While you’d think that there’d be more equity between male and female directors after more than a century of moviemaking as an industry, the field is still rather male-dominated. Sure, there’s been a push in the right direction, with more female directors behind game-changing movies like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie or Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, but it’s still sort of a phenomenon when it does happen. Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke recalled her experience on the 2008 hit, and why it didn’t give her hope for the future of Hollywood banking on women filmmakers.
Between casting Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in their iconic roles and finding a vision to thoughtfully adapt Stephenie Meyer’s books, director Catherine Hardwicke helped make 2008’s Twilight the box office hit that it became. However, her experience making the movie led her to discover the following about the world of Hollywood:
No, people aren’t going to hire more women directors. They’re not going to give you the next job and let you do something great. It was an earth-shattering reality right away.
In an interview with The Guardian, Catherine Hardwicke got honest about what happened when she helmed the first Twilight movie. The film ended up making $407.3 million worldwide for Summit Entertainment after an opening weekend of $69.6 million (against a reported budget of $37 million), per Box Office Mojo. It was among the Top 15 highest-grossing movies of that year.
While she’d heard of male directors with that kind of success being gifted “a car, or a three-picture deal, or [getting] to do basically whatever you want,” that’s not what happened next for her. As she continued:
I walked into a room with all these gifts, and everybody was congratulating the studio, and they gave me a box. I opened it up, and it was a mini cupcake.
And then just a month after Twilight’s release, Deadline reported Summit Entertainment had fired Hardwicke and was looking for a new director. The report suggested people thought she “was ‘difficult’ and ‘irrational’ during the making of Twilight,” and parted ways because she needed more “prep time to bring her vision of the film” to the big screen.
Ultimately, Summit Entertainment ended up hiring male directors for the rest of the franchise’s run, which Hardwicke has shown some disappointment over. But the director has also shared that she doesn’t regret leaving after Twilight because once the first movie became a franchise, “the expectations went through the roof” and “there [were] a zillion notes and committees and everything.” This was a stark contrast to the first movie where she said they didn’t micromanage her at all. Hardwicke previously shared that she thinks “they would have never hired a female director if they thought it was going to be a blockbuster”.
While Hardwicke had an unfortunate experience with Twilight, helming the film certainly allowed her to put her own stamp on a beloved property, and it’s widely thought of as the best of the Twilight movies thanks to her direction.