Robert Pattinson and Catherine Hardwicke Talk Twilight

Posted by Michelle Graham (michelle@filmschoolrejects.com) on May 1, 2008

When Robert Pattinson left the world of possibly the most popular adaptation of the page for the screen, Harry Potter, he couldn’t have known that only a few years later he could return, in another explosively successful adaptation with the potential to take the Potter torch and run. As he says himself in an interview with MSN Movies, he hadn’t even read the books when he auditioned! However, after only a short while with “Bella”, Robert found the “Edward” in him drawn to the project uncontrollably.

“I had no idea how to play the part when I went in, and it was a good thing to find during the audition. I really wanted it after that, but I didn’t really even know what it was. I hadn’t really read any of the books. And just from that, ‘I want this job.’ It was pretty much because of Kristen [Stewart, who plays "Bella"].”

Once he was in the project, Robert was blessed with a sit down session with Twilight’s author, Stephenie Meyer, and she shared with him something that ravenous fans around the world, the “Twilighters”, would have killed for.

“There is another version of ‘Twilight’ called ‘Midnight Sun,’ which isn’t finished, which Stephenie Meyer wrote, and it’s the entire story from [Edward's] perspective,” he says. “He just sees himself as the most disgusting person in the entire world, which is how I was trying to play it before I read that. Luckily, I was on the same page as the author.”

Of course, Robert’s not the only one who’s fallen under Twilight’s spell. According to MSN Movie News, Twilight’s director, Catherine Hardwicke was handed a bundle of scripts by Summit Entertainment at Sundance 2007 and found that Twilight was the only one that caught her eye.

“They said, ‘Hey, we’d love to do a project with you. Here are five things we want to do this year. Tell us if you’re interested in any.’ The other four? Uh-uh. But I read the script for this one and went, ‘This is pretty cool.’”

So, what could be the major hurdle between Twilight and mass market appeal? Well, many believe that it’s the fact it’s so firmly entrenched in the female market, with a lack of pull for the guys. After all, it is based on a teen girl’s romance with a guy she shouldn’t be with, talk about the perfect recipe for a chick film. However, Twilight already has a big male fan base, and Hardwicke believes she has just the thing to attract some more.

“The book stays a lot in Bella’s head, but sometimes she implies a lot of action and we show it,” Hardwicke says. “[In one scene] Bella passes out when the venom starts going in her and she doesn’t see the whole action the way Edward does. We see it all, in a big way. We see the dismemberment, the fire … We see it.”

Dismemberment, fights, fire, sounds like Twilight could have all the action it needs to offset the perceived girlyness, and from a director who’s done Lords of Dogtown and Thirteen, both fairly gritty pieces of film-making, it doesn’t appear likely that she’ll fog up the screen with pink lighting and cute teddy bears. In fact, she has a very clear idea of how the movie’s image will come across.

Who has ever seen vampires in the Pacific Northwest rainforest, dripping with moss and weird shafts of light? I thought, ‘That’s a cool concept. That pale skin vampire in that green.’ That vivid green and the wetness and you see everything we do. We wet down the streets. Everything has moss all over it. It’s actually very creepy and cool.

Not quite your typical chick flick, but then again, something with vampires, werewolves, fire and decapitation was never going to fit that particular mould.

Read more articles by Michelle Graham