The Hollywood Reporter has a fantastic new interview with Twilight Saga author Stephenie Meyer, and in it, she gave quite a few new details about her thoughts on the series at its close.
One of the subjects up for discussion was that original draft of the script for Twilight. As she explained recently on Jimmy Kimmel Live, it was way off-base and almost made it so the movie didn't happen.
According to Meyer, the only reason it did end up going through was a little begging on the part of film studio Summit Entertainment.
"We got lucky where with Catherine Hardwicke, she really wanted to make it like the book. There was an original script before we were with Summit that was so completely bizarrely different," she explained. "FBI, boat chases, night vision goggles, Bella with a gun. Yeah, it was crazy. At the time -- once you give away your rights you can’t object to the changes. It was just kind of like, ‘ahh!’ And then they didn’t make it and they let the rights come back, and it was like, ‘OK, I’m taking this home and no one’s ever touching it again.’ Then Erik Feig called and said, ‘Please we’ll do anything. We really want to make your story.’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that before.’ And he’s like, ‘No, no,’ and he let me come up with a rider where I wrote all these things that couldn’t change. They were like, ‘Yes, we’ll do it’ and I was like, ‘Oh, OK, well then I guess you really do want to make it as it is. That’s cool.’"
As for some specifics on Twilight, Meyer said that Ashley Greene as Alice Cullen is the closest to her imagination and that originally someone else was supposed to portray Emmett Cullen before Kellan Lutz got the part, and she had to put the kibosh on that. Also, in her mind Breaking Dawn and New Moon were the hardest to adapt (no surprise there), and the reason she didn't pen the Twilight screenplay adaptation herself is, "It’s like cutting off your fingers every time you lose a word. I know that I can’t do that, and I’m happy to have someone come in who can be a little bit more distanced from it."
Interestingly, Meyer's affiliation with the casting process became more and more involved as the Saga went on. As she explained it, "With Twilight, I wasn’t involved at all with the casting in the original. They kept me in the loop, which was great. They’d be like, ‘Hey Kristen Stewart’s gonna do it’ and I was like, ‘Really? Awesome.” With the second one I got a little bit more involved, by the third one I was very involved, and then with the last one I was a producer. That was great because I got to see all of the auditions."
As for the next series on the agenda, The Host, Stephenie Meyer mentioned that it's been "really tough" for her to write the sequel while the first movie was in production this year.
"I mean, it’s such a different kind of creative expenditure. When you’re working on the movies, it’s very collaborative, there’s a lot of other people involved, and you sort of put in your two cents where you can and consult a bit. When you’re writing, it’s all you all the time and it is interesting to have the actors in the back of my head and think, ‘Anything that I write down, they may have to do.’It’s a little bit more challenging to have that distraction," she explained, adding that she's "not very far" into the draft for book two but that the producers would "like to keep going" with adapting the full series. "I think the biggest hold up is the fact that I’m writing so slow," she admitted.
