Catherine Hardwicke: 'Twilight' Scripts Initially 'Sucked'

First Posted: 02/ 8/2012 8:25 am Updated: 02/ 8/2012 8:26 am

Twilight

Grab your pitchforks, Twi-hards! In a recent interview with Vulture, Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the first "Twilight" movie, had some unkind words about the film's initial script.

At a Sundance dinner, [Hardwicke] had been seated next to the heads of Summit Entertainment, who handed her five scripts and asked her to read them. "Every one of those scripts sucked," she says. "Oh, Lord, did they suck."


At the time, Hardwicke was best known for the critically acclaimed "thirteen," which she wrote and directed. So, if she really thought the scripts for "Twilight" were so horrible, why did Catherine eventually take the gig? Besides being allowed to do a complete rewrite, she was attracted to romance between Bella and Edward.

"I thought the script was horrible, but then I looked it up on the Internet and I thought, Okay, it's based on a book and people tend to like it. There's gotta be something there. So I read the book and I thought it captured that feeling of being madly in love. And I thought, That's kind of a good challenge, to see if, as a filmmaker, I could make you feel that giddy, crazy."


Although the rewrite Hardwicke asked for did little to sway the critical opinion of the film, it certainly helped the finished product in some eyes. "Catherine Hardwicke has a genius for getting inside the brain and is so in touch with what it's like to be a teenage girl," Bill Condon, who directed "Breaking Dawn," told Moviefone last fall. "I couldn't imagine doing that first 'Twilight.'"

Despite the "horrible" initial script, the first "Twilight" went on to gross $392 million worldwide.

You can read the entire interview with Hardwicke over on Vulture.

[via Vulture]

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Grab your pitchforks, Twi-hards! In a recent interview with Vulture, Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the first "Twilight" movie, had some unkind words about the film's initial script. At a Sun...
Grab your pitchforks, Twi-hards! In a recent interview with Vulture, Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the first "Twilight" movie, had some unkind words about the film's initial script. At a Sun...
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12:49 AM on 03/01/2012
ok so they sucked. isn't it the directors job to make something average into something wonderful? hardwicke is just making excuses. yeah the script may have sucked, but her directing was some of the worst id ever seen.
07:45 PM on 02/24/2012
Twilight movies should always be nominated for the Razzies. Some of the worst directed, acted movies of all time and boring.
02:15 PM on 02/12/2012
Big fan of irony and puns, but.. yeah. The whole franchise sucks.
mazaranne
Texas liberal is not an oxymoron
08:26 PM on 02/08/2012
I was going to say something about the previous commenters saying "suck" so much, then I remembered that it's a vampire movie. Apropos, I suppose.
12:23 PM on 02/08/2012
What the script sucked, well I guess they did not improve it much because the movie still really really sucked LOL.
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Carl E Cook
11:17 AM on 02/08/2012
teen vampires....?........the book "sucked"........ the sequels "suck".........the movies, too........