cinema

what the heck?

It’s Romeo and Juliet in the fangy world of vampires. When the beautiful Isabella Swann (Kristen Stewart) moves to grimy Forks to live with her father, she meets and falls head over stiletto heels for the intriguing Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) who just happens to be a vampire. Oh boo. We hate it when the love of your life turns out to be a blood sucking killer.

chitter chatter

We talked to the director Catherine Hardwicke and stars Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and guess what? They spoke back. Hoorah!

There must have been a lot of pressure making a film of a book that kids love so much…
Catherine: Yeah most of my life I have dreamed of beating James Bond, no but I read the books and read all of the stuff the fans wrote on the internet and could see there was so much passion involved with these books and people got so involved and swept away in this romance, so I wanted to see if I could bring this crazy, giddy feeling to the screen. They helped a lot.

Kristen: I knew how important the book was to a small group of people, I didn’t realise how wide spread they were. I think the film made it much more well known and luckily when we were making the movie we thought it was more of a cult film and I didn’t think that we were going to have to come to London and do press conferences.

How did you come to cast Robert and Kristen?
Catherine: I think you have to find the chemistry between the two lead characters, first I knew Kristen had to be Bella and then the search was on for the perfect Edward. We couldn’t find anybody and were really desperate. So many cute guys walked into the room, but they just looked like the cute guy next door. There was something about Rob that was special, tortured, interesting and strange. When they auditioned together and they did the kissing scene, that’s when we started to feel magic and electricity and thought this could be a movie.

How did you get over any sexual tension between the two of you?
Robert: I used to run into Kristen’s bedroom naked…no. I don’t know. It’s strange as all the romantic scenes are important.

What do you think the fascination is with Vampire’s that are good?
Robert: I think that is it a way that you can present violence that isn’t too bad. People think oh yeah he kills people because he’s a vampire, so humans are quite accepting of that. That’s probably the worst possible answer!

Kristen: Even thought the ‘act’ isn’t thrown into your face it’s still as abundant. Watching sexualised films still deals with wanting to have sex and really there’s no difference.

Catherine: Maybe it’s much more exciting with that anticipation, like how close can I get without killing her. Foreplay might be more exciting to people than the actual act.

Twilight is still very much a tween film but teenagers are still attracted to it. Do you feel happy as actors to be free of the kind of squeaky clean bondage?
Catherine: We never thought of it as a teen movie and in the US 45% of the audience were over 25. Even men like it now!

Kristen: You have one character that is 128 years old. It never started out as anything in particular and the studio gave us freedom and we didn’t have this frame we had to fit in to. It’s great not to have squeaky clean bondage!

Robert has your life changed a great deal?
Robert: I’m not really living in the US, it hasn’t changed that much, at least not in my head. Like little weird things like people following me around; this is a little strange. I still do pretty much the same stuff. It’s weird seeing my face everywhere, especially for someone who suffers with extreme paranoia. I got on a bus once with my face on it.

Have you been back to your home town recently?
Robert: It was really different when I was there and I guess it’s a bit la-de-dar now. I went to the theatre company because there were a lot of pretty girls there. When I started acting it was nice as I only started acting when all the good people left and I was the only one tall enough to play this part. I did learn quite a lot from it. The stuff I did then was probably the best stuff I did. It didn’t make me decide to be an actor but I probably wouldn’t have got into acting without it.

Kristen: I was really young when I started and I was always turned away when I was a kid. I started when I was nine years old and the movie ‘Speak’ actually inspired me to carry on further.

Catherine: I used to be a production designer and architect. The skills I learnt here were really helpful during the making of this film.



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