Twilight - SciFi Weekly: Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson Interview

At SciFi Weekly:

(Please follow the link for the complete interview.)



Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson breathe life into Stephenie Meyer's best-selling vampire romance Twilight


By Ian Spelling


Twilight is nearly upon us.

After all the buzz, following months of hype, the big-screen adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's best-selling novel Twilight will finally arrive in theaters on Nov. 21. The film sets the stage for a potentially long-running and lucrative film franchise, not to mention a cottage industry of clothes and posters and all the requisite tie-in products.

But that's getting a little too far ahead. First, audiences must bite into Twilight, in which the human teen Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) falls for Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a century-old vampire who stopped aging at 17 and whose clan drinks the blood of animals rather than humans. Their romance must withstand all sorts of challenges, as Edward must resist the temptation to turn Bella into a vamp and contends with the threat of other vampires who wish him dead and make no apologies for feasting on human blood.

Stewart is a fast-rising star whose credits include Catch That Kid, Zathura, The Messengers and Into the Wild, while Pattinson is a British actor best known for playing the doomed Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. During separate telephone conversations with SCI FI Weekly, Stewart and Pattinson talked about Twilight, their respective familiarity (or lack thereof) with the material and the pros and cons of Twilight exploding into a phenomenon.

A brief excerpt:

Kristen Stewart, did you know about the Meyer books before the film came about?

Stewart: I didn't. I'd been working. I didn't go to high school. I did home school for high school, and I stick to the Classic Literature section in Borders and I don't really venture from there. So I don't know what sort of rock I was living under, but, no, I hadn't heard of them.

... Robert Pattinson, you'd not read the books prior to becoming involved with Twilight, and you had no way of knowing that even as you shot the film it was emerging as a phenomenon. How strange has it been to be in the eye of the storm?

Pattinson: It gets stranger and stranger every day, at the moment. I was literally completely and utterly ignorant until the last day of shooting of what it really was. Even the budget didn't reflect that kind of phenomenon that it is now. It wasn't that kind of $200 million budget movie. It was a relatively low-budget thing. So I literally had no idea it would get this kind of attention.