“Twilight” Director Says Stephanie Meyer Was Against Diversity

November 9, 2018 / Posted by:

Those Twilight films are thankfully no longer extremely popular and we no longer are exposed to watching people with questionable mental stability freak the fuck out over trailers or the actor’s personal lives or whatever. But, the 10-year anniversary of the first film is coming up, and so the director of the movie, Catherine Hardwicke, spoke with The Daily Beast about making the first movie and spilled some tea about the creation of the film. Namely: that it could have been more diverse.

According to Catherine Hardwicke, she tried her damndest to make Twilight have a more diverse cast of characters among all the shades of mayonnaise. “I wanted a lot more of the cast to be diverse,” she said, revealing that the author of the books, Stephanie Meyer, was against it.

“[Stephanie] had not really written it that way… So she probably just didn’t see the world that way. And I was like oh my God, I want the vampires, I want them all—Alice, I wanted her to be Japanese! I had all these ideas. And she just could not accept the Cullens to be more diverse, because she had really seen them in her mind, she knew who each character was representing in a way, a personal friend or a relative or something… She said, ‘I wrote that they had this pale glistening skin!'”

Yeah, Catherine, Stephanie had seen all the characters in her mind when she took the twenty minutes to write those books and all of them were white, okay honey? Pale glistening skin! Vampires, like Santa Claus, are white.

Eventually Catherine convinced Stephanie to use a Kenyan-American actor to play “one of the scary antagonistic vampires,” so we’re all good here. And Stephanie also allowed for Bella’s friends (who barely get any screen time) to also be more diverse:

“The only reason that came through was he was described as having olive skin. And I said, there are black olives out there! Then she was open to the students in [Bella’s] peer group being other ethnicities, so we got Christian Serratos and Justin Chon, so we were able to open it up a little bit.”

Bare minimum ethnic diversity for the WIN! Can you imagine having to pitch a black actor through the use of an olive metaphor? Wow. Maybe if it was mentioned in the book that Alice liked Green Dragon rolls you would have had better luck with getting her to be Japanese? “In this scene Alice is eating a dumpling, so we could riff off that and cast an Asian girl?” Try that next time! Progress!

Pic: Wenn.com

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