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 think it's true that the more sanitized a person is, you can't really relate to that person.
Sometimes, a scene goes on too long and, with this being a suspense story and murder mystery that you're trying to discover through her heightened paranoia, you don't want scenes that take you on a tangent. Sometimes, you love those scenes, but you know that it's better not to be in the overall film. So, I'm not sad that they're not in the main movie, but I do think it's fun for people to get to watch them, if they want to.
I can go back to my very first movie, Thirteen, and think about that exact moment when I saw Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood do their chemistry read audition together. It just came alive. I was filming it with a video camera and I was like, "I know I can make a good movie now."
I like doing commentary. As a filmmaker and film student, I think it's really interesting to hear what a director did and how they figured out how to do things. I often like the technical commentaries myself.
Even after I had just done Twilight, which made $400 million at the worldwide box office, I could not get financing for three or four projects that I really loved and I thought people would love because they didn't fit some studio or investor's model of thinking, "This will definitely make money." It's a business and a film does potentially cost millions of dollars, and they have to think that they're going to get their money back somehow.
You can't really just think, "Oh, I want to make something that is going to appeal to every single person in the world." You have to just try to make a movie that comes from your heart.
People love to talk, so let them have fun talking, I think they have an interesting, wonderful connection, so you knowWhat does dating mean? I don't know. I couldn't say. People love to talk, so let them have fun talking.
When I read the 'Twilight' book, I didn't see it as fantasy. I saw it as a love story.
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.
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.
Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.
Every day I'm intrigued and sometimes outraged by things that no one talks about. Current is a chance to be heard, and send think-bombs out into the world.
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.