Everything
In life, some of the greatest losses we mourn are the things that never happened. And as we’ve come to find out, we missed out on something that could’ve changed the course of history: Sofia Coppola’s Twilight.
That’s right, the lauded director almost made a Coppola girl out of Kristen Stewart‘s Bella Swan.
Speaking to Rolling Stone about her upcoming release Priscilla, Coppola, who is known for cult films like Lost in Translation, The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette, revealed that she was in the running to helm the Twilight saga.
“We had one meeting…[but] it never went anywhere,” she explained, adding that she thought “it’d be fun to do a teen-vampire romance.”
What compelled her to turn it down? As many would agree, the plot of Stephenie Meyer‘s bestselling series started off strong—who doesn’t love a story of star-crossed lovers with an 87-year age gap?—but got a little murky towards the end. The director noted that while “the earlier Twilight” could have been reimagined in “an interesting way”, the franchise’s ending lost her.
“I thought the whole imprinting/werewolf thing was weird,” she says, referring to the plot twist that Jacob, a teenage werewolf, falls in love with Renesmee, Bella and Edward’s vampire/human hybrid child. “Too weird,” she commented, “The last [film] gets really far out.” A sentiment we really can’t argue with, especially when you picture that cursed CGI baby that even terrorised the actors on set—a budget of over $200 million AUD, and that’s the best they could do? OK. Hell, even the films’ leading man, Robert Pattinson, has repeatedly roasted the franchise.
In an interview with reporter Chris Van Vilet, Pattinson even admitted that he also struggled to process the story. “There’s a lot of stuff in the Twilight world that doesn’t make sense,” he said, noting the vampire’s student status as particularly odd. “It’s like, why are they still going to high school? They’re a hundred years old.”
Although, it is tempting to imagine a version of Twilight through the nostalgic lens of a Sofia Coppola film, and Bella Swan is exactly the kind of misunderstood heroine coming-of-age that the director loves to portray. In another life, perhaps.
