How ‘Twilight’ Captured “Love That’s Like a Drug”
When filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke got the first draft of Twilight, she knew there was a problem. The depicted script Bella as a superstar athlete and ended with her in a chase with the FBI (on jet skis). “It had just gone out of control ,” says Hardwicke. “I’m like, ‘No, no, no, that’s not what the book’s about. It’s about this incredible, impossible love and this yearning.”
Hardwicke wanted to ditch the script and get closer to the book by author Stephenie Meyer. Those instincts proved right. Fifteen years ago, on Nov. 21, 2008, Twilight became a surprise hit for low-key studio Summit Entertainment, grossing $408.4 million worldwide and instantly turning stars Kristen Stewart (Bella Swan) and Robert Pattinson (Edward Cullen) into global stars. It would spawn four sequels, with a TV reboot on the way.
After working on a new script with writer Melissa Rosenberg, Hardwicke, then best known for Thirteen, went on the daunting journey to cast her Bella and Edward — an ordinary high school girl and the immortal vampire she falls for, respectively.
The director knew she’d found her Bella in Stewart when she saw her in the trailer for 2007’s Into the Wild. She ended up flying to Pittsburgh where Stewart was shooting a movie and oversaw her screen test with Jackson Rathbone (who later took on the role of Jasper Cullen, an adopted vampire brother of Edward’s). “At the end of the day, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, she’s really cool and she’s got all that angst,’” Hardwicke recalled.
Edward proved to be much more difficult to find. As Hardwicke notes, the actors that were auditioning “didn’t look like they’d been alive for almost 100 years and all this deep, soulful angst, existential crisis. They did not feel that Kind of soulful.”
They narrowed it down to four actors, including Rathbone, Shiloh Fernandez, Ben Barnes and Pattinson, who bought his own flight from London since production was on a tight budget. They all did chemistry reads with Stewart, but once Pattinson was up, Hardwicke knew he was the one because she felt “that electricity” between them. (The pair would become a real-life couple for several years.)
Ashley Greene auditioned for Bella, but Hardwicke saw her more in the role of Alice Cullen, one of Edward’s adopted sisters. The actress recalls she was “obsessed with this book, like many people were, and just really wanted to do anything possible to be a part of the film,” even if it wasn’t the role of Bella. But it was also a special project for Greene — it was the first big acting role that she booked since to Los Angeles just a couple of years prior.
When Peter Facinelli’s agent asked if he wanted to do a vampire movie, he said no. After all, he reasoned, good and bad vampire movies seemingly came in waves and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to jump on the next one. But once he heard who was directing, he says his “ears pricked up to that because I had been a fan of Catherine’s work.”
Since there wasn’t a script yet, he went out to buy the book and gave it a skim before his audition the next day, which involved a very hands-on Hardwicke, to win the role of Carlisle: the adoptive father of a family of vampires. “At one point, we cut to the scene where she’s [Hardwicke] actually playing Bella. So I have my hand wrapped around her leg and I’m crouched out over her and I’m thinking, ‘If someone opens the door right now and looks in, this is going look really weird, me hovering over the director, you know, with my hands on her legs.’ And so, it was just fun,” the actor says.
As he moved on to other projects, he thought, “The universe is really rubbing this in that I did not get this role,” because he saw a book about “50 years of vampire making in Hollywood” on a coffee table while in another audition. But because he admired Hardwicke so much, he decided to gift her with a copy of the book and send her best wishes making Twilight. fortunately for him, the first actor they cast in the role of Carlisle Cullen ended up not working out, which led Hardwicke to remember Facinelli
