3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Cosmopolitan
‘Twilight' Director Admits 'Every Studio in Los Angeles' Turned the Movie Down at First
Within the grand limestone walls of Fort Ricasoli in Malta last week, director Catherine Hardwicke gave a masterclass on her craft at the 2025 Mediterrane Film Festival, dissecting specific scenes from her many movies—including Twilight.
The movie based on Stephanie Meyer's hit book debuted nearly 17 years ago, but there is still behind-the-scenes intel to be found, and Catherine was generous in sharing her set stories. In her session—called 'Fix It in Prep' and moderated by The Hollywood Reporter's Chris Gardner—Catherine gave intel on her movie, from the color stories of the wardrobe to background on Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson's "hold on tight, spider monkey" scene, which did not appear in the book.
Catherine also touched on many of her other projects during the masterclass, including Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown, Miss You Already, and her episode of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. But the Twilight intel? Unmissable. Read on for Twilight highlights from Catherine's Mediterrane Film Festival masterclass.
'In the Cullen family, they wore the colors of an arctic wolf: silvers, blues, grays, blacks. Those were the only colors they were allowed to wear,' Catherine said. 'If you look at the whole movie, you will never see one human being in yellow, orange, or red. You know, those colors were not allowed.'
'We had 10 different T-shirts for her. She didn't like any of them. When we were shooting, she goes, 'I like your T-shirt.' I'm like, 'Okay,' [so I gave it to her] and I got a different T-shirt. That's what she wears in the movie, the T-shirt I had.'
Bella's wardrobe also had a specific color story that mirrored her story arc: 'She had a different color palette, more earth tones [at the beginning], but by the end of the film, she's dressing like the Cullens. She's got the blue jacket and everything.'
'The book has a lot of time where we're thinking about Edward's cheekbones, then again we're thinking about the cheekbones, and again we're thinking about the cheekbones. That doesn't work well in a movie. A book has to turn cinematic.'
'I wanted to do a scene that shows how wonderful it is to be in love with a hot vampire. How does it feel the first time you're madly in love? What could I create for that? So I kind of came up with the idea: Let's do this crazy tree top sequence.'
'Hold on tight, spider monkey. Anybody remember that line? Okay, I started to notice that Rob and Kristen needed a little bit more dialogue. There was too much eyes, eyes. So the night before, I'm writing like 10 different things, and I gave Rob the list asking, 'Which one do you want to say?' And he said, 'I want to say that.' Which is now the classic.'
'At the time, every studio in Los Angeles turned down Twilight. Nobody thought it would make one penny,' she said.
'I read the script, and I thought the script was terrible. I went and read the book, and I saw why there were fans that were passionate about it. So I said, 'I want to take a meeting,' and I went in there to the meeting and I took the script and said, 'This guy's in the trash can, but we're going to make it closer to the book and here are some ideas.' So they said, 'Okay, we agree with you. Let's hire a screenwriter.''
'Our bonding was baseball camp, because most people didn't know how to play baseball. I thought, 'How do you bond as vampires?' We can't really go out and drink blood and stuff together. So we did the baseball.'
WATCH 'TWILIGHT' HERE
