Sofia Coppola turned down the chance to direct the final ‘Twilight’ movie, calling it “Too weird”
The iconic screenwriter and director Sofia Coppola turned down the chance to make the final movie in the Twilight franchise, calling the concept “too weird”.
A beloved franchise of the late 2000s and early ’10s, Twilight was a tween sensation, telling the story of a young student who falls in love with her mysterious new classmate, a 108-year-old vampire. Attracting fans from across the world, largely due to its good-looking cast members, which included Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and Taylor Lautner, the Twilight series produced five movies from 2008-2012.
With different directors behind each instalment, Bill Condon was chosen to adapt the final book, Breaking Dawn, into two parts. Yet, it seems he wasn’t the studio’s first choice, with Coppola having a meeting with the production team.
In a conversation with Rolling Stone, Coppola revealed: “We had one meeting, and it never went anywhere…I thought the whole imprinting-werewolf thing was weird. The baby. Too weird! But part of the earlier Twilight could be done in an interesting way. I thought it’d be fun to do a teen vampire romance, but the last one gets really far out”.
This wasn’t the only high-profile movie that Coppola came close to helming either, with the director speaking in the same interview about when she almost joined a live-action version of The Little Mermaid for Universal Studios.
“I was in a boardroom and some development guy said, ‘What’s gonna get the 35-year-old man in the audience?’ And I just didn’t know what to say,” Coppola said regarding the unmade project, “I just was not in my element. I feel like I was naive, and then I felt a lot like the character in the story, trying to do something out of my element, and it was a funny parallel of the story for me”.
Coppola’s Priscilla recently screened at the London Film Festival, with Far Out’s four-star review reading: “As is often the case with Coppola’s films, Priscilla once again puts forth the idea that wealth and aspiration will always play second fiddle to what human beings genuinely want (regardless of their levels of affluence). All Priscilla wanted was to be loved and cared for, to live her own life in partnership with her husband, and what she got was a drug-addicted, self-obsessed, cultural phenomenon – a phenomenon that she would never entirely be able to remove herself from”.
Take a look at the trailer below.
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