Catherine Hardwicke, director of the first Twilight movie, said the first scripts she received for the film sucked.
“Oh, Lord, did they suck,” she said in a recent interview with Vulture. During a dinner at the Sundance Film Festival, the heads of Summit Entertainment handed Hardwicke five scripts to read, each of which she dismissed as garbage. At the time, the director was best known for her film Thirteen and hadn’t heard much about the novels before that evening.
“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.”’
Hardwicke finally agreed to take on the project because she was allowed a full rewrite of the script and found herself drawn to Edward and Bella’s romance.
Hardwicke’s rewrite of the script did not win over many critics but ended up grossing $392 million worldwide.