Q&A: “Twilight” director Catherine Hardwicke

Catherine Hardwicke (Associated Press photo) 

Catherine Hardwicke, who has directed movies such as “Thirteen,” “Lords of Dogtown” and “The Nativity Story,” was given the pressure-cooker task of adapting Stephenie Meyer’s beloved book “Twilight” to the big screen.

In a recent roundtable interview in Beverly Hills, Calif., Hardwicke talked about casting Edward and Bella, ramping up the action and the challenges that would come if the first book sequel, “New Moon,” also is adapted to film.

Here is an edited version of the interview:

Q: Were you a fan of the genre or the book when you signed on for this?
A: I had always liked, well who didn’t love Lestat and fall in love with “Interview with the Vampire” and “Nosferatu” and Coppola’s “Dracula” with the awesome costumes. So I loved all that. But that really in my mind had nothing to do with this movie because Stephenie came up with it. She didn’t watch all those movies. She didn’t love the vampire world. When she had this dream it wasn’t particularly derivative of those movies.

So I didn’t look at them to say “I want to copy this, this or this.” This was in a whole other world, a whole other universe of Olympic rainforest and green, beautiful pale vampires in greenery and moss. I thought that was kind of cool, to do something quite different. I liked the book, it had that voice, that you started getting if you let yourself go there, you got swept away, and the detail, the obsessive detail mesmerizes and falling in love, obsessively in  love-that’s kind of cool, I’d  like to see that. I’d like to make that in a film.

Q: The casting has been dissected online by millions of fans.
A: (laughs) When I started there were only two books out but there was already a passionate fan base and they had their ideas of who would be a good Bella and a good Edward. I checked out all those people. I met with Emily Browning, that was one of the favorites. She had had two bad experiences on films and told me, ‘I don’t know if I even want to act again. I’m certainly not going to sign up for three movies in a row,’ so she was completely out. But I met with all the people fans liked. Some of them were already too old or whatever, or weren’t interested or in person they weren’t right.

Then I had to search. I loved Kristen in “Into the Wild.” She’s sitting there on that bed in that trailer and you can just feel that she’s feeling that desire, that longing-she’s able to express it. So I sought out Kristen. I got on a plane and went to Pittsburgh, and took my video camera and an actor and filmed a day being with Kristen and we tried to see ‘is this gonna work?’ I looked at it the next day and said, ‘Yeah, she’s Bella,’ not to mention she is 17, the perfect age. So in a weird way that was easy. Robert, not easy, finding Edward. That was insane

Q: How many people did you see?
A: Out of probably over 1,000 tapes and auditions that came into casting, several thousand,  I maybe saw maybe less than 100 guys. Some of them ended up good for other parts, so that’s kind of cool. Some of them were great but they looked like they could be your next-door neighbor or the cute dude at your school.  I thought Edward had to be somebody from another world, that you couldn’t figure him out. He had to be something special, that we hadn’t seen before. So I was really desperate. I could not find that person.

I was so desperate that I’m like literally calling Rob in the middle of the night; I had only seen a bit of “Harry Potter,” which didn’t impress me, so I had no hope for it really, and said “Why don’t you come out here?” But he flew out, we brought our top five over to my house for the auditions, so five guys worked with Kristen on three different scenes.

Have you guys heard about my bed? We did the kissing scene on the bed, and that bed is special because on “Thirteen” Nikki and Evan met each other – Nikki Reed met Evan Rachel Wood – and that’s where their chemistry sparked.

So when I saw Rob and Kristen there too, the electricity, I was like “Ohhhh this could be good!” But I wanted to look at it the next day on tape and make sure I’m not getting affected by the hormones or something – I didn’t want to get carried away. But then you look at it on the monitor and “Yep, it’s still there. And it’s gonna leap off the screen.”

Q: What was it about Kristen that made her Bella?
A: I feel that when you read the book, Bella has a lot of depth, a lot of soul. She’s not … you can’t take a TV actress that’s really cute and ‘Oh, adorable, I’m in love.’  That’s not going to work for the level that the fans feel connected to these books. There’s an intimacy there, and a seriousness too.

I literally heard two 9-year-old girls at Christmas two Christmases ago talking for an hour and a half about the soul of Edward and Bella. It means something on a deep, emotional level. So this actress had to be able to carry that kind of depth. And what I’ve seen of Kristen’s work, she is one of the few actresses of her age that has had the opportunity to do that and has shown us that she can do that, and showed me that she could do that too.

Q: Who were the 9-year-olds?
A: They were two really cool girls in Portland. It was at a Christmas party while I was there location-scouting. We were all doing the dishes at the party and literally for an hour they went into soul-searching about Edward and the meaning of evolution and vampires can be just as legitimate as humans.  It was getting so heavy.

Q: Oh, we thought maybe you did the project because of nieces and nephews; a lot of directors and actors take on projects for that reason.
A: Oh no, but now my nieces and nephews know about the book.

Q: So you’re a cool aunt
Yeah, always, I did the skateboard movie (“Lords of Dogtown”). I did “Thirteen.”

Q: Can you talk about the technical and logistical challenges? We’ve heard that when you wanted rain it was sunny …
A: Actually we didn’t want it to be rainy or sunny; it had to just be cloudy. When you look at the charts for Portland it says cloudy in the winter – 28 days. So maybe it’s cloudy for 28 days for 20 minutes (at a time). I could shoot a two-shot and it would be cloudy – yes! – and do one single and it’s still cloudy and go for the second single and it’s bright sun.

Q: So what did you do?
A: Patience, Cloud dances, rain dances, begging the sky. Lucky charms. (with a wide grin)

Q: Did it work?
A: One time it did. But what we did, every single day, the call sheet would have at least three possible scenes that we could shoot every day.  If it’s sunny- this; if it’s rainy – this. If it’s cloudy … and you just had to be ready. Sometimes we’d only get to do part of the scene and the sun came out so we’d run over and do that part of the scene. It was a lot of memory work.

Q: You also had to move equipment into the woods and actors had to learn to do wire work
A: Yeah, I think you’re starting to feel my pain. That was every minute. The movie was literally a logistics nightmare. Luckily, our AD (assistant director)/co-producer (Jamie Marshall) is very experienced on big weather-scary movies like “Vertical Limit,” so he had us prepared for that.

But also I was really prepared. I had my shot list done two, sometimes three weeks in advance, if not a month in advance. I storyboarded the most complex scenes.  We had the backup plan, and the backup plan to the backup plan. That’s what you have to do as a director.  You have to be able to think of a solution to the problem and think fast.

Q: Did you make your time and budget?
A: Yes, we did. We did not go over one day of shooting. We didn’t go over one day in post-production. Did I get everything I wanted? No.

Q: What had to go?
A: Some days I wanted to get other cool shots, other close-ups, I wanted to give somebody another take, try a different alternative. I had a thing, I knew if I could get three shots I knew I had the scene. These were my priorities. Sometimes you have to combine it, do it in one shot.

I had to sacrifice some of my dream and try to make what I had work as well as I could.

Q: What pressures are there doing something with a fanatic fan base? Are you contractually obliged to do any of the other versions of the books?

A: For me, personally, I put my own pressure on myself. Every job I’ve done, as a production designer, I wanted to make every set as excellent, as interesting as I could make it. Every film I’ve done I’ve tried to do the best I could within my constraints and budget. So I don’t think that anybody could put any more pressure on me than I put on myself.

But having said that, did I want the fans to be excited about it and love it? Hell yes! I want people to get into the film and feel like they saw what they love come alive on the screen.

Some of the things, I really wanted to make it more visual because when you read the book you’re kind of way in your head, and a lot of scenes are two people talking in a car. I tried to think, “How do we make those scenes more dynamic and more alive and give something even more to the fans?”

So, the second thing, “New Moon” is much more expensive than the first book because there’s werewolf transformations, CGI, there’s stunts-jumping off cliffs, motorcycle rides. They go to Italy. So, we have to make quite a lot of money on this one to be able (to make the sequel).

Q: Would you want to do it?
A: I’m not really trying to like count on anything until we see how does it do – do people show up?

Q: You’ll do something else before then?
a: Well, on one level, I don’t know if you would,  because kids are not supposed to age so it would not make sense …

Q: You mean it would have to start fast?
A: It would need to, yes.

Q: Did you feel more pressure doing this than “The Nativity Story”?
A: A lot of fans read the Bible too. In fact more people bought that than the “Twilight” series. (laugh).

Q: In the book the action with the other coven of vampires doesn’t start until later, but you moved it up. Was that an idea to get a more general audience and boys to like it more?
A: Actually, it was to get me to like it more. I felt waiting ’til the end to introduce the bad vampires, I didn’t think that was the  best thing. I wanted to see … and I like action, I want to have a moment to be excited and be scared. I wanted to have more shape to the film. I felt that was important. I had to fight a lot for that.

The studio did not care if boys liked the movie. They said, “We don’t care, we’re not giving you any more money.”  I had these elaborate storyboards, I had a lot more in the baseball sequence, and they said “We just care about the core audience. We’re not trying to reach out.” Of course, that was their first thought. They had to stick to a budget and they’re a new company. I’m not blaming them. But I said “I’m going to draw some cool pictures and try to get them excited about what I can do,” so I started drawing some wild stuff and they started getting more enthusiastic.

Q: What do you think makes vampires so enduring and intriguing?
A: Sexy! Zombies, mummies, they’re disgusting and gross. You don’t want to make out with a mummy. At least I don’t. The vampire has always been the sensual … who goes for your erogenous zone, your neck. As you study vampire legend throughout history, it goes back to almost every culture. South Africa, Indonesia, crazy places have that legend and that idea of immortality.

I mean, we all, how much cream do we buy to try to stay young and capture our youth? And the idea also of the undead reaching out to the living is a pervasive idea. I think a lot of this stuff is in our psyche. It just keeps going. People keep reinventing it or feeling that myth coming back again.

Q: Where was CGI used in the movie?
A: My personal feeling about CGI is: invisible amount of it – the whole frame is 90 percent real shot and we add one little dot or erase one thing, that’s pretty much it

Q: Like wire removal, sky replacement?
A: Yeah. We had to smooth out the sky. When you go to the Cullens’ house, I added a third story. But there are quite a lot of shots, over 200 shots that we had to do something to. But pretty minor. We always shot in the real locations. We didn’t have the “Harry Potter” budget to build a forest. We had to go to a real forest and suffer the weather

Q: Is Nikki Reed your lucky charm?
A: I don’t know, Nikki is kind of like my adopted daughter. I’ve known her since she was 5. Whenever there seems to be something she can do I try to find a cool way to be in. And when I read this wild, radical, bitchy character Rosalie, I thought “Yeah, she could pull that off.”

Q: Was the scene with Bella and Edward sitting in those high treetops real?
A: That was pretty scary. When Rob and Kristen are there – there’s Rob and Kristen and there’s the doubles. And when it’s Rob and Kristen that’s on a cliff at the Columbia River Gorge. If they went a little more this way, it would have been scary. We mostly kept them on the other side of the cliff. And then on the helicopter shot, it’s the doubles and actually the climbing is the doubles, too. But it was scary. They were wired and the helicopter got so close we thought they were going to get blown off the tree.

It was a pretty badass stunt.

-BAM

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