‘Twilight’ director explains why the final two movies are “camp”
Bill Condon, the director of the final two Twilight movies, Breaking Dawn Part One and Breaking Dawn Part Two, has hit back at the criticism of the films.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Condon admitted that Kristen Stewart “fascinated” him, which was one of the main reasons he took on the projects despite them being so far from his usual type of filmography. The series is now considered a cult classic and kick-started the impressive careers of Robert Pattinson and Stewart.
He added that he enjoyed the female perspective of the final two instalments in the vampire-werewolf drama, sharing, “Twilight is a franchise that is really women’s pictures, they call them. It is told from a female perspective. I can’t tell you how many times you talk about that movie and someone would say in the first one, “Well, nothing happens,” but she gets married, she gives birth, she becomes a vampire.”
Condon was then asked by the interviewer to react to the backlash to the final two movies, despite them grossing in the region of one billion dollars each at the box office— $712.2. million for the first, and $848.6 million for the second. He added first, “Obviously, it became such a target for people, and people felt superior to it, and I thought, “God, you were really missing the point.””
He continued eloquently, “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.” Sheen plays a powerful leader of a vampiric panel that rules over the laws of the undead.
As part of the LGBTQ+ community, Condon is well-versed in such topics. He continued, “There’s a line that Molina 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. It’s been a wonderful opportunity to mix it up and to have something where there is 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.”
Condon stands by his work on the two films, adding of the fifth and final installment, “In that movie, 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, but it becomes a kind of secret badge of honor.”
Condon’s latest project, Kiss of the Spider Woman, was a 2025 American musical drama film written for the screen and directed by Bill Condon. It starred Jennifer Lopez and Diego Luna.
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