"Breaking Dawn" cinematographer Guillermo Navarro Interview: "A new visual landscape for Twilight" Rob and Kristen mention

Guillermo Navarro, ASC, AMC knows about sequels and Oscars®. He shot the first two Hellboy movies, but more typically, he says, “I’ve been in the situation where I shot the first movie and then a sequel was done after. But this is the first time where I’m actually closing the saga.”
The two films were cross-boarded and filmed simultaneously at locations varying from Vancouver to Louisiana to Brazil. “One week, we were shooting one movie, and within the same week, a piece of the other. It was very complicated.”


Taking a fresh approach meant re-creating from scratch the parallel realities of the different characters’ worlds. “We did a lot of tests and work on how the look of those worlds was going to appear. We wanted to stay away from other things that worked for the other movies,” such as Edward’s (Robert Pattinson) heavy white make-up, a signature of his vampire look, in order to focus more on what was going on inside the characters.


The movie is very centered in the main characters’ emotions, and what’s really going on with them,” the cinematographer explains. “There are such profound changes with them in these films, so we made sure to allow room for exploration.”
Most significantly are the changes Bella (Kristen Stewart) goes through: her transformation into life as a vampire, her wedding with Edward, and the birth of their child. “We took full advantage of the range of emotions she experiences during her transformation, putting as much dramatic weight as we could on the sequence,” he says.

“For example, the wedding scene is very romantic and profound, after which things settle a bit. The camera is used subjectively; you really are there with them, enveloped in the passion.”


Prior to the wedding, Bella fantasizes about a different sort of wedding – one in which the couple is seen atop a wedding cake, but the cake is actually made up of a pyramid of dead bodies. “It’s a very beautiful shot of them, as if they were the cake toppers with this huge collection of bloody corpses beneath them,” Navarro describes. “We did a shot with Kristen and Robert on top of a little platform with all of these bloodied actors lying around, which you see as the camera starts revealing what’s there. So at the end, it really looks like a wedding cake, but it’s a nightmare wedding that she’s experiencing. It’s a pretty impressive shot, and one with incredibly strong imagery.”


Navarro recalls another shot filmed in Brazil when Bella first realizes she is pregnant with Edward’s child. “It’s probably one of the best shots in the movie, because she realizes not only that she is pregnant, but that she wants to keep the baby. We used a Steadicam to follow her, until she finds her reflection in a mirror, and locked in on that sentiment. It’s a shot that really takes you with her in her process. It’s actually one of my favorite shots of the whole movie.”


The most powerful sequence, according to Navarro, is the one that fans of the films and books have long been awaiting: the birth of Edward and Bella’s baby. “The birth scene is extreme and strange,” he says. “We pull the audience in so they really feel like part of the event.”


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