Catherine Hardwicke interview

-The girls didn’t need to be convinced.-We toured malls the week before [the movie] opened. When we went to Dallas, there were one thousand girls screaming like it was Beatlemania and yelling “I want to have your baby” at Rob [Pattinson, the male lead] and all that. He had done a few indie movies since then, and a play, and this and that. He had been unemployed for a little while. His career wasn’t exactly shooting for the moon.-[Before I cast him] I was pretty desperate. I didn’t think I had found the right Edward. It’s a tall order: He had to be the most handsome guy in the world, and he had to have pale skin, and he had to be believable as a high schooler, and he had to be a really good actor, and he had to feel otherworldly. A lot of the kids who [auditioned] were really cute but looked like they could be the prom king.-What about Kristen Stewart, who plays Bella?I had seen Into the Wild—I thought she was so good in that. There’s the moment where she’s sitting on the bed and is so vulnerable. You can just feel what she’s feeling. She wants to connect, and Emile Hirsch is great: “No, I can’t do it—you’re underage.” I loved her from that scene, and I thought, “I just have to meet this girl.”

-Her career has also been helped enormously by this.
-She’s an incredible actress. She’s been doing small roles in indie films, but even though that’s where her heart is, she can now get movies green-lit, because she has star power.-Has this film had a similar effect on your career? Thirteen [Hardwicke’s directorial debut, in 2003] was big as far as it went, but it didn’t succeed on the scale that Twilight has.
-Oh, no. I mean, [Thirteen] was only in one hundred theaters total, so it made nothing compared to [Twilight]. On opening weekend we beat Thirteen by $65 million!
So what’s the practical impact?-Any of that stuff appeal to you?
-A lot of it doesn’t. But I’ll try to read the script all the way through to see, because the truth is that when I got the script for Twilight, it wasn’t even close to what we filmed. It was a whole other script that had been developed at Paramount before the book was released. Somebody read the novel in galleys and said, “Oh, I think this could be a cool movie.” It took extreme liberties. There was an FBI agent involved, and girls were on Jet Skis by the end, like Charlie’s Angels, and Bella was a track star—she wasn’t just a clumsy everygirl. So I read that script, and I read the book, and I went to my meeting with the studio and said, “You know what? This script should just be thrown in the trash. We have to start over and make it like the book. Because that’s where the heart is. That’s why these kids around the world are connecting with it.” And that’s what we did.-Well, Thirteen was something I wrote from scratch with [Thirteen actress] Nikki [Reed], and that came from no material other than life. The draft that we wrote in six days was very close to the movie that you see. It’s got the same first scene, the same last scene—it’s pretty damn similar. But it became richer and deeper as I worked with [lead actress] Holly Hunter. When I met with her, she would have ideas, and I would write new scenes for her, which improved it greatly.

On Twilight we had a screenwriter who the studio had worked with before, but I went up and scouted all the locations and found these crazy things I wanted to put in. I don’t know if you remember the scene where they go outside and fly through the treetops. There’s not anything even remotely close to that in the book, but it was created to visualize a feeling of being in love—crazy, ecstatic love. I told the screenwriter I wanted to do it, and she put it in the script, very bare-bones, and then I elaborated on it and did storyboards". Source: www.texasmonthly.com