‘Breaking Dawn’ Director Defends Killing ‘Twilight’ Characters in Shock Finale

Twilight fans were in for a shock at the end of 2012’s Breaking Dawn – Part 2 when several popular characters appeared to meet their ends, only for their deaths to later be revealed as just a vision.

The scene, which was not in Stephenie Meyer‘s 2008 book that the movie was adapted from, raised eyebrows for its brutal killings of vampires Carlisle Cullen (Peter Facinelli) and Jasper Hale (Jackson Rathbone), as well as werewolves Seth (Booboo Stewart) and Leah Clearwater (Julia Jones).

But as audiences soon learned, the slayings were only a vision of Alice Cullen (Ashley Greene), which was ultimately circumvented by avoiding a battle with the sinister Volturi at the story’s conclusion.

As director Bill Condon recounted in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter pegged to his new movie Kiss of the Spider Woman, “There [was] such a dedicated audience waiting for it, and you’re in dialogue with that audience knowing that we were going to do this incredibly cruel thing of killing off all of their beloved characters.”

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“That, to me, was like, ‘Oh, I have to, because I just want to be there the first time we show it,’ ” continued Condon, 69. “I’ve never, ever heard a scream as loud and last as long as when we cut off Carlisle’s head.”

Addressing criticism of both Breaking Dawn installments (Part 1 of which was released in 2011), Condon told THR that Twilight “became such a target for people, and people felt superior to it.”

“I thought, ‘God, you were really missing the point,’ ” he went on. “Because this is a big franchise that is in on the joke. For me, personally, as a gay director, I thought I brought a bit of camp to it that was permissible. Michael Sheen, that laugh.”

“There’s a line that Molina (Tonatiuh) has in Kiss of the Spider Woman where he says, ‘Call it kitsch. Call it camp. I don’t care. I love it.’ And that’s how I feel about that movie,” Condon told THR.

The filmmaker — who also directed hits like Dreamgirls (2006) and Beauty and the Beast (2017) — admitted that he “sometimes” feels he “was born in the wrong time because I do think of myself as being a kind of Hollywood classicist in a way.”

Of Breaking Dawn — Part 2, Condon said, “There was emotion, there was beauty, there was humor and visceral pleasure that I try to have in anything I make.”

“And some of that the pleasure quotient isn’t necessarily at the center of where cinema culture is, so there are going to be people who resent it and detest it,” he went on.

But at the end of the day, for Condon, “It becomes a kind of secret badge of honor,” he added.