On Movies: 'Twilight' star Stewart enjoys 'clean horizon'

From a few recent interviews, here are outtakes and extra bits with the stars of Twilight, Cyrus, and I Am Love, and the writer-director of Get Him to The Greek:

Kristen Stewart, on the freedom the Twilight series has given her (i.e., she doesn't have to worry about her next job). The Twilight Saga: Eclipse just passed $245 million; she plays a teenage stripper in New Orleans opposite James Gandolfini in Welcome to the Rileys (out in November).

"I've been given every opportunity," says Stewart. "I couldn't be in a more creative, free, easy position. Like I don't feel like I have to do anything. . . .

"I have a clean horizon, and I can't wait to get excited about the next project."

Stewart, who turned 20 in April, says that eventually she'd like to get behind the camera, too. "I have ideas all the time, but I'm waiting. . . . I love movies, and I want to make them one day, write them, whatever. But I choose work pretty impulsively, so right now I'm just waiting to read something that moves me."

Since the interview, Stewart has signed on to play Dean Moriarty's wife, Mary Lou, in Walter Salles' adaptation of Jack Kerouac's Beat classic On the Road. It's set to start shooting in August, with Garrett Hedlund as Moriarty. Then in October, Stewart switches back into Bella Swan mode for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn.

And yes, she has read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - and read those conjectural (short) lists that have her name on it to play the book's heroine, Lisbeth Salander, in David Fincher's planned Hollywood adaptation.

"Oh man, it's a great book," she says, "but I have no idea, no, nothing has happened as far as that's concerned. Nothing."

In Cyrus, John C. Reilly stars as a lonesome loser who meets a woman he really likes (Marisa Tomei) and who, to his great surprise, seems to really like him. Unfortunately, her 21-year-old live-at-home son (Jonah Hill), doesn't like Reilly's character. Not at all.

The discomfiting comedy by Jay and Mark Duplass was shot on digital. With no film magazines to change, the takes could go on and on, a process that allows, in theory, for more improvisation. The Duplass Brothers encouraged Reilly, Tomei and Hill to venture off-script and see where things went. But Reilly says that sometimes those takes felt truly endless, and awkward.

"I'm not really a fan of shooting on digital, for that reason," he explains. "There's something about shooting on film - it's an occasion. You're actually burning through a commodity that you paid for, so when they say, 'Action!', everyone stops, gives their focus, and they know it's only going to last at the most 12 minutes, usually shorter than that. There's this sense of occasion, this rhythm to it. You stop, you have a moment to clear your head and think about what you're doing.

"But with digital, what ends up happening is that the takes go on so long the crew eventually starts to get restless. . . . There's less focus on what's happening, and then the director starts talking - 'I'll give my direction while we're on the fly here' - so you never really get a chance to reset. The camera's still rolling, it's still on you.

"I don't know. [Digital] has its benefits, but you lose some things, too.

"I've worked in a really improvisational style before, with Paul Thomas Anderson. There are whole sections of Boogie Nights that are improvised, but longer takes don't necessarily mean more insightful improvising, you know."

In I Am Love, Tilda Swinton stars as the Russian wife of an Italian textile magnate who falls in love with her son's friend, a chef. It's a lush melodrama, set in a rarefied world of moneyed folk, and the Milanese villa that Swinton's Emma lives in is an elegant 1930s modern beauty, replete with gardens, tennis court, and pool. Finding that house was key to the success of the film, and it was a quest that took Swinton and director Luca Guadagnino quite literally years.

"It was one of those blessings," Swinton recalls. "We'd talked about exactly a house like that, but not known that it existed, and I remember in one note writing something about it needing to be 'part palace, part prison, part museum.'

"And then this house, Luca found it in the last big coffee-table book of Italian houses that he allowed himself to buy. . . . It was the last house mentioned, and the reason that we hadn't known about it is because up until three years ago it was in private hands, and it was in the process of being renovated. It's now in the hands of something like the National Trust and open to the public."

If you're heading to Italy, and to Milan, the house is Villa Necchi Campiglio, and it can be found on www.casemuseo.it, a website of historic house museums.

Get Him to the Greek writer/director Nicholas Stoller has been working with his Forgetting Sarah Marshall star, Jason Segel, on The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made. Stoller and Segel have been collaborating on the script, which will probably not have a lot of drug references and penis jokes in it. James Bobin, of The Flight of the Conchords, is directing.

"It will shoot in September. We had a table read with all the Muppets that went really well," Stoller reports. "It's definitely old-school Muppets, like The Muppet Movie or The Great Muppet Caper.

"When you watch The Muppet Movie now, first of all it hasn't aged, it's still totally relevant somehow. It feels like a Simpsons episode, but not cynical like The Simpsons. There are so many jokes and it's so self-aware, it breaks the fourth wall . . . it has a real sweetness, you know, and to get to write for those characters - for Kermit and Miss Piggy and Gonzo and Fozzie - is kind of a dream come true. I always call the Muppets the gateway drug for comedy nerds."