February 12, 2012

Melissa Rosenberg Takes a Bite Out of Twilight

by Andrew Gnerre | Published November 14, 2008

With Twilight, the series of teen-lit vampire romance novels that have courted 13-year-old girls and their mothers more heroically than Miley Cyrus ever could, there are two factions: The uninitiated and the over-initiated. But come November 21, only the latter bloc will remain as the world will tremble and panic before ultimately giving way to the all-encompassing, unremitting and overwhelming might of Stephenie Meyer’s one fantasy franchise to rule them all. (In other words: That’s the day the first novel’s movie adaptation, directed by Catherine Hardwicke and starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, will be released in the United States.)

A few weeks before the chaos reached its tipping point, MM got a chance to speak with screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, who was unaware of Twilight altogether (blasphemous, we know) when she was offered the job of adapting the novel for the screen. A veteran writer and producer for television, most recently for Showtime’s manically brilliant “Dexter,” Rosenberg spoke about the pressures of adapting such a scared text and how she found inspiration for this forbidden love story between a vampire and mortal in Ledger and Gyllenhaal’s cowboys.

Andrew Gnerre (MM): So how did you get involved with Twilight?

Melissa Rosenberg (MR): Well, I had written Step-Up for Summit [Entertainment] so I had a really great relationship with those guys, I had a really great experience on that film. I wasn’t available to do Step-up 2 so I thought, ‘Oh gosh, ruined my relationship with them. I had to pass on Step-up 2.’ And then like eight months later Erik Feig at Summit called and asked, “Hey, how do you feel about teens and vampires?” And I was just immediately, ‘I love teens and vampires!’ And I do; I’m a huge fan of the genre. I think “Buffy” was one of the great television series and I was a big fan of Joss Whedon so I was on board before I’d even knew what the story was. Then he mentioned that the books had quite a fan base and I thought, ‘Oh yeah. Ok great.’

MM: Bit of an understatement.

MR: Understatement of the year! But I wasn’t really aware of it [the fanbase] as I started writing.

MM: So before they asked you, had you even heard of it?

MR: I had not, no.

MM: That’s an interesting thing about this whole phenomenon. There are two camps: The people who are just absolutely infatuated and everyone else who has never even heard about it.

MR: I had not heard about it but of course once I read them I became infatuated. I think it has something to do with your age and your relationship with children. If you’re a teenage girl you’ve heard of it. If you’re a mother of a teenage girl then you’ve heard of it. If you’re an adult woman or person walking around, you may not have, but I think that by now everyone has heard of it. But back a year ago that was less the case and I had not.

MM: So then how was it starting out, did they give you free reign or did you have a lot of people looking over your shoulder?

MR: Well the great thing about working with Summit is that they’re a small studio; it’s not one of the majors where you have 20 people needing to justify their job. You’ve got a really tight, talented group of people. It was like three executives over at Summit and three producers and then Catherine. I had the director on board before I started writing, Catherine, and she was really the person I worked most closely.

I didn’t experience limitations, more of a blessing that we really needed to adhere to the book. We needed to do the book; we needed to adapt the book. Summit had gotten this book in turn around; it had been at Paramount. They actually had a complete draft or several drafts of the script which when Stephanie read through that script she had said, “Great script--has nothing to do with the book.”

And she was rightly so upset about that and was almost not going auction it off to anyone else. Then Summit said “We’d like to make the book.” And as I read the book I said to myself, ‘Why would you make anything other than, I mean why would you…you have an embarrassment of riches in the book and the challenge is not to come up with something completely different; the challenge is to condense what’s there and make it visual and externalize. Why would you invent a whole new story? It’s just too rich a story to veer away from.