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Showing posts with label la times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label la times. Show all posts

Saturday, June 2

KRISTEN TALKS 'EAST OF EDEN' REBOOT WITH 24FRAMES/LA TIME INTERVIEW

LA TimesWith “East of Eden” often mentioned by Kristen Stewart among her favorite reads, the actress’ fans have long clamored for the “Twilight” heroine to star in a reboot of the John Steinbeck classic.

That reboot, announced more than three years ago with Tom Hooper and Imagine Entertainment, has been perpetually stuck in development. But Stewart still feels strongly that the Cain-and-Abel story — of course originally brought to celluloid by Elia Kazan and James Dean in 1955 — could use another go-round on the big screen.

“Obviously ‘East of Eden’ is a really great movie,” Stewart told 24 Frames when asked what book she’d most like to see adapted to film. “But it’s the last chapter of the … book.”

The Kazan film focuses only on the latter sections of the novel, particularly the dysfunction and adventures of a pair of brothers in California’s Salinas Valley around the time of World War I. Stewart said that a new film could take the scope of Steinbeck’s epic, which goes back a previous generation and even flashes back to the Civil War, and make a more faithful adaptation.

“That really is much more of a saga. It’s so long; there is so much to take,” she said.
The actress didn’t say anything about starring as the Cathy/Kate character, as many KStew fans have been pulling for. (Cathy/Kate is the lead female character, a conniving and murderous operator who gets involved with several male characters.)

Stewart did, however, say she was relieved about the development progress of a different book that has struggled to make its way through Hollywood — John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces,” to which Zach Galifianakis has just signed on as the bumblingly iconic Ignatius Reilly.

Finally, they’re going to get that made,” she said, breathing a sigh of relief.

In addition to starring in a new spin on a Brothers Grimm tale with this weekend’s “Snow White and the Huntsman,” the Bella-fied one appears in another adaptation of a classic text — “On the Road,” the film version of the Jack Kerouac tome that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and opens in December.


post : Melin

Tuesday, November 22

KRISTEN'S EXTREME BD BELLA TRANSFORMATION



LA Times 'Breaking Dawn': Kristen Stewart's extreme 'Twilight' transformation

To depict the great physical toll the pregnancy takes on Bella's body — she's unable to eat and essentially is withering away as her stomach swells — the "Breaking Dawn" filmmakers looked to Lola Visual Effects, the company responsible for downsizing muscular Chris Evans to a pre-transformation weakling in this summer's comic book superhero film "Captain America." The results are certainly eyebrow-raising, with Bella becoming increasingly pale and extremely gaunt.

"The idea was to leave you with a question mark about how they did it," said the film's director, Bill Condon. "We wanted you to think it was possible that Kristen actually lost a lot of weight for it."

The visual-effects team added prosthetics to Stewart's face (a process that took three hours of application) to make her eyes look more sunken and her ears larger. Stewart likened wearing the prosthetics to having a "big, skinny head" for the scenes. Still, the 21-year old actress was game for the transformation.

"I'm so happy that they were not afraid of it — to have your main character look so awful for half of the movie is a bold choice for a huge film," Stewart said. "It was the one thing I wasn't fully responsible for concerning Bella and it made me really nervous. I didn't know what it would look like until I saw the movie."

kstewartfans robstenation

Post : Melin

ROB CHEERS FOR BILL CONDON

LA Times  Robert Pattinson cheers 'Twilight' director Bill Condon
Reviews for "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 1" might have been, well, mixed, to put it kindly -- as of Sunday evening, the movie had a 29% fresh rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes. But the film's director, Bill Condon, has at least one very prominent supporter: the movie's star Robert Pattinson.

The 25-year-old English actor, who plays Edward Cullen in the series, had nothing but kind words for Condon, the fourth director to sign on for a "Twilight" film and the man who will conclude the saga next year when "Breaking Dawn -- Part 2" is released. He said he appreciated what the filmmaker was up against: a tonally challenging narrative, a special-effects-intensive production and pressure to meet outsize fan expectations for the first half of the finale of the franchise adapted from author Stephenie Meyer's bestselling vampire romance novels.

"It was a massive undertaking, much bigger budgets and huge expectations, since it was the last one in the series,"Pattinson said of the production. "There was much more pressure than the last one."

Pattinson said he felt that Condon had a point of view with the film -- Condon told The Times that he wanted to marry melodrama and horror in telling the story of Edward's marriage to Bella (Kristen Stewart) and the fallout from the unplanned pregnancy that happens soon after. The actor also enjoyed Condon's humor, which showed up both on-screen and off. 

"It's very easy to become cynical about stuff, especially where you are doing five movies in the series," Pattinson said. "It's a very sentimental story in a lot of ways, and I'm an incredibly cynical person. Bill would always have a great explanation for why it's not ridiculous and it's not corny. It was great to have someone on set who could convince me of those things."

Pattinson said that from the beginning, the shoot was a challenge. The six-month filming schedule for both parts of "Breaking Dawn" kicked off in Brazil, where Pattinson said "everything went wrong."

"Just the fact that he didn't get overwhelmed within two seconds was a big deal," Pattinson said of Condon. "We were in Rio [de Janeiro] for one day. Two cameras broke down, a crane broke down and everything was crazy. There was no crowd control, and he stayed perfectly calm. Bill was really thrown in the deep end, and we came up with really nice stuff. It was really pretty and nice."

via RPLife robstenation

Post : Melin

Friday, November 18

ROB AND KRISTEN PRAISE BILL CONDON



LA Times The story, this time around, centers on Bella's nuptials to Edward — she wants to be a vampire like him, his condition is that they get married first — and the life-threatening pregnancy that unexpectedly results from their first bed-splintering honeymoon encounter.

To bring such heightened material to the screen, Condon said he looked to both Vincente Minnelli and Alfred Hitchcock, hewing to tradition for Bella and Edward's wedding and honeymoon, skewing more graphic when depicting Bella's pregnancy, which is destroying her from the inside out. Through a combination of prosthetics and CG, Condon transforms his dewy brunet into a gaunt, skeletal version of herself.

"She needed to look like she's dying or the story doesn't make sense," Pattinson said. "It was great that he went there."

Pattinson says he felt a kinship with Condon from the moment the director came to visit the 25-year-old actor while he was shooting the period love story "Water for Elephants" in Los Angeles.

"I had my hair cut really short, and he said, 'Oh, you should have your hair like this in the 'Twilight' movies.' I thought, 'OK, I already like you," Pattinson said with a laugh. "Especially since so many people worried about my hair. It was all they cared about. The hair and a six-pack."

Stewart too praised Condon.

"I wanted a director that I could trust enough that I could completely clear my head and know that all my preparation was going to find its way into my body," Stewart said. "I didn't feel that I was always looking over his shoulder making sure he was capturing it, or looking over his shoulder making sure he wasn't missing some aspect of the book that I knew about and he didn't. I already knew that we were on the same page."


Post : Melin