"I'm dressed in baseball gear because during a baseball game, the bad vampires show up and they threaten to kill Bella," Nikki Reed (Rosalie Hale) said of "The Garage Scene," another iconic moment they're filming on this particular day. "So Edward is in a panic, and he feels powerless. He's extremely scared. We get back to the garage, and the entire family comes up with this plan to lead them in a different direction by wearing Bella's clothing and rubbing it up against trees, misleading the bad vampires."

On this mountainside property that can only be described as a mansion, the garage is housing three of the trademark vehicles mentioned throughout the novel. Parked nearby is Bella's orange-red Chevy truck. Hardwicke gathers her young, beautiful troops, shouts "action!" and watches movie magic unfold on a handheld monitor.

Jasper: "I've had to fight our kind before. We're hard to kill."

Edward: "But not impossible."

Emmett: "We'll rip them apart with our hands, then burn the pieces!"

Carlisle: "I don't relish killing another creature. Even a sadistic one like James."

Rosalie: "He might get to one of us first."

Bella: "I can't let you guys do this! This is insane!"

Rosalie: "Too late."

Take after take concludes with the same sequence of events: Hardwicke steps in to give her thoughts, the young actors pair off (usually in the same groupings as their decades-long lovers in the film), and Stewart hops up on the workbench to have a moment alone. Since the scene ends with Bella in the backseat of Carlisle's Mercedes, being driven away from Edward, Stewart ends each shot with a tear so dependable you could set your watch to it.

No one bothers Stewart between takes as she comes back from whatever place she has to go to find her sorrow. On almost every occasion, it is Pattinson who will eventually walk over, give her shoulder a light rub, and bring her back for the next take. If chemistry is a concern to the "Twilight" fans, they can sleep well from here on out.

"I've revealed that I'm a vampire, essentially, and Bella knows and she still wants to be with me," Pattinson said of the common thread between the two scenes being shot on this, the 29th day out of 45 they'll be shooting. "I'm basically testing the waters of how far towards a normal human relationship Edward can have. ... I am seeing how much I can actually be physical with her, and how much I can say without scaring her off. Even though I've told her the basics, there's still a lot of stuff that I could say that could potentially ruin everything. [The meadow] is like a date scene."

For her part, Stewart prefers these days to such action-packed scenes as the baseball-field showdown that was recently filmed, which displays the other characters' superhuman speed, agility and propensity for violence. "In the big action sequences, it's a little scary because some people say, 'We're going to get done with the action sequences, and then we'll get to the acting scenes,' " revealed the "Into the Wild" actress who counts no less than Jodie Foster as one of her greatest fans. "And it's like, 'Well, that's just not how it works, man.' It's hard to keep what you're doing in the rest of the movie consistent. ... You can't lose what's going on with the characters. [Quiet scenes] are actually more difficult, because you have to strive to not let it go and not just focus on a wall that's being ripped out or something. In the more intimate scenes, you're given the time to get into it."

To help him "get into it," Pattinson tracked down Meyer during one of her set visits and got a rare peek at the closely guarded manuscript for "Midnight Sun," an upcoming novel that retells the "Twilight" story from Edward's point of view.

"I am definitely the only person apart from her and the editor who has read it," he said with pride. "Just me and Catherine [Hardwicke]. It is very top-secret. And it is like halfway, two-thirds finished. I read that right at the beginning [of filming]. I got a lot of stuff out of that."

Insisting that he's "not allowed to say anything" about the "Midnight" passages that even the 4,000-strong fan group "Twilight Moms" would likely give their firstborn child to read, Pattinson was willing to say this: "It's exactly the same events, but a couple of other things happen. You get the same gist, but it's funny how different things affect Edward in ways that you don't really expect if you have just read 'Twilight.'