“Twilight” director Catherine Hardwicke reveals behind-the-scenes film secrets

“It had to be magic,” Hardwicke says of turning the YA novel into a major motion picture.

You better hold on tight, spider monkey!

Fifteen years ago, director Catherine Hardwicke took on the difficult task of adapting Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, a story about a clumsy 17-year-old human falling in love with a Volvo-driving 100-year-old vampire, for the screen. Hardwicke says, “You have to remember Twilight wasn’t Twilight at that time. It wasn’t like we were doing a Marvel movie. Nobody even thought it was going to be particularly successful.” Not even with Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in the lead roles.

From using melted cheese for skin to Stewart pitching “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” by Iron & Wine for that prom scene, Hardwicke takes us behind the scenes of the making of the first film.

When Edward Met Bella

Keeping the Biology class scenes true to the book was one of the most important tasks when it came to adapting Twilight. Hardwicke says she trusted Stephanie Meyer to write the dialogue for Edward and Bella’s first true interaction in order to “keep that very accurate.”

“That’s such a memorable scene in the book," Hardwicke says. "This is the first moment that any kind of contact is made so I wanted enough time to film that so I would have great shots of her and him, and to be able to play with the camera a little bit so we could feel how those two are connected. You don’t want to just do single coverage. You have to find a more lyrical way to tell this story.”

This was the moment where she wanted audiences to start asking, “When are they going to get together?” “[It] was more exciting to see that than if you just see two people slam into each other and start kissing. That misses all that beautiful anticipation that the book has,” explains Hardwicke. 

"Skin of a Killer"

Edward telling Bella the truth happened a little differently in the book as compared to the film, and that was a change Hardwicke knew she wanted to make right off the bat. Rather than the vampire confession happening in the front seat of Edward’s car like in the novel, Hardwicke brought the conversation to the outdoors. Hardwicke says the forest location for the vampire reveal was in her original pitch deck because she wanted the audience to feel “intoxicated” by the location to reflect what was happening in the scene. “I love that location with the rocks and the moss. We had another location, it got snowed in so we couldn’t go there. At the last minute, I had to go find something else. That’s right near a restaurant. It’s in the back of the restaurant, by a parking lot,” reveals Hardwicke. “I go there and I’m walking around [thinking] ‘I can’t look that way cause it’s a freaking parking lot, but can I make it work just looking like this?’ I took the two stand-ins [for Pattinson and Stewart] and I was like, ‘We’re just going to run around in here and try to figure out if I can shoot this.’” And over time Hardwicke quickly realized that it was possible to turn this into the perfect forest location she needed for the pivotal scene. “We really made it our own little world.”

But creating Edward's “skin of a killer” wasn't an easy task. Hardwicke had to be very particular about when she would show Edward in the sun. “In the book, he’s in the meadow and there’s quite a long scene of dialogue where he was just sparkling the whole time. We could not afford that," Hardwicke says. "We could only afford a couple of sparkling shots. I actually thought that was more effective though anyway. Just to see a taste."

Vampire Baseball

What would Twilight be without that iconic baseball scene?

“That was like our team bonding. Cam Gigandet and Jackson Rathbone were already pros, but the rest of us were [not]. So we had our own baseball training which was really cool,” Hardwicke recounts.

“I remember thinking, on the page, ‘How are we going to make this look cool? How is this not going to be just B-movie camp?’” Jackson Rathbone, who plays Jasper Cullen, previously admitted. “But luckily we were in the hands of an incredible cinematographer — and of course Catherine Hardwicke directed the hell out of it.”

“It took multiple days to film it," Hardwicke says. "We got rained out. We had to run to cover sets in the middle [of it]. It was absolutely nuts but the ideas were fun to brainstorm with baseball players and think of how vampires would play,” says Hardwicke. “Ashley [Greene] had to learn how to pitch. Nikki [Reed] had to learn how to slide into the base.”

Kellan Lutz, who portrays Emmett Cullen, previously told EW that “during the baseball scene, [Hardwicke] had us acting like cats and bears and animals, so we could give life to these vampires who are the undead and don’t have much going on.”

“That was just fun. We just had fun. That was one of the dreams of my life, to shoot that scene,” says Hardwicke.

The one thing that Rathbone remembers most was his “little baseball bat trick that I did, that was just me improvising, but it became kind of a thing with the Twilight Jasper fans,” the actor previously said. “A lot of people thought it was CGI and I’ve had to prove it many, many times that I can do it in real life.”

Another aspect of the vampire baseball scene that fans have latched onto is the use of “Supermassive Black Hole” by Muse. “Well Stephanie [Meyer] mentioned that she was listening to Muse the whole time she was writing the book and that was her soundtrack so I knew we had to use them in some way,” the director says. “I can’t imagine it with any other song. I’m sure most people when they hear that song, that [scene] is the first thing they think about.”

Twilight fans can also thank Hardwicke for that moment where Rosalie (Nikki Reed) calls Emmett (Kellen Lutz) her “monkey man.” “When you get in the zone, you can’t help but be creative as a director.” says Hardwicke. The director had a habit of shouting out lines for the cast to use in the scene and that one stuck.

Fun fact: Hardwicke also came up with “You better hold on tight, spider monkey!” “I realized that sometimes it’s just really hard to act when you don’t have any lines. We have a lot where people are just looking at each other and there’s a lot of eye contact so I thought, ‘I need to come up with some more lines,’” she says. “So I wrote like 10 lines and that was one of them. I give it to Rob and say, ‘If you feel like it, you can say one of these lines.’ And he read them all and he goes ‘Hold on tight, spider monkey!’”

Edward vs. James

One might think that the fight scene between Edward and James (Cam Gigandet) would be something you work up to, but Hardwicke had a different approach. She made that the first scene the cast and crew shot. “I had done Lords of Dogtown and I had shot the biggest, most difficult scene first because I wanted to get it over with,” she explains. “Otherwise if you don’t shoot those big scenes first, you just worry about them. It’s like a weight hanging over your head the whole time.

“That was such a complicated scene," she continues. "It was pretty hectic because it was all mirrors. Me and the camera person would [accidentally] be in the shot and we didn’t have a VFX budget on that film so we had to find a way around that."

With a limited budget, Hardwicke was faced with “trying every trick in the book.” For example, during that fight scene the crew ended up using melting string cheese for James’ skin. If you look closely in the scene where Edward bites into James’ neck, you might be able to see Pattinson spit the string cheese out onto the floor.

Adding to the emotion in the scene was Robert Pattinson’s “Let Me Sign” playing in the background as Bella “dies”  Pattinson lending his voice to the soundtrack was unplanned. “Nikki Reed told me one day, she goes, ‘Rob has a very striking voice. Like an old blues singer. You wouldn’t even believe it’s Rob,’” Hardwicke says. Once Reed showed Hardwicke a video of Rob singing, the director asked if they could use some of his songs in the film. In the beginning, Pattinson was adamant on none of his songs being used, but Hardwicke didn't give up. Eventually, she convinced Pattinson to re-record in the closet of a friend’s home in Venice, CA. “He just started playing and we recorded it. I took that recording and put it in the movie. I thought it worked and raised the [scene] to a whole other level. It’s just so soulful and gut-wrenching.”

Forks High School Prom

Toward the end of the film, Bella and Edward get a rare moment of piece as they attend prom and get a small glimpse at a “normal life.” Finding the perfect song for the final shots of the film was a tricky task. “We were in the hotel doing rehearsals the week before shooting and I’m like, ‘Let’s practice the prom scene,'" Hardwicke says. "I had picked out a few songs that the music supervisor gave me and then Kristen [Stewart] goes, ‘How about this one?’ She put [“Flightless Bird, American Mouth” by Iron & Wine] on and I was transported instantly. So she and Rob [Pattinson] started dancing to it and I could see it, feel it. I knew that was it.”

Little did Stewart know that the song would become one of Twilight’s unofficial anthems, being used again during Bella and Edward’s vows in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2.

End Credits

Hardwicke was at a Radiohead concert at the Hollywood Bowl when the idea for the end credits hit her. As soon as heard “15 Steps” live, she knew it had to be the song playing at the end of the film. In that moment, she also decided to put “the end credits in black and white [and show] all the actors so that you could see their names, cause nobody was known. I thought, ‘Let me give them their due so people will know.’ Everybody had their footage with their name on it,” she says.

When it came to finding footage for every actor in the end-credits scene, Harwicke looked to deleted scenes and shots that hadn't been used in the film. “Sometimes I’d be on the set and I’d think, ‘Oh my God. We’re in this beautiful forest.’ I’d see Kristen and Rob just laying there and I’d say to the cameraman, ‘It’s not a scene or anything, but just walk up and let’s film it. Let’s just get beautiful moments. That’s what’s really fun in a movie is if you can have two seconds on a set where you’re not just running around and have a little moment to make something magical or create something special.”

Fifteen years later, Hardwicke sums up her experience by saying, "It’s pretty awesome to be a part of something that in some ways changed people’s lives and in a profound way.”

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