Kristen Stewart, Nikki Reed talk ‘Twilight’

Posted on November 14, 2008 | From USA Today By Brian Truitt, Lorrie Lynch with Kathy Rowings | Previous

It’s only one day until our exciting Twilight issue of USA WEEKEND, and we have something very special for our readers: an exclusive chat with two of the movie’s stars, Kristen Stewart and Nikki Reed. Our Brian Truitt caught up with the two friends at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., this morning, just a few hours before Stewart was headed down to Northern Virginia to sign autographs at a Hot Topic store in Fairfax. The Twilight Tour has been utter insanity so far: In San Francisco, so many fans showed up to get a chance to meet Stewart’s on-screen paramour, Robert Pattinson — who plays the vampiric suitor Edward in the movie — that there was a near-riot. And at 3 a.m. this morning, 2,000 fans were at Fairfax’s Fair Oaks Mall trying to be one of the lucky 500 to get a wristband and opportunity to meet Stewart. Ah, the wonders of being involved in a project beloved by bajillions of teenage girls. Click read more below for the first part of Brian’s interview with the actresses (stay tuned for part two tomorrow) and remember to check here to find out where you can find your Twilight issue of USA WEEKEND starting tomorrow!

It almost seems like a day in the life of Bella and Edward in Forks, Wash., with all the cold and the rain. Yet it’s nothing new for Stewart — who plays Bella in the movie adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s mega-popular book, in theaters Nov. 21 — or Reed (who co-stars as the gorgeous vampire Rosalie), as they spent five drenching months shooting Twilight in Portland, Ore. “It’s very oppressive,” says Stewart, sporting tousled hair, jeans and a “Defend New Orleans” T-shirt (she just finished shooting a movie there). “It’s like a blanket. You can’t see the sky and it’s always rainy and always dark and you’re stuck in a place, it adds to the seclusion. The weather’s kind of a character in the movie.” Reed, clad in a Diet Coca-Cola shirt, agrees. “I was questioning my sanity by the end of it, honestly. Lack of vitamin D, that’s not good.”

Kristen, you do realize that 2,000 people lined up at a mall this morning in the rainy cold just to get a chance to meet you.
Kristen: Oh my God.
Nikki: That’s why Kristen and I truly have developed the buddy system. It really is important in this kind of situation with this kind of film. It’s really overwhelming for everybody, especially for her and Rob and Taylor Lautner. Actually, any of the boys and Kristen. It’s really overwhelming to hear the screams of these girls. We try to do things together and it’s nice to lift a little bit of that and put it on somebody else.

I really didn’t even realize how big Twilight was until I attended the panel at Comic-Con in July, where 6,500 fans packed in to check out the whole cast. You might as well have been parting the sea.
Kristen: That was the first time I saw it, too. There’s really nothing to think about it. They’re not screaming for me, I could be anybody and it’s really bizarre to find yourself in the position of figurehead for so many people who are obsessed with your character. And it’s so weird, too, because it’s such a personal thing for me: I’m obsessed with my character, too, and I care about the book just as much as they do. So it’s so weird to have their concerns pushed on me. When I play roles, it’s always been so personal — I don’t really affect people unless they choose to let it affect them, but they don’t have preconceived ideas about it affecting them. But how do I deal with people screaming and how do I deal with direct contact? I’m very, very, very, very outside myself. It’s like when people compliment me: “I love you, oh my God, I love you, you’re so beautiful!” I’m just like, “Thanks, I’ll tell her, because that’s this other little thing that you’ve got going here that you’re looking at, and that’s not me. I’ll tell the girl that you’re talking about that you like her.”

Do you understand the fandom on some level? Did you love something this much when you were younger?
Nikki: No, but I do understand that heightened sense of when you’re young, when you’re at that transitional period, everything feels like such a big deal. That’s what this movie is about: It’s like your first love, your first everything, you create an obsession with your best friends in school or the guy that you’re dating.
Kristen: When you’re a teenager, man, those heightened emotions are crazy.
Nikki: They sort of run you. But you’re talking to the wrong people, because both she and I started at a young age in this business. I made it all the way up to high school in public school, and then I didn’t go anymore. We’re plucked from the normal public and put into our own little bubble in a weird way when you grow up as an actor.

Kristen, you’re playing an everyday girl who stumbles a lot and is really klutzy. Can you go back to a time in school where that was you as a gawky teenager and did you bring some of that into the film?
Kristen: You put me in a room with 150 extras and I feel like I’m in high school. It’s like, “Oh, there’s the lead actor” and you’re stared at. I went to school until I was in the seventh grade, so I had public middle school. It’s high school but you’re just a little younger. Oh my God, it was terrible.
Nikki: Yeah, middle school’s awful! You have no identity. At least in high school, you go off into your little group — middle school, you have nothing. Kristen: So I know the feeling very well. Plus, when Bella gets to Forks, one thing that I like about her is that she’s very content. You could have a love story this epic and think that typically, the beginning of the story is going to have a character searching for something and she finds it in this man. But she’s fine. She’s very self-assured already, so when she gets to the school, it’s just like, “Alright, I hope everybody’s going to be OK dealing with the fact that I’m very solitary.” But then people take notice of her and she’s like, “Why?” and that makes her self-conscious. She’s fine with being an outsider. Everybody says that to me: “Can you relate to Bella in that she’s an outsider trying to find her way?” No. She’s not. She’s fine. She’s just swept into something that’s crazy.

Nikki, you’re a natural brunette but you sport blonde locks as a vampire considered to be the most beautiful girl in the world. People who know you from Thirteen might not even recognize you.
Nikki: This was an opportunity for me to look completely different, I didn’t recognize myself, and Kristen was totally getting to know me with that look. And now I finally feel like myself again. Every feature that I had that I was born with that put me into that “good looking” category was wiped away! [laughs] So that was bizarre for me. It’s not every day that I get calls to play the angelic-looking, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett-ish person.
Kristen: Some people would call it bad casting. [laughs]
Nikki: The fans were really horrified at first, but they kind of were with everybody.
Kristen: They weren’t happy with anybody that was cast.
Nikki: When you have 20 million people reading a book, there are going to be 20 million different paintings in their mind of each character. So believe it or not, even Mr. Robert Pattinson got a really hard time in the beginning. And then once they see you as that, then they become more accepting. I’m not in the trailer, I’m not in any of the promo stuff, so when there were set visits from MTV and stuff and they recorded footage, people seemed to hop on the Nikki Reed-playing-Rosalie boat. You know what, as hesitant as I was at first, I think I make a really fantastic Rosalie and I actually think I look “a’ight” as a blonde.

Part 2
With the way they interact with each other, you’d think these native Californians had been friends all their lives. And in fact, they do have many mutual friends — for example, Stewart’s boyfriend, actor Michael Angarano, co-starred with Reed in Lords of Dogtown. But if you’ve read Stephenie Meyer’s original Twilight book, you know their characters aren’t the best of buddies. In the movie directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen), Bella (Stewart) falls quickly in love with the handsome vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson), but another vampire close to Edward, Rosalie (Reed), is against the twosome hooking up — for reasons that aren’t readily apparent until later in the book series.

A lot of Rosalie’s coldness toward Bella in the book is non-verbal, with glares and icy stares and such. Do you explore that more verbally in the film?
Nikki: No. Kristen feels that presence with me anyway. She’s naturally just very scared of me. [laughs] The only problem with that for me is when you read 700 pages of a book, a character won’t come off as one-dimensional but when you turn that into a screenplay where obviously it revolves around Bella and Edward, there isn’t enough time. There were a few scenes that I can think of where I actually said to the producers, “It would be really great if we could not shoot this only because it turns into a cliché unintentionally" — scenes where she would walk by and I would just stare at her. It’s like, OK, we’ve seen that in every other high school movie so let’s not do that. For people who are not Twilighters, it’ll just make all the other characters beside Kristen and Rob, the ones you can’t explore in great depth, look very cliché.
Kristen: It’s arbitrary anger.
Nikki: Yeah, its not necessary so I’d rather have less of me and a few scenes that describe my character further as opposed to just floating around.
Kristen: Rosalie’s story will come out later. In the first one, you don’t really know why but there’s a very good reason why she’s feeling the way she is.

That said, was there anything thrown into the script from later books to flesh out that relationship?
Nikki: I read all the books before we started shooting. I read the script and it was great, but there was nothing for me to really do. We shot a kitchen scene once where I just distinctly remember Catherine coming up to me and going, “So we have one problem: Everything we’ve done is not usable because your eyes are watering and vampires don’t cry.” I was really feeling like that element of hurt and pain, which is where Rosalie is coming from, is not like meaningless anger or bitchiness. But it seems like with my career, no matter what I do, people like to go, “Oh, she’s just playing that character!”

Did you all use outside sources to inform yourself on how to play a vampire, or a girl in love with a vamp?
Kristen: For me, it was just living with the book. There was nothing outside of the book because vampires don’t exist. Our vampires are very distinctly different from the classic vampire. They’re people — at least the “goodies” are, fighting their inner vampire. They’re really, really trying desperately to push it down. It’s like they’ve got the plague or something and they can’t be around people and they’re very self-loathing. That’s why Rob was sort of perfect for the part because everyone else came in thinking of them as outsiders — like in the book, the way the humans think of them: “I just have to be good looking and confident and walk a certain way.” But they’re not like that so Rob came in with the right mind-set, like what would it be like to live 108 years alone and hating yourself. So he was perfect for that part. [laughs]
Nikki: Some of the other kids in the movie will say, “I studied Lost Boys,” and Peter Facinelli said he studied Underworld. [laughs] I didn’t only because I feel like this is one of those things that you can approach from any angle, and like she said, we didn’t have the fangs and we don’t sleep in coffins. Those are all classic vampire qualities and we didn’t have any of that. When we first got to Portland for filming, Catherine put me and every other vampire in cat class [to learn how to move like a vampire], and it wasn’t very useful. The entire shooting process felt more like an independent film than you can imagine. It was very chaotic and a lot going on in multiple units, trying to pick up pieces. I don’t think anyone going into this — from the actors all the way up to the studio — really knew what they were getting into. When the day came, it wasn’t about our cat classes or our lions-eating-bear video or baseball practice.
Kristen: Those sort of filled our days, and we felt like we had to cram in all of our actual rehearsal — not even rehearsal, but just sessions together to think about it — at night.

It’s interesting that you bring up an indie sensibility, because reading the book, it’s at its core an intimate character study.
Nikki: Reading the books, I sort of envisioned something more fantasy-like. They brought Catherine Hardwicke on for a reason: She has a very specific style, and that is her specialty, stories about youth and love. Her style is pretty consistent. The end result of the film is great, but it does have a different look than what I envisioned while reading.
Kristen: It was nice that we weren’t doing this big effects-driven, green-screen movie. It looks like it could be in the trailer; they’re trying to hype up and amplify the action-y sequences.
Nikki: It’s this big glossy thing, but it’s not that. It’s very character-driven and very intimate.
Kristen: And it’s slow. It’s a slow steady progression of a relationship and it’s quaint. It’s not what you’d expect. It’s also a very detailed, personal account of the story, and it’s like second-to-second thoughts. You’re reading about this girl’s fixations like they’re your own, so they happen slowly. It’s not like you get smacked in the face with big plot points in every chapter. You have to slowly figure out what’s going on.

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Kristen Stewart, Nikki Reed talk ‘Twilight’