Bill Zwecker of the Chicago Sun-Times says that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart are very upset that Catherine Hardwicke will not be the director of the next installment in the Twilight book-to-movies project.
The genesis of the actors' anger comes from a feeling the film studio -- Summit Entertainment -- is far too eager to rush out the second ''Twilight'' flick, without prepping for it properly, as Stewart and Pattinson believed Hardwicke would do.
Summit Entertainment and director Catherine Hardwicke jointly announced today that the filmmaker will not be directing the next installment in the newly minted TWILIGHT film franchise. Summit’s targeted end of 2009 or early 2010 release of the film, NEW MOON, does not work with Ms. Hardwicke’s required prep time to bring her vision of the film to the big screen. Thus as has been done before with many successful film franchises, the studio will employ a new director for NEW MOON.
“I am sorry that due to timing I will not have the opportunity to direct NEW MOON,” said Hardwicke. “Directing TWILIGHT has been one of the great experiences of my life, and I am grateful to the fans for their passionate support of the film. I wish everyone at Summit the best with the sequel– it is a great story.”
“Catherine did an incredible job in helping us to launch the TWILIGHT franchise and we thank her for all of her efforts and we very much hope to work with her on future Summit projects,” said Erik Feig, Summit’s President of Production. “We as a studio have a mandate to bring the next installment in the franchise to the big screen in a timely fashion so that fans can get more of Edward, Bella and all of the characters that Stephenie Meyer has created. We are able to pursue an aggressive time frame as we have the luxury of only adapting the novels into screenplays as opposed to having to create a storyline from scratch.”
Twilight movie director, Catherine Hardwicke, talks at MTV.com about New Moon movie and her commitment to making it even better than Twilight!
I want to do ['New Moon'] better than we did 'Twilight,' and do it really cool. I definitely don't want to do it as something just tossed off, like a 'Saw II' or something like that. We want to be sure that it's really going to be great and that everyone's on the same page.
She also revealed that she's had some cool new ideas in mind for the New Moon special effects:
I was doing a lot of research on wolves before [filming 'Twilight'], and we had a scene with the wolves in it ... so we're already thinking a little bit about [Jacob's transformation into a wolf]. Then there's the stunts, and there's Italy. It's all cooking in the brain.
