‘New Moon’ Director Chris Weitz To Quit Directing

Director Chris Weitz (The Twilight Sage: New Moon) is hanging up his director’s hat soon after the release of his next movie, ‘The Twilight Saga: New Moon’. But Weitz isn’t making New Moon his last film. According to reports he’s got one more project that he’d like to complete before he surfs off into directorial retirement.

“It’s a script by Eric Essen called ‘The Gardener’,” he explained. “It’s sort of an homage to ‘The Bicycle Thief’. The intention is that we will shoot half in Spanish, half in English, in Los Angeles. On the one hand it’s a very small, intimate story, but its implications are very grand. I’m always looking for my last film, where I can put the brush down, and this is the one…It’s a beautiful story…I feel that I have now spent a decade of my life in training to know how to make films—how to accomplish every aspect of it—and I feel that if I were to do this one film, I’d feel okay just sitting back and reading. I’d really like to read some books.”

Weitz explained that his frustration with the movie industry has boiled over mostly because of the studio interference that occurred during post-production on ‘The Golden Compass’. “I wanted that to be my masterpiece,” says Weitz. “Unfortunately, the edit was taken from me and whatever chance I had at that was also taken from me, which is kind of sad.”

Weitz says he already has plans on how to spend his spare time after quitting saying, “You know, it sounds ridiculous, but I’d really like to be a better surfer. I’d like to learn to speak Spanish fluently; I’d like to travel around, live in Italy; I’d like to learn kung fu… It’s nice to make movies, but it’s also really hard.”