15 years ago, a cultural phenomenon was born. Twilight, the film series based on Stephanie Meyer's bestselling series of fantasy YA books, landed on screens for the first time, bringing with it a hysteria unlike anything seen before. This love story between a human girl and a vampire boy hit the world like a 100mph baseball, launching Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart into mind-melting levels of fame and introducing the concept of Twihards – diehard Twilight fans – into the lexicon.
Over the next five years, four more sequels come our way, each with bigger, shinier and flashier budgets than its humble first outing. When you go back and rewatch the original movie, you'll likely be struck by how small it feels. Made for just $37m, there's almost no trace in its heavily blue-hued frames that it was about to shift the cultural axis and introduce a decade of other YA films like The Hunger Games into our cinemas. By the time the last movie, Twilight: Breaking Dawn - Part 2, came out in 2012, it was working with a budget of $137m.
That first Twilight movie, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, still holds a heavy concentration of fan devotion, almost as if it's a cult classic (albeit, a cult classic that made almost half a billion dollars). Maybe it's its relative quaintness compared to later instalments with a relatively simple storyline that doesn't involve a wolf romantically imprinting on a half-vampire baby, or maybe it's just the weird and sometimes cringey love story at its heart. Whatever the reason, there's still a lot of love for Twilight, and to this day, fans continuously mine its two-hour runtime for almost every single millisecond of content for new memes and new discourse. “I love Rocky Horror Picture Show and how that movie has endured forever and people are still dressing up and know all the words,” says Hardwicke. “I always hoped that I would have a movie like that. And I guess it happened.”
To mark the anniversary of Twilight, we sat down with Catherine Hardwicke to ask every niche question about the film that fans have raised, memed, TikTok-ed and joked about over the last 15 years, from rogue costume choices to iconic baseball choreography.
One of the most enduring scenes of Twilight is when Bella walks into the classroom and Edward recoils like he's smelled something rancid. What was the decision to have Robert Pattinson react that way?
So that was one of the first audition scenes that Rob and Kristen did at my house, and, you know, we just kind of felt it and they just did their spontaneous first take with that scene. They were already so into it. Both Rob and Kristen were so committed that I think it just came together sort of organically almost. We just kind of created it, and as a director, we sometimes just respond to what the actors do.
You recreated the cover of the book, of two hands cupping an apple, with Edward catching an apple in the cafeteria with his feet and it moving up his body into his hands. What was the process of getting that shot?
I just thought [it would be great to have] some little beautiful nods. Of course, I wanted Stephenie Meyer to be in the movie, and I thought our fans were going to kind of love that. She's in the diner scene. And [I thought] wouldn't it be neat to have that same visual from the book if we could figure out how to do it? We had the apple, and we kept trying [the sequence] and it was a pretty tight budget, we had a tight schedule. We usually only did, like, three or four takes and we just could not get the apple to work, and then on take seven, I was like, maybe this was a dumb idea, but let's do take eight and let me try it one more time. Take 13 I think is where we got it.
And is it actually Robert Pattinson doing that trick?
It is. He really did just have to catch it.
There are a few super-speed running scenes, and one of the defining scenes of the film is when Edward tells Bella ''Hold on Tight, Spider Monkey" before grabbing her and sprinting her through the forest. How were those scenes shot on such a tight budget?
There's really no special effects in the movie. There's no CGI or anything, apart from the skin sparkling. There are two shots that are green screen, but the rest… it's very minimal, it's really more like Guillermo del Toro with in-camera stuff. We just sped up the film, so that was one technique. And then when the bad vampires come in the baseball scene, the stunt guy made what he called a magic carpet, which is a piece of plexiglass attached to a machine, so they could walk on it and it doubled their speed.
Speaking of the skin sparkling, what was the process of nailing the sparkles? Was it a Goldilocks situation of, like, not enough, too much and just right?
The tricky thing is, you first think, Okay, a grown man has to sparkle. Okay, that's a little scary. I don't want it to be jokey. I don't want you to laugh. I want you to believe it, and it feel organic. We did try it with makeup, and that looked ridiculous. Just makeup that had some, you know, iridescent shimmer and stuff. In the book, he sparkles for a long time in the meadow, it's like four or five pages he is in the sunshine, and I said, 'Well, we can't afford that, so let's just reduce that time'. So the idea was that he would just step out into the beam of light, show her, say a couple of things and then get it out of there. Then we went to ILM, Industrial Light and Magic up in San Francisco that does Star Wars, and I worked with the artists there to get the right amount of sparkle.
One of the enduring memes that's popped up since the books were released is the outfit that Bella wears to meet the Cullens for the first time – a navy shirt and a khaki skirt – because everyone thinks it's just an incredibly unstylish concept for an outfit. Why did you dress Bella differently in the film?
When we did the costume fitting with Kristen, we didn't really think people were going to try and match every exact line, because we really wanted to make Kristen feel comfortable with what she was wearing. I don't think she would have felt her character would have worn that outfit. You know, she wasn't that much of a skirt person, in fact, that's even a story point when we get to prom.
And she's even wearing leggings under the dress then.
Well, it was freezing! It was April and everyone was like, Oh, It never snows in Oregon in April. Oh, no. It snowed that day, and it hailed. People were just icebergs during the shooting. But, actually, we had a whole colour palette so that the Cullens were the colour of an Arctic wolf, so they were wearing silvers, greys, whites and blacks. She's wearing earth tones at the beginning, but by the time she hooks up and gets closer to Edward, she starts to wear the blues to match the Cullens. So we had a whole visual palette for the film that it wouldn't have worked for her to wear a navy shirt.
Did the blue tint of the film impact the colour palette?
The famous blue tint! You'll never see red-coloured clothes or yellow or orange clothes. Nobody wore those kinds of colours. Everybody did have a strict colour palette to follow.
When Edward wears the sunglasses the first time he and Bella walk into school together, he's not sparkling. So was it just an excuse for him to look cool?
I thought how fun if we got to see him one time where he looks so freakin' cool. I just wanted to put him in the sunglasses [laughs].
I have to talk to you about the baseball scene, especially Jasper's (Jackson Rathbone) baseball bat tricks. Were they choreographed, or were they a Jackson special?
That's a Jackson special. He literally was a great baseball player and loved baseball, and at the rehearsal, I remember Jackson showing me that move and I was like, Okay, that's in the movie, for sure.
What was the most challenging aspect of filming the baseball sequence?
My God, the whole thing. It took four or five days, and you had to have that many days with no sunshine. We had to have like backup plans of backup plans. And then also it was freezing, and then somebody would have to use the bathroom. So you know, everything was a challenge. But we did have this whole hilarious baseball training camp where Nikki Reed learned how to slide and Ashley Greene learned how to pitch and that was really fun. That was a bonding experience for the crew and for the cast.
Which of the Cullens do you think organised the cute matching baseball outfits?
I think probably Dr Cullen (Peter Facinelli).
How was Muse's “Supermassive Black Hole” chosen as the song for that sequence?
When Stephanie wrote the novels, she listened to Muse, that was her soundtrack when she was writing. So, my first naive thought was, I'm going to get Muse to do the whole score for the movie and only use Muse songs and it's going to be amazing. We reached out to Muse and they were like, Well, we're on tour, we're doing albums, we have a very busy schedule, we're not just gonna stop the world and do your movie [laughs]. But they did give us that song.
Elsewhere, you've got some Robert Pattinson songs in the film. How did that happen?
In the big scene in the ballet studio, I felt like, at this emotional moment, we needed to have a new musical instrument that we hadn't heard before. And then Nikki Reed, who plays Rosalie, told me that when they all hung out between shots, they would always play music, because a lot of them are musicians, and she said Rob had this crazy, incredible voice that sounds like a 70-year-old Blues musician. So she snuck away, got a little recording of it and I begged Rob to please let me record it. He was very shy, saying ‘No, no, no, no’, but I said, Can you come to my friend's house in Venice Beach – this friend literally has a studio in a closet and it's not intimidating at all – I promise, you won't be nervous. He sang and recorded it and it was so soulful. I had my laptop, holding it up, and Rob was singing and playing along with the picture. It was very intimate is very personal, putting that song in the movie.
Looking back, 15 years on, is there anything that you would have done differently?
Of course! I'm the director, we all want to do more. I had dream sequences and underwater sequences and more action and crazy things that I wanted to do, but we couldn't afford it. But I don't think you miss it. You still feel the essence of their love and their crazy, ecstatic attraction for each other. So I think it's okay.
Catherine Hardwicke's latest film, Mafia Mamma, starring Toni Colette, will be released on Prime Video on 24 November.
