Catherine Hardwicke: 'Twilight' Scripts Initially 'Sucked'

Grab your pitchforks, Twi-hards! In a recent interview with Vulture, Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the first "Twilight" movie, had some unkind words about the film's initial script.

At a Sundance dinner, [Hardwicke] had been seated next to the heads of Summit Entertainment, who handed her five scripts and asked her to read them. "Every one of those scripts sucked," she says. "Oh, Lord, did they suck."

At the time, Hardwicke was best known for the critically acclaimed "thirteen," which she wrote and directed. So, if she really thought the scripts for "Twilight" were so horrible, why did Catherine eventually take the gig? Besides being allowed to do a complete rewrite, she was attracted to romance between Bella and Edward.

"I thought the script was horrible, but then I looked it up on the Internet and I thought, Okay, it's based on a book and people tend to like it. There's gotta be something there. So I read the book and I thought it captured that feeling of being madly in love. And I thought, That's kind of a good challenge, to see if, as a filmmaker, I could make you feel that giddy, crazy."

Although the rewrite Hardwicke asked for did little to sway the critical opinion of the film, it certainly helped the finished product in some eyes. "Catherine Hardwicke has a genius for getting inside the brain and is so in touch with what it's like to be a teenage girl," Bill Condon, who directed "Breaking Dawn," told Moviefone last fall. "I couldn't imagine doing that first 'Twilight.'"

Despite the "horrible" initial script, the first "Twilight" went on to gross $392 million worldwide.

You can read the entire interview with Hardwicke over on Vulture.

[via Vulture]