It's Twilight in America: The Vampire Saga

Beatlemania is the comparison that everybody makes, but Twilight is more like the Beatles in reverse. Beatlemania was a reaction to the buttoned-down, sexually repressed pop culture of the 1950s. Twilight is a reaction to the reaction — it's a retreat from the hedonistic hookup culture that the sexual revolution begot. Nobody hooks up in Twilight. Meyer put sex back underground, transmuted it back into yearning, where it became, paradoxically, exponentially more powerful. "For me, the appeal of the vampire is safe sexuality," says Melissa Rosenberg, who has written the screenplays for all the Twilight movies. "It's the ultimate romantic ideal. You have the allure of the danger. And yet there's only so far you can go."

Idols of the Twilight
In retrospect, it's surprising how long it took the sound of hundreds of thousands of teenage girls hysterically keening to reach Hollywood. The first glimpse that director Catherine Hardwicke had of Twilight came at Sundance in 2007, where the founders of the newly independent Summit Entertainment showed her a script. It had been worked over so thoroughly at Paramount that it was practically unrecognizable. "It had Bella as a track star," Hardwicke remembers. "Then there were FBI agents — the vampires would migrate south into Mexico every year, and FBI agents in Utah were tracking them. They ended up on an island chasing everyone around in jet skis." (See the top 10 Sundance film festival hits.)

But Hardwicke saw something there, and she wanted in. She read the Twilight books. Then she threw the Paramount script away and called Rosenberg, who worked with Summit before, and they started over. She also began the hunt for her leading couple.

Hardwicke spotted Kristen Stewart in Into the Wild, in which Stewart makes a brief but indelible appearance as a roller-skate-skinny underage seductress. Hardwicke flew to Pittsburgh, Pa., where Stewart was making Adventureland. "We spent four hours working on scenes and running after birds in the park and playing. The next day when I saw the film, I knew, yes, it has to be. She is Bella." It was a good match for Stewart too. "It was like, wow!" the actress remembers. "I want to play like this all the time!" (See the top 10 comeback movies.)

Edward wasn't that easy. "The bar is so high," Hardwicke says. "Every two pages there's a comment about how gorgeous he is ... I met all of these guys I felt were quite good, but they didn't have that special other quality that they were alive for 105 years." She took Robert Pattinson and three other actors to her house in Venice, Calif., to run lines with Kristen. They played the biology-class scene in the dining room. They moved the cars out of the garage and did the "How long have you been 17?" scene there. Then they did the kissing scene on Hardwicke's bed. "I played it like a guy who is beating himself up a lot about everything," Pattinson says. "I don't think anyone else did it like that. I guess I tried to ignore every aspect of the confident hero of the story." It worked. Stewart and Hardwicke were sold.

Selling Pattinson to Summit was tougher. He wasn't a star — his biggest role was Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire — and he didn't look like a star. "He was disheveled," Hardwicke says. "He was a different weight. His hair was different and dyed black [he had just played Salvador Dalí in Little Ashes]. He was all sloppy. The studio head said, 'You want to cast this guy as Edward Cullen?' I said yeah. And he said, 'Do you think you can make him look good?' I said yes, I do."

By all accounts, the chemistry between the two leads was intense, maybe too intense. "After I cast him, I told Rob, Don't even think about having a romance with her," Hardwicke says. "She's under 18. You will be arrested." It was the beginning of the real-life are-they-aren't-they, did-they-didn't-they speculation that is now an ongoing subplot of the Twilight story. "I didn't have a camera in the hotel room. I cannot say," Hardwicke says. "But in terms of what Kristen told me directly, it didn't happen on the first movie. Nothing crossed the line while on the first film. I think it took a long time for Kristen to realize, O.K., I've got to give this a go and really try to be with this person."

See pictures of the Harry Potter cast growing up.

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