Catherine Hardwicke: Twilight Director's Notebook

The full title of this book is Twilight Director's Notebook: The Story of How We Made the Movie Based on the Novel by Stephenie Meyer. This is a book I had walked by those days or even weeks before the Twilight dvd release without much thought of getting it. What really sparked my interest in it was hearing about The Twilight Director's Notebook from, yes, a thirteen-year-old Twilight fan. I listened to them rave about their copy of this book and thought about the extra possibly two week wait I would face to receive my copy of the Borders exclusive Twilight dvd. I decided this would be how I would keep sane the night of the midnight dvd release: I would read this book in my empty house while stores everywhere would be flooded with teens and some not-really-teens-but-fans-all-the-same of the ever popular Twilight series. My very sister was one of those people, and 101 Things to Do in WalMart sheet in her hands, I bidded her well and secretly hoped she would be up to not much trouble.

A first thought on opening this book was of the battered shape the Twilight movie director's paperback copy of Twilight was in. I spent a while thinking about how her copy, which seemed to have even fallen apart in places, wasn't in bad or horrible shape at all. It was well digested. It had to have been read more times in places than any Twilight fan could claim to have read themselves, for the author of this book (and director of the Twilight movie) needed to have gone over many parts thinking of exactly how she would interpret scenes for the movie. Originally horrified, I admired the condition of Hardwicke's copy of Twilight before turning past the page she had a photo of her copy on.

I enjoyed reading the layout page titled "What's in her bag?" I also admired the paintings featured that were done by Hardwicke's sister. There was many a story board in this book and I really loved getting to see them. The artists as well as Hardwicke did amazing jobs. Best of all was of course learning those behind-the-scenes kind of thing that we couldn't really learn about until at least watching that part of the Twilight dvd. In fact, there was even much which this book taught me that sitting through all the special features and such did not teach me. Reading this book made the Twilight movie new to me in the sense that I was looking for all the things I hadn't known before that I had missed seeing the movie the one time I went to see it in theaters. It shows readers just how much went into the movie and leaves them further impressed.