Catherine Hardwicke Says The Script For The First Twilight Movie Was Horrible

Since the Twilight franchise began in 2008, reviewers have found many angles to take in their criticism, be it the wooden performances, overt messages, overdone melodrama or the poor writing. Not excluded from these comments is the first movie, but do you want to know who else had major problems with Twilight? The director, Catherine Hardwicke.

"Every one of those scripts sucked,” Hardwicke recently said about her work for the vampire franchise. "Oh, Lord, did they suck." Vulture recently had the chance to speak with the filmmaker, and part of the discussion was about Twilight and her reflections since the movie came out. So why did she decide to take on the project if she thought the script written by Melissa Rosenberg was "horrible?"Said Hardwicke, the most influential element was the passion that fans have for the stories and the characters. "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.'" She then turned to the original books, written by Stephanie Meyer, and found what people were connecting to: the plight of being hopelessly in love. "I thought, That’s kind of a good challenge, to see if, as a filmmaker, I could make you feel that giddy, crazy ..."

She then gave up another tidbit that may come as a surprise to fans. While Rosenberg is the only credited screenwriter on the movie, part of Hardwicke's deal was that she could fix the script herself. The article says that Hardwicke went to Summit and said that she would only do the movie if she could do a complete rewrite. According to the site, the studio agreed. If this is true, why isn't Hardwicke credited as one of the screenwriters and why hasn't this come out until now? Surely Hardwicke and Rosenberg have previously mentioned in interviews how they worked together on the script. I really feel like we're only hearing one side of the story here.

Eric Eisenberg
Assistant Managing Editor

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.