Derek Hough dances through heartbreak in long-awaited music video for Twilight wedding song 'Turning Page'
Almost 12 years after Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) exchanged vows in a dreamy woodland ceremony in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, the song that soundtracked Bella's march down the aisle finally has its very own music video.
EW is exclusively premiering Sleeping At Last's music video (above) for their poignant single "Turning Page," which Twilight fans will recall not only plays during the lion and the lamb's nuptials but also during their honeymoon on Isle Esme.
The video, which is co-directed by Derek Hough and So You Think You Can Dance alum Phillip Chbeeb, explores both the beauty and ephemerality of love through the medium of dance. It opens with Hough traversing across a square platform to reunite with his fiancée Hayley Erbert while being buffeted by a raging sandstorm. After the pair exchange a passionate kiss, the chaos surrounding them briefly calms, only for Hough and Erbert to be separated once again when the platform spins in a different direction.
"We wanted to create a video about love and how life is a fleeting journey, an impermanent dance between birth and death. Like the sands of time we eventually return to the earth," Hough tells EW. "Yet, despite our transient existence, the essence of life lies in cherishing and embracing love during our brief experience. The brevity of life serves as a reminder to seize every moment and to connect deeply with others. In the grand tapestry of existence, the pursuit of love and connection makes this journey all the more worthwhile."
Their romance, as well as several other love stories, is brought to life through Chbeeb and his wife Makenzie Dustman's stunning choreography (she teased the release with a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the music video, below), which sees the couples leap into each other's arms, twist into kaleidoscopic shapes, and slash through the sand to find one another once again. In addition to Hough and Erbert, professional dancers Jason Glover, Erica Klein, Haley Jonae, Billy Mustapha, Koine Iwasaki, Lex Ishimoto, and Hough's fiancée Hayley Erbert are also featured in the video.
According to Chbeeb, every action within the video holds emotional significance. "The spinning platform represents the movement of time, and the sand represents a formless source from which all forms spring and return," he explains. "All of us, and the love between us, are each like a unique dance, a song of the universe, that gives meaning to its existence. This video aims to reflect the beauty that our love adds to the world… even if it must, like all good music, have an end to be truly beautiful."
Despite the song's initial success and long-standing legacy ("Turning Page" recently received RIAA platinum certification), Sleeping At Last singer-songwriter Ryan O'Neal tells EW that he didn't consider creating a music video for the track until "the beginning of this year" but, once he did, he immediately tapped Hough for the project.
"I was like, 'I know this is kind of out of the blue, but would you want to direct [the 'Turning Page' video] and be in it?' And he was like, 'Absolutely!' And he completely ran with it," O'Neal recalls. "I gave him total creative freedom — he had expressed earlier that he and his soon-to-be wife Hayley had enjoyed the song and it had been a part of their relationship, and so I thought this was such a perfect fit and that he will know exactly what to do, visually, for this."
O'Neal says he was blown away when he saw the end result. "I already knew it was going to be beautiful," he shares, "but when he sent it to me, I [thought,] 'It's perfect. It's exactly what I'd hope for and a million times more.'" He adds that it was especially beautiful to see the song's depth captured on screen: "It's not just a love song; it's a little bit of a life and death song. Like, an overarching kind of song for the story of our lives."
O'Neal originally wrote "Turning Page" as "a total shot in the dark" blind submission for the Twilight soundtrack. "At the time, I was like, 'It's very unlikely that it's going to make it into the movie, so I need to make sure that I mean it and want to put that song out into the world whether or not Twilight will happen,'" he remembers. "And so I wrote it, really, about my wife and then I bent some of the language into vampire [references,] like waiting a hundred years. I haven't actually waited a hundred years to marry my wife."
After six months of silence, he was ready to move on when he received a call notifying him that "Turning Page" would be used twice within in Breaking Dawn - Part 1. "They didn't lay out exactly what scenes it was going to be in. I knew it had something to do with the wedding, but I wasn't sure when she walked down the aisle or if it'd be in the background later," he admits. "I did get to go to the premiere and it was really such a special moment to be able to see it in the audience of the people that made it and to see where the song landed both times in the movie. It was really a highlight, life moment for me."
The song's music video, of course, pays homage to the series that helped create it by ending with the song's title being displayed onscreen in Twilight's signature font before it, too, dissolves into the sand. "A little nod to the birth of the song," O'Neal teases.
Watch the music video for "Turning Page" above.
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