I grabbed a quick interview with Chris Weitz on Thursday afternoon at Comic-Con. It almost didn’t happen, because I had a signing right before it, which ran over (and which mostly consisted of me watching Jacqueline Carey and Patrick Rothfuss signing books for fangirls anyway. But you know, dedication to the craft and all). Then Weitz was staying at the Hard Rock, where the elevators require that you have a guest pass, which I didn’t have … so yeah, I was late.

But he was very mellow about it. We talked about Twilight fandom and the lessons of Golden Compass and Weitz’s natural estrogen levels. But we will begin in medias res with a chat about the Twilight panel from that morning…

Chris Weitz: It was this crazy thing, which everybody was kind of warning us about. 7,000 Twilight fans in a room screaming for Rob.

Me: It’s an uncanny sound. I think only teenage girls can make that sound.

That high, keening noise.

It’s like Beatlemania.

That’s the only thing I can think of, the Beatles. You see old footage of that type of thing. It happened in Montepulciano, when we were shooting there. It was like The Birds, but with young girls. You’d turn a corner and there would be one or two or three. And the next time you looked there would be 10, 20, 50, 100.