I just read a great interview with David Slade and he did a great job of describing vamp physiology that made a lot more sense. He seems to have given a lot more attention to these details that the previous directors and I am excited to see what he has done with Eclipse. Here are a few of the Q&As; full interview here
Stephenie Meyer's unique vampire mythology sort of helps one get around depicting graphic violence, doesn't it? Eclipse features a lot of arm-ripping, head-smashing action -- and yet not too much blood.
We managed to pack quite a lot in by making the pathology of this vampire a little bit fantastic. I worked with the guys over at Imagine Engine, who are best known for being one of the main vendors on District 9, which is an amazing film. They did a hell of a lot of the alien work. They did some wolf work for us -- not all of it, that was mainly done by Tippett Studios -- but when we were designing some of the crystal-sparkly stuff we basically sat down and figured out how it would work. We got anatomical drawings and did human slices -- not real ones, but photographs of them -- and figured out which layers would be crystal and how that would work. We figured that out because we knew we had to smash them. In a way, it was going to be acceptable to decapitate the hell out of people and smash their heads off in pieces. Bite people's arms off and leave them with stumps. [Laughs] I'm amazed we got away with that, too, [in the scene where] Riley's arm gets bitten off.
Stephenie Meyer describes the vampire body as made of a marble-like substance; you call it 'crystal'?
There's a crystalline structure. Marble-crystal, yeah. We figured it was a kind of crystal because crystal slides and grows in a way that's very similar to muscle. It could potentially, in some fantastical way, slide around and move like muscle.
How much of the previous digital and design work did you inherit and how much did you try to change?
We tried to change more than we could. Not because of anything other than schedule and finance. We started down the path to radically redesign the sparkling Edward effect, but we just ran out of time on the R&D on that and ended up augmenting what already existed. What I wanted from that effect was the idea that even though he's this cold, soulless thing, when the light hit him it'd refract light back and reflect onto you. If you were kissing him, you'd feel the warmth on your skin. That was something emotional and nice about that effect, because I just personally didn't like how that worked out before.
I really like his crystal comparison and wish that he would have more money to fully develop his Edward-sparkle concept. So, does the crystal theory of vampire physiology make more sense than the strictly stone/marble that we usually read about?