'Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 1' lets actor, producer rekindle their Louisiana ties

'Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 1' lets actor, producer rekindle their Louisiana ties

For most "Twilight" fans, the latest big-screen installment in the crazy-popular vampire romance -- "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1," which opened Friday (Nov. 18) -- probably will be remembered as the one in which Bella gives birth.

For Louisiana movie fans, the $120 million-plus film -- the biggest-budgeted in the series so far -- will likely be more remembered as the one in which the franchise got onto the Hollywood South bandwagon, shooting for months in Baton Rouge, and a few days in New Orleans, between November 2010 and January of this year.

But for producer Wyck Godfrey, who has guided the franchise since its 2008 inception, and actor Jackson Rathbone, who plays the charismatic blood-sucker Japser Hale, it's something else. For them, it represented something of a homecoming.

That's because, while neither lives here, both have local roots: Godfrey was born in New Orleans; Rathbone's mother is from here and his father is from Baton Rouge. And although the bulk of their recent time in Louisiana was spent on a Baton Rouge soundstage, both said they relished the chance to go native when the cameras stopped.

"It was a fantastic place to shoot a movie, as you can imagine -- (especially for) those of us who like football," Godfrey said. "Every Saturday in the fall you can go to an LSU game, and every Sunday you can go to a Saints game, so that in and of itself was a blast."

Godfrey, whose time in town also included a fair amount of visiting with his godparents, local civic leaders Anne and King Milling, describes himself as a "huge Saints fan," dating back to well before his father's job required the family to move to Johnson City, Tenn., when Godfrey was 7. Even when the Tennessee Titans set up shop in Nashville in 1997 -- at the dawn of the Saints' regrettable Mike Ditka era -- Godfrey resisted the temptation to jump ship and held on firmly to his Who Dattitude.

"I've been a Saints fan since Archie Manning was playing at the old (Tulane Stadium) and we used to live on Pine Street," Godfrey said. "We used to sell parking spots in our driveway. So having suffered through the Saints for a long time, its been fun over the last five years for sure."

To make sure his kids have their own Louisiana memories -- football, the French Quarter, fried turkey -- he flew his family in during production of "Breaking Dawn" and hauled them to New Orleans whenever he could.

"It's work, work, work, work during the week, and sometimes during the weekend, but for the most part Saturdays and Sundays are yours and you make the most of the local flavor," he said. "I was in New Orleans every weekend, had my family come down, my kids. That was fun. One week, for Thanksgiving, we stayed down there and spent Thanksgiving in Baton Rouge with ('Twilight') author Stephenie Meyer's family."

Other members of the film's cast and crew also made regular sojourns into the Crescent City during breaks in Baton Rouge shooting, he said.

That includes the 26-year-old Rathbone, for whom the local shoot provided an opportunity not only to reconnect with his extended family but to revisit his love for local music. An actor, producer and musician, he was born in Singapore and describes his parents as "kind of the world travelers" of the family. But they always set a course for Louisiana at holiday time, to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with their aunts, uncles and cousins.

"I always say I'm from the South," Rathbone said, "because all my family's from Louisiana. ... I think I discovered my passion for the arts in New Orleans. Just when you're walking around and you see all the street musicians, I would beg my parents for a dollar so I could go drop it in a guitar case or a violin case and listen to these guys play."

All these years later, his time away from the set often found him jamming in New Orleans bars with his band, the indie rock ensemble 100 Monkeys.

Movie-goers, however, shouldn't plan on seeing any of that New Orleans scenery in "Part 1." Godfrey said it won't show up until next November with the arrival of the film franchise's final chapter, "The Twlight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2," which was shot concurrently with "Part 1." The multitude of scenes shot at Baton Rouge's Raleigh Studios -- most of the film's interiors, in fact -- will show up throughout the film, although they aren't set here so they won't carry a particularly Louisiana flavor.

That doesn't mean the location wasn't key to the production, though.

"The people are great and, more so than in Vancouver and some of the other places where we shot, really respected the actors' privacy and let them live their lives," Godfrey said. "That was something that made shooting a more pleasant experience for them."

He continued: "It's the first place people talk about now when they say, 'If were not going to shoot in Los Angeles, where should we go?' And my hope is it will continue to be lucrative for the state and make sense from the tax standpoint, because personally I love shooting down there."

Source => NOLA / Via => JRathboneFB