Hardwicke also was instrumental in casting Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson as the star-crossed Bella and Edward, and those choices were excellent, not only because they're skilled performers but also because they too threw themselves into their parts as if they were Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor doing "Camille" for George Cukor.
Stewart made an impression as Emile Hirsch's wannabe girlfriend in Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" because, Hardwicke has said, "I felt her yearning -- it was just palpable," and it is that quality that sets the tone for the entire film.
When "Twilight" opens, 17-year-old Bella, likely the palest girl in all of Phoenix, is moving to tiny Forks, Wash., an area (shot with a brooding beauty by Elliot Davis) that gets more rain than any other place in the country. She's going to live with her dad, Charlie (Billy Burke), the local chief of police, while her mother makes a new life with a new husband.
Even before the plot kicks in, Bella demonstrates the film's key attitude: As a teenager, she is, by definition, a deeply superior being, elevated far above the dross of the rest of life. When she thinks about her pathetic, clueless parents, should she think about them at all, it is with a kind of benign condescension. Really, what can you do with a mother who is "erratic, hare-brained" or a father of whom it is possible to say with a straight face, "One of the best things about Charlie is that he doesn't hover"?
Go ahead, have children.
Forks High School holds no charms for this elevated creature, until she sees the glamorous, self-confident Cullens, the four foster children of the town doctor. "They kind of keep to themselves," Bella is advised, but one smoldering exchange of looks with dishy Edward lets us know all that is about to end.
But not at once. Edward bolts out of the room when he has to sit next to Bella in biology, stays away from school entirely for a few days and then acts so friendly that Bella tells him, "Your mood swings are giving me whiplash." What gives?
As Bella ever so slowly finds out, Edward is acting the way he does because he is a vampire who is so powerfully attracted to her it scares him. "Your scent," he tells her in one of the franchise's signature lines, "is like a drug to me." Even though the Cullens, the vampire equivalent of vegetarians, kill animals, not humans, there is always the possibility that Edward will lose control and revert. Talk about keeping a little excitement in your relationship.
