Tuesday, December 9, 2008

New Moon News: Catherine Hardwicke will NOT direct 'New Moon"

Just a week after the 'Twilight' director discussed her ideas for directing the sequel, 'New Moon', Catherine Hardwicke regretfully declines the job. According to a Deadline Hollywood article, it was Summit Entertainment's decision, not Hardwicke's.
Here's the official press release:
Los Angeles, CA, December 7, 2008 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."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting article. I'm a bit annoyed that the flack for everything wrong with this movie comes down on Catherine. Her other films speak for her abilities as a director. Lords of Dogtown is a beautifully done movie and she fought for many areas in that movie to get done. Thirteen was very well done as well.

The truth seems to be that Catherine Hardwicke had bigger plans for this next movie than Summit was willing to put into it, time being the biggest. I also heard she wanted to do a good deal on location again which would have taken them to Italy. With the amount of time Summit wants to give this movie for production that would definitely be axed. Summit doesn't seem to want quality so much as to make a bunch more money fast. Late 2009? What movie of this level shoots in, goes into post production, and has the whole thing done and out within one year and does it well? They haven't even finalized the cast beyond the two leads. This won't start filming until sometime in the spring.

The major concerns about this movie for people seemed to be the effects and the pacing. The movie had a very small budget to accomplish a large task. Does anybody remember how bad the effects were in the first Harry Potter? Easy to see how a bit more money does a world of good. And the pacing has more to do with the screen play than the direction. The book was long and fitting it into 100 minute movie was no easy task. The screen writer has no backlash at all and lets face it, her other works (Step Up) aren't exactly gems of movies.

I also found it interesting that they credited the cinematographer with the look of the movie rather than the director. In that case I guess we should be thanking her for way too many close ups and half-head shots.

There are things that need to be changed about this next movie, yes but Catherine Hardwicke is not where I would start.

wolfgirl said...

sad but its ok i sure the next one will be good even with out the same director but i dont like it when they change them

Anonymous said...

Another interesting article about why Hardwicke isn't doing the next movie:

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/12/catherine_hardwicke.html

And they are thinking of doing the filming for New Moon and Eclipse back to back?