Time Magazine has posted a new interview with Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke. Here is a excerpt:

TIME: You directed Nativity Story and Twilight, based on very popular books. So which is a bigger — Twilight or the Bible?

Hardwicke: (laughing) Probably Twilight. I know it seems strange, but at the time it didn’t seem that big at all. We knew there was a passionate group of people that loved it. When I took it on it was much, much smaller. At the time [Summit execs] were saying, There might just be 400 girls in Salt Lake City blogging about this — we don’t know how big this audience actually is.

A big ingredient of the success are the lead actors. Talk about casting Robert Pattinson.

The Edward character, I had no idea who that was going to be. For him, the bar is so high. He had to be drop-dead gorgeous and a great actor. I met all of these guys I felt were quite good. [But] they didn’t seem to have that special other quality that they were alive for 105 years and they had gone through all the things that Edward had gone through.

When I talked to [Pattinson] on the phone in London, at the time he was — as he likes to say — unemployable. He was in between gigs and broke. He took the risk to fly over on his own dime and stay on his agent’s couch. She called and said, Be honest, do you really not have your Edward? I don’t want to bring him over here for nothing. I said, To be honest I don’t have it. And I cannot cast Rob without meeting the person and seeing how he works with Kristen [Stewart]. This is all about chemistry.

To read the rest of her interview, click on the link above.

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