An Oral HistoryA Look Back at How the ‘Twilight’ Movies Began

Nov 12, 2017 9:00 am

It’s hard to believe that it’s just about five years since the The Twilight Saga came to a close with the release of Breaking Dawn Part 2, but at the same time it’s the perfect opportunity to look back at the series and remember the magic between Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan, Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen and Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black.

To celebrate, we’re taking a look back at the entire film series, beginning with this retrospective piece on 2008’s Twilight through the words of Kristen, Robert, director Catherine Hardwick, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, producer Wyck Godfrey and author Stephenie Meyer.

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STEPHENIE MEYER (Author): Twilight hadn’t been published yet when the movie deal happened, so this was before it had any fans and before I had any sense of how it was going to do. And my agent explained to me, “Creatively, they can do anything with this.’ For me, it came down to protecting it and not letting the film happen or getting to see it on the screen. I knew it could go either way, and actually it usually goes the bad way. But what pulled me through was the idea that maybe I could see one scene — the meadow scene — on screen that was right. That was what I really wanted, and I felt like it was worth the risk. When Summit Entertainment came into the picture, they were so open to letting us make the rules for them — like, “Okay, Bella cannot be a track star. Bella cannot have night-vision goggles.” The other thing is that I saw the book very visually when I was writing it, and to see one scene of it on the big screen was, like I said, alluring. I didn’t care about anyone else going to see it, that was about me alone in the theater getting to see it and having it be real. That’s what swayed me.

WYCK GODFREY (Producer): I have to give a lot of credit for the first film to director Catherine Hardwicke. The franchise wasn’t as big as it got over the course of the year that we made the film, but ultimately they figured this was a growing thing and the idea was if we can just get girls and women, it can support the budget we were trying to make it at. Once they got Kristen Stewart, they felt confident they had the right Bella Swan and then it all came together. The hard part of it all was making the movie and delivering it for the budget we had, but Catherine did an amazing job as the world has seen. For me, what Catherine was able to capture with Twilight was that insular obsessive love that Bella has. It was a very subjective movie — you really felt like you were with the girl, going into this town and walking into this relationship; and the details of Edward’s face, it was so inside the mind of a teenage girl, very intimate and it was perfect for Twilight.

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CATHERINE HARDWICKE (Director): The power of this book is that you’re really in the voice of this girl. When I read it, I felt like I had time traveled and was 17 again, and was madly in love with this guy. I’d do anything to be with him, I’d die to be with him, I’d become a vampire to be with him. It’s intoxicating the way Stephenie writes. Sometimes that kind of intoxicating prose repetition sucks you in and you go with it. I think people really starting breathing with the character, your heart starts beating with Bella if you let yourself go there. That’s kind of a cool place to go. There’s this desire to connect, and this romantic notion. I’m glad people don’t want to let that go. It’s a great fantasy, and it’s got the thrills and the action. And for a guy, it’s a great fantasy, too: You would be able to protect this girl against other bad vampires, and this amazing chick loves you and you’re the hero. I’ll take it!

MELISSA ROSENBERG (Screenwriter): What I endeavored to do with the script was to realize the book, if not specifically, then certainly its spirit. Stephenie writes with such heart and the book is wall-to-wall character and emotional connection and drama and conflict. She actually downplays some of the action in the book, and will kind of suggest it or it happens off screen, so we’re bringing it to the screen, perhaps more vividly. I think that she provided us — provided me — with such rich character connections to infuse every scene. I don’t think there’s a scene that doesn’t have some sort of character element. Maybe a couple of scenes with the evil vampire, but those are still fun and they become very emotional characters — not for themselves, but for Edward and Bella.

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Obviously the next most important element of the film was the casting of the lead characters of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (not so much Jacob Black in the first film, as his role was a relatively minor one — though the decision to use Taylor Lautner would have a very positive impact on the films to come).

CATHERINE HARDWICKE: On one level we did the traditional casting process where every person in the world knows that you’re casting for these roles, so tapes are coming in from everywhere. But even while we were doing all of that, I had Kristen Stewart in mind, because I loved her in Into The Wild. Just hands down, I thought she was amazing and I heard all these great things about her from other people. We have many mutual friends, so she has heard about me from a number of people. I think she was predisposed to work with me. And she thought this character was an extreme challenge. She saw it as the Romeo And Juliet of this generation, and enjoyed that deep connected love that was so passionate.

KRISTEN STEWART (Actress, “Bella Swan”): The only thing I could bring to Bella was to be myself. She’s an honest, upfront, seemingly logical girl. She’s alone, but not lonely. Bella is very honest. I mean, I could relate to her because she’s just a very straight-up, good-natured girl who found herself in an insane position. She’s seemingly logical, and then all of a sudden she’s thinking of herself as a psychotic person and she’s just swept away by something more powerful than she. Every girl wants to lose herself. And Bella started out hard and just lost it, and that’s what I really loved about it.

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STEPHENIE MEYER: I was very excited to have Kristen Stewart play Bella. She’s an amazing actress with experience all across the board — action, horror, comedy, romance, and more. Since Twilight has moments that fit into every one of these genres, I was thrilled to have a Bella who has practice with them all. The thing to hope for is a really great actor who can make us believe she is Bella (or Alice or so forth) for roughly two hours. We’ve got that with Kristen Stewart.

KRISTEN STEWART: She is supposed to fill this role of the damsel-in-distress, but in an odd way she sort of holds the power in the relationship. She is very sure of herself and not afraid of the situation, which is so much bigger than her. Bella and Edward have a funny dynamic. He’s a vampire and he would suck the last bit of blood out of her, yet she’s completely fascinated by him. She takes things for what they are. Bella doesn’t over consider things and let them intimidate her. Edward is tortured and thinks that he’s going to hurt her and this is something that you should run away from. But she’s, like, “You can’t live life like that.”

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CATHERINE HARDWICKE: The real challenge of casting was the role of Edward. How do you find the best-looking guy in the world that everyone is going to think is great-looking, but he has to be believable to be a 17-year-old in high school? That takes out almost every hot actor you can think of. They are not high school boys. And then he has to be pale-skinned, and that eliminates a whole other group. And it’s weird, he has to look otherworldly. So many cute guys came in, but they all looked like you could see them at your high school. Or, “Hey, that looks like the guy on our football team,” or, “He looks like the prom king at my school,” and that’s not what you want. You want someone who you can believe was not a normal person — who had that special quality and he had already lived 109 years and had this internal torture. So that’s super-challenging.

Eventually Robert Pattinson ended up auditioning at Hardwicke’s home, with Kristen Stewart, as time was rapidly running out before filming had to begin.

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CATHERINE HARDWICKE: It was down to four guys, and they came over to my house and auditioned with Kristen — she did three scenes with them, and we did the famous scene on my bed. When Rob and Kristen did that scene, and I’m filming it, I just knew. There was no question that these two had the chemistry, the intensity, and they could match each other. It came alive. And my attitude was, “Okay, done. This is our guy.”

ROBERT PATTINSON (Actor, “Edward Cullen”): Once I began to really look at him, I realized that Edward was more complicated to play than I first thought. When you look at what Edward says, it seems that he always says the right thing. He’s always just the perfect gentleman. But when you put it in the context of his actual life situation, it doesn’t compute that he would be this completely easy-going, normal guy. That’s what he was before, but then he got bit. He’s still trying to be a nice guy, but he’s also killed, like, 50 people. So he’s kind of in a state of constant penance. A lot of the story is Edward going against his base instinct. He knows he’s a vampire and he knows what vampires do, what’s kind of the whole idea of being a vampire. Denying that is kind of boring. The more Bella says, “I’m not scared of you, you’re not a monster,” the more I believe it myself and I kind of forget that I am a vampire and what my urges are. I try and kiss her, and obviously it kind of ends up being a nightmare. She has a hormonal rush and I have a kind of “I want to kill you” rush. But it ends up being quite sexy in a weird sort of way.

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KRISTEN STEWART: When you think about Robert as Edward, he’s so good and he’s so soulful and he’s just not a liar — you can feel pain from him. The cool thing about the story is that it’s a seemingly wonderful fantasy — “Let’s fall in love with vampires and live forever” — but it’s so much harder than that. Imagine living forever. Living one life is hard enough.

ROBERT PATTINSON: He knows his relationship with Bella is right, but he can’t stand the fact that he keeps hanging around her. It’s, like, “I know I’m in love with her. I know that’s all well and good, but I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m a vampire, I should just accept that and kill myself now.” It’s a lot of self-loathing, and I wanted to play it 100% self-loathing the whole time, and nobody would let me. They had to kind of lighten me up a bit.

CATHERINE HARDWICKE: When I think about Kristen and Robert as Bella and Edward, I can’t imagine that anyone else could have pulled it off the way they did. There was really no other choice for either character.

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An Oral HistoryA Look Back at How the ‘Twilight’ Movies Began

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