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The Age
Friday December 19, 2008
SEVERAL months ago this column talked about a coming film about the love affair between a teenage girl and a moody vampire and suggested that if you valued your safety you would not get between the expectant adolescent audience and the queue to see the movie. Twilight, released locally last Thursday, has subsequently obtained blockbuster status internationally. It's something of a phenomenon in that it has achieved the holy grail of the film business: repeat business. Fans of Stephenie Meyer's novels about the chaste bond of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen are seeing the adaptation multiple times. Success, however, has merely heightened the stakes. Summit Entertainment, the production house behind Twilight, wants the second film in the series, New Moon, out by the end of November 2009. That's a suffocatingly tight schedule and it prompted the departure of director Catherine Hardwicke, who reportedly felt the sequel would suffer artistically from Summit's schedule (pre-production starts, oh, now, with shooting in March). Hardwicke's replacement is Chris Weitz, who has already felt the pressure of handling a hugely successful book when he did most of The Golden Compass - he quit and then came back. Knowing the ferociousness and size of Meyer's audience - the Twilight novels have sold more than 25million copies - Weitz pitched himself to fans in an open letter. He stressed his record of turning books into films (he co-directed the screen take of Nick Hornby's About a Boy), pledged devotion to the material and argued that a male director would have no problem empathising with Kristen Stewart's Bella. Meyer, a huge fan of About a Boy, gave Weitz her blessing online and reprinted his unofficial job application. "Torches and pitchforks are not going to be necessary," she wrote, calming her followers for now. -- CRAIG MATHIESON
© 2008 The Age
