Trailer
Plot summary
Bella Swan leaves Phoenix, Arizona, for Forks, a small town on Washington's Olympic Peninsula where her father, Charlie, is the police chief. Her mother, Renée, has remarried and remains in Arizona with Phil, a minor league baseball player. In Forks, Bella renews a childhood acquaintance with Jacob Black, who lives on the nearby Quileute reservation, and at school she is drawn to the aloof Cullen siblings. Edward Cullen, seated beside her in biology, seems repulsed by her. When a van nearly crushes her in the school parking lot, Edward crosses more than thirty feet in an instant to stop it with one hand, then refuses to explain and warns her against befriending him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Twilight (2008)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- MTV Films' first crack at Twilight was a drastic rewrite: Bella was a long-distance runner who cursed, used shotguns against the vampires who killed her father, became a vampire herself and rode a jet ski while chased by the FBI. Stephenie Meyer called it frightening that the script had nothing to do with her book.
- Catherine Hardwicke did not initially choose Robert Pattinson for Edward Cullen: he arrived at her Venice home for a test looking, by her account, "kind of wild-looking", with scraggly black dyed hair and a stain on his shirt. He won the part after an audition in which he kissed Kristen Stewart on Hardwicke's bed and fell out of it.
- Stephenie Meyer was invited to draw up a written list of things the film could not change, such as giving the vampires fangs or killing characters who survive in the book, and the studio agreed in her contract to follow it.
- Lily Collins and Jennifer Lawrence both screen tested for Bella Swan, while Frances Bean Cobain turned down the chance to audition and Michelle Trachtenberg turned the part down over scheduling.
- The ballet-studio fight between Cam Gigandet and Robert Pattinson was shot in the first week with heavy wire work, and used chicken and honey as substitutes for flesh; Gigandet added mixed martial arts moves.
- The actors playing vampires avoided sunlight to look pale and wore contact lenses, gold because the Cullens have golden eyes, and black "when we're hungry," as Carlisle's Peter Facinelli explained.
- Twilight's opening weekend gross was the highest ever of any female-directed film, surpassing the previous record held by Deep Impact (1998).
