New Moon producer Wyck Godfrey has an excellent new interview with HitFlix where he details some of the finer points of making the Twilight Saga happen, including the logic behind casting in the film–

Q: Some franchises like the ‘Star Trek’ movies, for example, are notorious for inserting celebrity cameos. Now that ‘Twilight’ is so big and now that you have so many Hollywood fans, do you think that will happen in any of the future movies?

Well you were on-set earlier right? You noticed Julia Roberts? (Laughs.) She’s just an extra standing out there. I always liked to feel like people want to immerse themselves in a world and not be distracted by gimmick casting. I kind of in general like…we’ve always just wanted to put the best actors in the role, not the biggest reality TV stars or whatever. We want to put great actors in the roles and let them become the character that people have read in these books and fallen in love with. And I sometimes think like if you try to like stunt-cast things, people notice and for that split second in the movie it pulls them out of the movie and they whisper to their friend ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so’ to me you don’t immerse yourself in the world of the movie. So, I don’t know. We’re not ever going to consciously try to put extra surprising stars in the movie.

Q: Well to that point, when Dakota Fanning was cast it seemed a little surprising because she was such a big name especially at her age. So was there any trepidation that she might be almost too distracting because she is so well known in such a smaller role?

Well, the finding is that for a lot of websites you’d see like who’s your favorite Jane and she’d almost be at the top of the list. So, as long as you feel like it’s the right casting, it doesn’t matter how big or small a person’s name is. I mean, I think if Jane were written as a 35-year-old transvestite you’d be like that’s kind of weird they’re putting Dakota Fanning in it, but it really felt like the right call. We’re just glad that she was…and again, she was a fan of it. She was interested and that made it easy to get someone of her stature.

Later in the interview, Godfrey gives 100% confirmation from the horse’s mouth that Breaking Dawn will not be rated R. He also confirms that Breaking Dawn is not even official yet.

Read the interview at HitFlix.

[thanks, LMCullen!]