Male Directors Might Get a Car for Making a Hit Movie—but Not Twilight’s Catherine Hardwicke

No matter how successful their films, female directors often aren’t as highly valued as their male counterparts—and that was even truer years ago. Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke learned this from bitter experience in 2008. That year, Hardwick brought Stephenie Meyer’s first novel to the screen, laying the foundation for an international phenomenon that would propel the acting duo of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson to superstar status—generating billions of dollars along the way.

Given the first film’s restricted budget, production company Summit Entertainment was hoping for a modest revenue of $30 million. But against all expectations, it instead topped the $400 million mark. The figure made the company brass’s heads spin. “I walked into a room with all these gifts, and everybody was congratulating the studio, and they gave me a box,” Hardwicke recently told The Guardian. “I opened it up, and it was a mini cupcake.”

In that mini cupcake, she saw the fate that so often befalls women in the film industry. When male directors steer a massive success like Twilight, said Hardwicke, they’re rewarded with “a car, or a three-picture deal, or [getting] to do basically whatever you want.” This was not the case for her. It was a disillusioning moment: “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.”

As a director of independent films, Hardwicke had been considered an audacious choice for the first Twilight. But her franchise adventure came to an end after that first installment. Given the success and popularity of the film, the studio wanted the second movie to be released quickly. But Hardwicke felt she did not have enough time to prepare a worthy sequel. In 2023 she told The Hollywood Reporter that she also “had the most inspiration and vision for the first book. Not so much the other ones.” Meyer’s initial novel describes an all-consuming adolescent passion. “Everybody wants to have that first love,” said Hardwicke. “That’s just undeniable. That’s just a head rush that makes you feel ecstatic. A love that’s like a drug…. And that’s what I was really trying to create in the movie.”

Instead, Chris Weitz directed the second Twilight film, New Moon. David Slade, who specializes in horror films, helmed Eclipse. The grand finale, Breaking Dawn, was released in two parts, both directed by Bill Condon (of Chicago and Beauty and the Beast). As the phenomenon grew, each fresh film outearned the previous one; in total, the five films, released between 2008 and 2012, raked in more than $1.3 billion.

Original story in VF France.