Chris Weitz: What will he do for the saga?

New Moon is scheduled to come out in November of this year and is currently being filmed. Of course, one of the biggest question in everyone’s minds is, What will the new Director Chris Weitz do for the series?

They say those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it so let’s take a quick look at Chris Weitz’s past.

Weitz started life as a writer at Disney where he was one of the writers for Antz. After Antz, Weitz was a producer on a short-lived revival of the 1970’s show Fantasy Island. It only ran for 13 episodes. He got his start directing by co-directing American Pie with his brother Paul, something the duo would do again in Down to Earth and About a Boy.

Weitz’s last directing job was The Golden Compass, where he left the set early on only to come back when the new director quit. The Golden Compass did poorly at the box office with a disappointing $25 million opening weekend. Like New Moon, Golden Compass was an adaptation of a popular book series and while New Moon has no where near the technical challenges that Golden Compass did, one of the reasons Weitz quite, they do exist and will no doubt test Weitz. Golden Compass did win the Oscar for visual effects but Weitz was unable to bring any of that award winning team with him to New Moon.

But of course, Weitz must first focus on his actors before he ever gets to post and the technical problems. No doubt that Weitz has worked with talented actors and actresses before, Hugh Grant in About a Boy, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and Ian McKellen in The Golden Compass. But while Weitz did work on The Golden Compass, a children’s film, his first two films American Pie and Down to Earth, a Chris Rock comedy, could hardly be put in the same category as New Moon. Catharine Hardwicke, the director of the first Twilight movie, had a similar problem her first two films being Thirteen, a movie about two thirteen year old girls who discover sex, drugs and crime, and Lord of Dogtown, a movie about the origins of skateboarding and surfing in Venice California.

So does Weitz have what it takes to direct New Moon? His directing credits do seem a bit thin and he is even shorter on movies made for younger audiences. His visual effects hardships will be made even harder by the fact that he doesn’t have the team from Golden Compass but in the end his record of working with top notch talent speaks for itself and this writer thinks will carry him through in the end. Twilight fans seeking reassurance of this need look no further than About a Boy, a wonderful adoption of a Nick Hornby novel, to see that Weitz has experience with transferring novels to the silver screen.