MOVIEMAKER - MELISSA TAKES A BITE OUT OF TWILIGHT

MovieMaker.com interviewed Melissa Rosenberg about writing the moviescript for Twilight and how Brokeback Mountain influenced her.

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.

Read the complete interview at the Movie Maker website here

I was surprised by the Brokeback Mountain influence, that was unexpected! What did you think of this interview? Did you hear anything new from it?