Catherine Hardwicke
Catherine Hardwicke
Catherine HardwickeOctober 21, 1955) is an American film director, production designer and screenwriter. Her works include the Academy Award-nominated independent film Thirteen, which she co-wrote with Nikki Reed, the film's co-star, the Biblically-themed The Nativity Story, the vampire film Twilight, the werewolf film Red Riding Hood, and the classic skateboarding film Lords of Dogtown. The opening weekend of Twilight was the biggest opening ever for a female director...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth21 October 1955
CityCameron, TX
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Now there are three guys who directed "Twilight" films that had a gross of a gazillion dollars. All those "Hunger Games" guys, the "Divergent" guys. All those people. When they are looking for the next big director, they see they have a track record. So there's 20 people that spun off of "Twilight" that have more qualifications than any woman.
People are more likely to help other people who look exactly like them. They will hang out at the bar and on the golf course with them.
As a director, you try to do things that are going to touch the human experience somehow, and emotions that mean something to people. You search for those projects and you hope to realize the potential in a project.
I thought, "If I can make you feel what it's like for that first super-passionate love, other people might like that too," and, of course, they did.
People love to talk, so let them have fun talking,
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.
As a director, we work ridiculously hard on every detail, and we do everything to the billionth degree, and mostly people notice nothing.
Back in medieval times, Victorian repression hadn't come in yet. People were bawdy and wild and more in touch with their true natures. If you look at the Bosch paintings or Bruegel, you see, when people are dancing, they're totally cutting loose.
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.
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.
When I read the 'Twilight' book, I didn't see it as fantasy. I saw it as a love story.
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.
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.