Twilight Saga author Stephenie Meyer was named #10 on The Hollywood Reporter’s 25 Most Powerful Authors List, for which she gave a great interview about writing, film, and how the reaction to all things Twilight is certainly “not normal”!
In particular, she talks about how the Twilight movie almost get made because the original script was so horrendously bad, Stephenie initially refused to sell the rights back to Summit after their temporary acquisition had expired:
THR: What was different about it?
SM: 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 (former president of worldwide production and acquisitions at Summit, now president of production at Lionsgate) 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.’
THR: What were the things you said they couldn’t change?
SM: Well I mean, I was in the middle of writing the series at that point in time so one of the big things is in that original script, Charlie got killed at the end. So, they couldn’t kill anyone that dies in the books unless you create a character to kill — which if you look back through the movies, you’ll see where they’ve created new people so that they can off somebody. Then there were things like, Bella cannot be a vampire until she does in the novels — cause that also happened [in the first script] — and just all these things that I felt like if they really wanted to go and do something completely different, they would look at it and say, ‘OK, nevermind.’ If they looked at this long list of things and said, ‘OK, we can do this,’ then I would figure, ‘OK, they’re not messing with me.’
They will be available in stores on September 25th.
