Twilight Saga scribe Melissa Rosenberg should consider dabbling in espionage. For years, she’s kept a giant secret: how she and Twilight author Stephenie Meyer decided that the series’ final film adaptation would conclude with a thrilling, violent battle scene that — spoiler alert! – ends up being nothing but a vision of a possible future. “It hasn’t been a hard secret to keep, though, because no one suspects it’s going to be any different,” Rosenberg says, pointing out that the scene doesn’t really diverge from Breaking Dawn, the novel: “Fans get the book, but they get a little detour on the way.” Of course, there’s a little more to it than that. Here’s the tale of Breaking Dawn — Part 2‘s shocking battle scene, from conception to screen.
As told by: Melissa Rosenberg
We were filming Eclipse up in Vancouver, and Stephenie and I were having dinner at a steakhouse. At the time, she was debating whether she even wanted to make the fourth book into a movie, and I was debating whether I wanted to continue on with the series. Stephenie knew the book ended with this really tense conversation, and she knew that that wasn’t cinematic. We started talking about the ending, and I don’t know who had the idea [to do the battle scene] first — neither one of us can remember exactly. It felt simultaneous. We just went back and forth and were like, “That’s it! That’s gonna work!”
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