‘It’s always a no,’ says Catherine Hardwicke of the struggle to get films made throughout her career as a director, from Twilight to Lords of Dogtown to her bold and visceral debut, teen psychological drama Thirteen, over 20 years ago.
Not that it was Hardwicke’s introduction to Hollywood: she’d already been an established production designer on movies including Three Kings, starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, and worked with Tom Cruise on Vanilla Sky.
But her mantra of working out how to ‘overcome the no’ has seen Hardwicke forge her own (award-winning) path in the industry as an indie filmmaker who also launched a $3billion franchise with Twilight thanks to her vision and understanding of Stephenie Meyer’s novel, which studio execs at Paramount – who had started to develop it – hadn’t even read.
‘It’s a f**king love story,’ is the simple way she puts it to me when we talk at Malta’s Mediterranean Film Festival, where Hardwick served as a jury member and delivered a rousing masterclass showing how she meticulously planned out each of her movies.
Hardwicke was also told ‘no f**king way’ about Thirteen when she initially pitched it, co-written with actress Nikki Reed, who also appeared in the Twilight films and was then the daughter of her former partner and still in middle school.
‘We’re not making that movie with a 13-year-old girl cutting herself, with the F-bomb. It’s going to be R-rated. Who’s the audience?” Everybody said no,’ the director recalls of the initial reception for the film – until Hardwicke made it on a shoestring budget, convinced Holly Hunter to come on board and Searchight purchased it at Sundance.
Thirteen went on to become a commercial success and a critical darling, being nominated for a slew of awards, including Golden Globes – while Hunter was nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar and Hardwicke won Sundance’s directing award.
Even following the phenomenon of Twilight, though, with all of the franchise’s films re-releasing in UK and US cinemas this month for the book’s 20th anniversary, the struggle was not over for Hardwicke.
‘Even afterwards – well, why can’t I get to direct this? “Oh, you were only successful because the book was successful.” Bulls**t. You and every other studio in town did not see that as a success. So anyway, what can you say?’ she shrugs.
Hardwicke describes being a female director in Hollywood as an ‘uphill battle’ – and she has the anecdotes and rejections to prove it – but she wears them lightly as a smiley and energetic force, but with a laidback air. I can’t imagine her ever losing her rag; she’s soft-spoken but passionate.
Her next project, Street Smart, is a project close to home, shot on the streets of Venice, California, and taking a look at homelessness.
She calls it ‘a movie that matters’ and adds: ‘I wanted to shine a light of the humanity of these kids that are creative, they just didn’t have a chance.’
Prior to Thirteen, Hardwicke had struggled to get any screenplays she’d written made into films.
‘The first one that got optioned would have cost like $8million – but they’re not gonna let a woman first-time director direct [an] $8m [film]. Then I wrote a cheaper one, $4m. “Oh no, you’re never going to get a $4m film.” She laughs. ‘I was like, Jesus Christ, I’ve worked with a lot of first-time directors that had much bigger budgets than that, but that wasn’t a popular time to be a female director. Then I wrote that one with Nikki, and that was so we could basically shoot it with all my furniture, clothes, my house, my car – everything’s in it. We just did it bare bones.’
And the ‘no’ was promptly overcome.
But when working on Twilight, Hardwicke still had issues with the budget, which ended up at $37m (Thirteen’s, in contrast, was $2m). The rights were expensive to Meyer’s book, ‘for good reason,’ says Hardwicke. (‘She deserves every penny she can get!’)
‘But I would have an idea, like let me have a cool dream sequence or I want to do this thing underwater… “We can’t afford it, it’s not going to make any more [money]”,’ she recalls being told.
The studio had estimated Twilight’s success as, in the absolute best-case scenario, equal to that of The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, released in 2005 and starring Blake Lively, America Ferrera and Alexis Bledel.
‘They said that’s a bigger book, that was all females with four leads, and that made $42m and that’s about all we’ll ever make. So they didn’t… they were not free flowing with the money,’ Hardwicke reveals.
Twilight went on to gross over $400m, with the subsequent four films based on Meyer’s sequel novels bringing the franchise’s total north of $3.3bn – that’s more than Guardians of the Galaxy and Indiana Jones.
‘It was kind of funny because if they knew the goal they had, they would never have hired a female director,’ Hardwicke suggests. ‘Because after me, none of them were women. The next four were all men, all the Hunger Games, five of them, all men – same studio – and then the Divergents, all men.’
Again, coming from someone else, this might sound bitter – but while Hardwicke has acknowledged these slights, they haven’t twisted her out of shape. She also wasn’t interested in coming back to helm New Moon afterwards – ‘but I still wish they would have hired other female directors’.
And she adds of this boom in YA fantasy adaptations: ‘That’s 12 more films that were directed by men that have now, on their track record, a big fat box office hit that [means] they have an easier time getting the next [project] instead of women.’
And why was it always men, does she think?
‘That was just default. You know, women are too emotional, women don’t know how to do action… Now we’re going to do more action, more VFX in those [so] we better get a dude!’
As Hardwicke has detailed before, the first script she saw for Twilight had Bella, famously to be played by Kristen Stewart, on a jet ski with the FBI chasing her, and the clumsy teenager was shown – from the very first scene – as a gifted athlete.
The filmmaker despaired at how wrong this all was.
‘They thought it had to be action – like male action. I was like, nope, that’s not why people are reading these books. They don’t want her whizzing around on a jet ski – it’s a f**king love story. And she’s supposed to be f**king awkward, she’s not a f**king track star.’
As a teenager at the time – and as someone who had actually read the books – I wholeheartedly agree.
‘The first movie would never have been the same if I hadn’t done it, or another woman.’
Hardwicke also understood the importance of the fanbase (‘I did read fan comments’) while also knowing that she needed to make it cinematic and be confident in her vision.
‘I thought, if I make it visual and sexy, and all those feelings that you have when you read the book, I think the fans will like it. So when I took that very famous scene out of the car [Bella’s ‘you’re impossibly fast and strong’ confrontation of Edward], I thought people were going to like my version better – and they did. I didn’t feel like I had to lock it precisely into the book.’
While Hardwicke has passionate lovers of her other films, Thirteen and Lord of Dogtown mainly, who like to approach her in the street to share their enthusiasm, she’s never disappointed if it’s a Twilight fan either – despite the struggles she faced making it, and despite it not being her own story.
‘I made a lot of original choice on that, so I feel like that’s my baby too, 100%,’ Hardwicke says. ‘But also, Rob [Pattinson] and Kristen met at my kitchen table, they kissed on my bed, you know? So it’s very personal – Kristen wore my clothes in some of the scenes. So as hard as directors work on movies, if you get one movie that people love, we got to be happy. And I am happy!’
She also has an extra affection for the little details that Twilight afficionados notice – ‘I can say the craziest things to fans, like who says “Burrito, my friend?” in the movie? And the deep fans, they know exactly who said it in what scene, what is on the wall. Everything is appreciated.’
Hardwicke has learned through fans what the new obsessions are too, from how many boiled eggs Emmett (Kellan Lutz) is carrying when he enters the school cafeteria, to people dressing up as ketchup bottles for a Twilight costume contest she judged.
‘I don’t know what that means. They said, “Oh, in the scene in the diner? Bella takes a ketchup bottle, and she can’t get the ketchup out, so she hits it twice and sets it down.” So that’s a new popular Twilight costume now. I’m like… it’s 20 seconds in the movie!’
But she also thinks it’s ‘awesome’, especially when she hears of the deeper, life-changing resonance the film and its passionate fandom has had for some.
‘The best thing is, honestly, when you meet people that did not have any friends: they were dyslexic, they were contemplating suicide or had attempted it – and then when Twilight came out they made a friend on the other side of the world that they could relate to, and then they learned how to read. That’s pretty cool, you know?’
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