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WOLFPACK: Bronson Pelletier, Alex Meraz, Chaske Spencer and Kiowa Gordon, pictured here with Kristen Stweart in a scene from

WOLFPACK: Bronson Pelletier, Alex Meraz, Chaske Spencer and Kiowa Gordon, pictured here with Kristen Stweart in a scene from “New Moon,” are all of Native American ancestry. (Everett Collection / Everett Col)

The making of “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” has been defined by two things: abs and angst. The sequel to last year’s paranormal-romance megahit “Twilight” was a hot topic pretty much as soon as credits rolled on the first film, but there were concerns right off the bat.

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Could actor Taylor Lautner mirror the abnormal growth spurt his character, Jacob, goes through in book two? Could teenage girls survive the story’s major lack of Edward Cullen-ness? And could director Chris Weitz actually get anything done, given the omnipresent horde of shrieking “Twilight” fans?

Happily, the answer is yes, and “New Moon” is poised to be an even bigger hit than its predecessor, thanks in large part to a savvy marketing campaign that’s been whetting so-called Twihards’ appetites with mega-hyped trailers, film clips and juicy on-set gossip for the past six months.

It’s been a long and exhausting process for everyone involved in the shoot, which took place on Canada’s Pacific Coast and in Italy. Just ask Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson — a k a Bella and Edward — who’ve been at the center of a yearlong media investigation into whether they’re Truly in Love (or, as one pop culture blog puts it, the “OMGTWILIGHTISREAL” phenomenon).

To hear the two stars tell it, they’re just a couple of introverts who weirdly found themselves at the center of an unwanted storm of attention. Almost never actually addressing the rumors spawned by occasional snaps of the two holding hands or kissing, they’ve been giving vague, awkward interviews that mostly revolve around the question of “Dude, why do you even care?”

“I probably would’ve answered it if people hadn’t made such a big deal about it,” Stewart said recently. “But I’m not going to give . . . an answer. People are really funny about ‘Well, you chose to be an actor, why don’t you just . . . give your whole life away? Can I have your firstborn child?’

“There’s no answer that’s not going to tip you one way or the other,” she added. “Think about every hypothetical situation: ‘OK, we are. We aren’t. I’m a lesbian.’ ”

For Stewart, this f-off attitude couldn’t have dovetailed more perfectly with her character. Bella Swan is a moody, accident-prone loner who finds her soul mate in supermodel-hot vampire Edward Cullen, a “vegetarian” who abstains from drinking human blood, and who treats Bella as though she’s made of glass.

In the first movie, this meant two delectable hours of watching them fall in love and struggle against their baser impulses (if he gets too excited, he might kill her accidentally) and decide that, against all odds, they will love each other forever and ever no matter what.

Cut to “New Moon,” in which Edward dumps Bella and splits town, sending her into a catatonic, months-long depression. Which doesn’t necessarily make great movie fare.

“Upon reading it, I was thinking that was going to be a challenge,” says screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg. “But it ended up lending itself quite well to the structure. You can get the message across about her heartache in a shorter time. Very quickly she’s trying to climb out of it.”

Bella shakes off her sorrow with the help of muscular pal Jacob Black — the character who created a whirlwind of controversy as soon as sequel talks began. Lautner, who played the teenager in the original film, was originally deemed by the studio to be too scrawny to adequately portray the Jacob of “New Moon.”

For the uninitiated: Jacob is a werewolf, as he (and the reader) discovers in the second book. And one of the things that happens when you’re a “Twilight” teenage werewolf is that you grow, over a year, to look like a hefty 25-year-old.

“[Jacob] is such a different person,” Stewart told Collider magazine. “He becomes a man. It’s not just a physical transformation. He really becomes an adult.”

Poor Lautner, adorable as he was, seemed unlikely to do the same. With the gauntlet thrown down, Lautner went on one of the most rigorous public campaigns ever to win a film role. He enlisted a personal trainer, hit the gym and downed thousands of extra calories a day to morph into the Jacob they needed.

And he succeeded, showing up on set with one of the most well-documented six-packs ever — plus 30 more pounds of muscle.

“I didn’t see Taylor until just before we started shooting,” Pattinson told Collider. “So when he came back I had the same reaction as everyone else: ‘Jesus. Now I have to go to the gym.’ ”

So did the rest of Jacob’s buddies from the res. Actors Alex Meraz, Bronson Pelletier, Chaske Spencer and Kiowa Gordon comprise the Quileute wolf pack, a hot-blooded clan who spend the majority of the film shirtless. (They have abnormally high body temperatures — what’s a teen werewolf to do?)

“It was painful,” Spencer, who plays lead wolf Sam Uley, says of the preshooting training regimen the guys dubbed “wolf camp.” “We had to do 300 crunches per day, right off the bat.”

Despite the level of attention that’s been paid to the wolf workouts, one thing audiences won’t be seeing is the abundant nudity in the book. For a series that revolves around the idea that chastity is a turn-on, the “Twilight” world includes plenty of full-frontal from the Quileute boys. When the werewolves transform in the book, they get naked so as not to burst out of their clothes, Hulk-style.

“It would change the rating of the movie if we did it that way,” says Spencer. “Although, some people probably wouldn’t think that was bad.”

The werewolf sequences involve heavy CGI, which Weitz used to startling effect on “The Golden Compass,” one of that film’s few good points. While some actors complain about the artifice of acting for a computer, Lautner gave the CGI wolves a big thumbs-up.

“I was blown away. I was really excited,” he told Collider. “Because when I’m filming the famous trailer shot where I’m running through the film and jump up and transform mid-air, I’m attached to wires and I’m running and I let the wires pull me up the air, and they jerk me to a stop and I just have to freeze there and let them convert my body into a CGI wolf, and the whole time I’m like, ‘I hope I look cool.’ ”

The other major hurdle both the screenwriter and director faced was Edward Cullen — or, more specifically, his absence. The crooked-smiled, bedheaded Pattinson has been a major factor in the global domination of “Twilight,” and the fact that Meyer had his character fleeing the country early on posed a bit of a problem.

For the majority of the book, Edward is present only in the stricken Bella’s mind. She finds she can hear his voice when she’s in danger, so she pursues anything and everything that might put her in harm’s way. “I chose to, fairly obviously, make that internal voice a vision,” says Rosenberg, leading to what’s been referred to as Pattinson’s “Obi-Wan Kenobi moment.”

The scruffy actor shows up as a ghostly vision to frown disapprovingly at Bella whenever she’s about to do something stupid, which is often. Then he’s there in person for the film’s climactic sequence, in which Bella races against time to get to Edward before he can step shirtless into the sunlight of an Italian town square and reveal himself — so the local vampire council will kill him and put him out of his lovelorn misery.

The sequence, shot in Montepulciano, was one of the first to make it into online news reports. Meticulous photos of Stewart’s sprint across the square, through a fountain and into Pattinson’s pale arms were spliced into montages and posted to YouTube as fast as their owners (presumably, film extras) could upload them.

“It was the closest moment I have really felt the emotional attachment to the character,” Pattinson said of the shoot. “Taking that one step into the light . . . that is the one moment . . . that I felt the whole weight of participation, and responsibility as well. It was a good moment — very nerve-wracking. I felt probably the most in-character I have felt in the whole series.”

Rumors from inside the film shoot dogged the pictures, though. Were Pattinson’s chiseled abs painted on?

“Rob had a team of makeup artists working on his stomach to make it appear as if he had a six-pack — Rob is definitely not that in-shape,” a source told MTV UK. “They used all the tricks — including liquid body paint, shading and airbrushing to make his torso look toned.”

Weitz’s film expands the entire Italian section, from its 11th-hour appearance in the novel, to give more screen time to the Volturi, the council that enforces the laws. (“Vampires have laws?” Bella asks incredulously in the trailer.)

It’s this section in which the new faces appear: Dakota Fanning and Michael Sheen play two members, as well as Jamie Campbell Bower and Cameron Bright.

Sheen, the British star of “Frost/Nixon” and “The Queen,” plays Aro, the council’s lethal and disarmingly friendly leader. “There was a moment when I suddenly thought, ‘Oh, I sound a little bit like the Blue Meanies,’ ” Sheen said of his high-pitched Aro voice. “I found them really disturbing when I was a kid, so I thought that was a good thing.”

Fanning loved playing a baddie, too.

“She’s never really gotten to play a bad person before, probably because she is a very good person,” Weitz told People. “She is really a lovely young person. But I think she had some fun playing, really, the most evil of all the bad guys.”’

Weitz seems to fully understand how vastly important “New Moon” is to its fans, be they squealing tweens or salivating “Twilight” moms.

“In terms of how we set about shooting [‘New Moon’], it probably feels a bit more like my sad attempt to echo David Lean or Kurosawa,” he told MTV. “There’s a kind of tremendous emotionality to the piece that we try to keep within the bounds of not being silly. It’s an unabashedly romantic big-scale epic.”

With The Los Angeles Times

Pack mentality:

The Quileute boys of “New Moon” are about to give Robert Pattinson a run for his money in the heartthrob market. And not just because they spend so much of the film with their shirts off. Here’s what makes their werewolf pack so hot.

Pack members are actually Indian. Taylor Lautner, Alex Meraz, Bronson Pelletier, Chaske Spencer and Kiowa Gordon are all of Native American ancestry.

Their abs are not painted on. “They put bronzer on our bodies to kind of enhance the muscles, but no painting,” says Spencer. “I wish there was painting. It would have saved me a lot of pain.”

Werewolves run hot. Pack members have elevated body temperatures. “We’re 108 degrees. So it’s not like we’re randomly taking our shirts off for no reason,” Lautner told E! News.

They bonded through training. “That’s really what helped out with building the chemistry on set, and even during filming,” Meraz told iesb.net. “I think it really helped. We had a blast. We even made fun of each other, like who could do the most push-ups or whatever.”

They are naturally that hairless. “Native Americans, we don’t have that much hair,” says Spencer. “I can’t grow facial hair. I look like a 14-year-old boy if I let my stubble grow.”

They want the film’s portrayal ofmodern Native Americans to change how people see their culture . “All they might know is what Hollywood has taught, which is not very much,” Meraz told Comingsoon.net. “It’s very cool that natives are being seen in a different light. It’s not leather and feathers on a horse, ya know. It’s contemporary. People can relate to it.”