More From Gus Van Sant.. And The Job He Didn't Get

You can really tell Gus Van Sant wanted to direct Breaking Dawn. In his latest round of interviews out of Toronto he's once again talking about it, telling Yahoo about the missed opportunity because he wasn't quite prepared:

Yeah. In an interview, Robert Pattinson was asked, "What's up for the next Twilight?" They had been asked this a thousand times. So he said, "We want to get a filmmaker like Gus Van Sant to do the next one." I was surprised at reading this and I thought, "Am I actually considered? Am I in the running? Would they actually even think that way?" So I told my agent to put my name in the hat. I went out to the interview and, naively, I wasn't aware that I was expected to sell [myself to] them. They wanted to see your plan even though the plan was to do the movie exactly the way the book read, because if you deviated an inch, you'd be killed by the fans. Of course, the other filmmakers who were much more savvy had long 45-minute displays of these ideas and they got the job. It was a really bad scene because I got really nervous and I realized it was just completely going down. Obviously, I screwed the whole thing up.

When talking to Movieline, the director pondered some more on what could have been..


So I have to ask: Were you really in the running last year to direct Breaking Dawn?

I think I was in the running, yeah. But I didn’t make it.

Did you want to make it?
Yeah! Yeah. I tried. I went into a meeting.

What interested you about it?
Because it was this really big pop extravaganza. Then I thought it would be interesting to try and go in there and direct one.

Because of the environment and culture around it?
Yeah.

Creatively, though, what’s the upside?
I think you could probably make it interesting. But I’m not sure, if I’d done it, what it would look like. It might have become similar to the others. I’m sure it would have in some ways.

What was your impression of those other films, and what did you think you’d bring to Twilight that would elevate it?
Well, they were really different, those films. I think I saw all three. The first one was Catherine Hardwicke; it was very… malleable. It had all these different things about it. But then the second one was different. And then I saw three, and that was different. So I realized that in the style you directed it, you could make it into something that was your own.

What about the actors? You have a history of developing great creative relationships with younger actors. What do you think you might have brought to Robert Pattinson or Kristen Stewart or Taylor Lautner?
I don’t know. I don’t know.

Did that enter your thinking along the way?
Well, I knew that I had to work with them, because they were the stars. So… I was looking forward to that part.

Aww.. we'll keep hoping for that collaboration to happen..