People are nervous about their kids, and they're worried about the disintegration of families and the type of media culture they're living in.
— Catherine Hardwicke
Before 'Twilight' was greenlit, I had four projects at four studios. I worked super-hard on all of them, but 'Twilight' was greenlit first.
Sheep are just psychotic.
Zombies, mummies - they're disgusting and gross. You don't want to make out with a mummy. At least, I don't.
I don't like the sterility of the casting office.
I had a bunch of other projects that I worked really hard on after 'Twilight,' and the magic just didn't hit.
People love to talk, so let them have fun talking.
A great screenplay makes everybody step up to the bar and deliver.
Of course I went and got 'Breaking Dawn' at midnight the night it came out and read it instantly. I was like, 'Yes!'
Everything is so aggressively marketed at every age: if you're not in Baby Gap, you're not cool. That's how everybody's grown up, so they don't even know it could be another way.
The boys in junior high get really lewd and say outrageous stuff to the girls. If somebody yelled the stuff at me that I've heard at junior high schools I've visited, I'd be scared and humiliated.
I've worked on really big budget movies as a designer - 'Vanilla Sky,' 'Three Kings;' I've been in that world, and you can just see people get nervous.
You don't watch 'A Beautiful Mind' and say, 'This is how every mathematician is.'
I hope I haven't grown up. The cliche for all artists is that you don't want to lose that child inside. I think when you get sedentary and set in your ways, you can lose a lot of that spontaneity and creativity. I hope I'm holding on to that.
For a film, when you condense, you don't want to keep going back to the same setting over and over.
Obviously, 'Twilight' had its own alchemy that was amazing, just phenomenal. Nobody thought it was going to make any money. Paramount wouldn't make the movie. Fox wouldn't make it. Nobody wanted to do it.
Starting with 'Thirteen,' my known technique is to cast the lead, then find someone with whom they have incredible chemistry.
When you're in a creative flow with somebody - and I had this back in architecture school - you're just so passionate about what you're doing, and if that other person is just as passionate, you'll be madly in love with them. It's just that thrill of creating.
Stephenie Meyer said she's ready to move on from 'Twilight,' but you never know.
Some directors I worked with didn't even know how to read a blueprint, understand a plan.
I had always liked, well, who didn't love Lestat and fall in love with 'Interview with the Vampire,' and 'Nosferatu,' and Coppola's 'Dracula' with the awesome costumes? So I loved all that.
As a director, we work ridiculously hard on every detail, and we do everything to the billionth degree, and mostly people notice nothing.
You have a big success, and it's still not easy to make a movie.
After 'Inconvenient Truth,' we hit a tipping point where almost everybody in America cares about the environment.
Actually, yeah, I am an artist. I draw.
You're fearless when you're a kid.
If you decide to tell a kid that looks don't matter, she can prove you wrong every day. Because they see it everywhere. That is age-old, going back to the Greeks, but now we're bombarded nonstop.
Being in construction my whole life - I was trained as an architect - I always had to work with guys. And I always did my homework and then challenged them to figure it out faster than me. They don't want to be shown up by a woman.
Kids have to experiment a little or figure out where they belong.
There are some moments where you're so depressed, you cannot see the way, and you're like, 'Whatever. Bite me.' I think all directors feel that way sometimes.
We can learn from everybody.
I think at any age, you can stay open and creative and excited.
I don't like to watch a movie where it's just kind of like all one note, dee-dee-dee-dee. I want spikes of adrenaline and highs and lows and exciting tension release.
As a director, you've got to have quite a few projects going because you never know which one will actually come together with the financing and get the green light.
Can you have it all, as a woman? Can you be a creative artist and have stability and a home life? How much can you stretch yourself as an artist?
I have a bunch of movies that are, like, two minutes from being green-lit, or that they've maybe even told me are green-lit. But I never believe it until I see the money.
As you study vampire legend throughout history, it goes back to almost every culture. South Africa, Indonesia, crazy places have that legend and that idea of immortality.
As the director, you cannot control what people do after hours or in their trailers or on break. Why would you want to? But you can't.
I could go my whole life and say, 'I'm not going to do anything with a love triangle,' but whenever you have a romance, there has to be some obstacle, and even the dumbest romantic comedies have a love triangle or something.
What does 'dating' mean? I don't know. I couldn't say.
How do you fight when you're trying to pull somebody's arms off or twist their head off? That makes for a different kind of fight.
There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out.
I'm immature.
The script for 'Thirteen' is tight, and not because of the now-famous six day writing spree, but more because it started out as 15 pages longer.
I've had meetings where there were literally, like, 12 angry men in a room and me. And even when everyone shot me down, I somehow dug in one more time.
So many images are saying to girls, 'Show a lot of skin and look gorgeous and sexy.'
I'll literally pay three Hollywood readers who don't know me to read my scripts under the radar and give cold comments. And at the early screenings of my movies, I'll hand out questionnaires that can be filled out anonymously so people can be brutally honest because, to your face, they won't be.
I respect all the teenagers I work with and feel that everything they have to say is just as valuable as anything I have to say.
Every filmmaker's just going to keep trying to make it the best you can make it: make it as potent and interesting and entertaining and exciting and tough and sexy as you can.
I try to learn on each project, try to really feel what the characters are feeling.
