‘Twilight’ takes final lap
girl and a “fantastically beautiful, sparkly” vampire were having an intense conversation in a meadow about the inherent difficulties of their blossoming love. Bella and Edward became voices in her head — “They simply wouldn’t shut up” — and then characters on the page and screen.
Months ago, however, word leaked about a secret twist that she and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg cooked up.
“It’s huge when you’re watching it,” Meyer said. “It feels very surprising. One moment in particular, I’m really excited to see it with an audience because I just want to hear the response to that one particular moment.
“But as far as being a big difference in the movie, I feel like this part of the story is sort of there but off-screen. Because we can only see things from Bella’s perspective, we aren’t seeing what other people are envisioning. I don’t feel like it’s super-far off the page.
After the first four movies earned more than $2.5 billion worldwide, the fifth and final installment closes the saga of characters so famous that they’re known simply as Bella, Edward and Jacob.
That would be Bella Swan, teenage transplant to Forks, Wash., where she fell in love with vampire Edward Cullen, eventually married him and immediately became pregnant with their daughter, much to the initial dismay of best friend and werewolf Jacob Black.
As the story resumes, Bella is now a newborn vampire who, with family and far-flung allies, must fiercely protect her daughter, Renesmee, mistaken for an immortal rather than a half-human, halfvampire.
Even now, 100 million copies of her books later, Meyer still isn’t entirely sure why the series struck such a chord. “I’ve never understood, and I still don’t,” she says. “I mean, it’s still kind of a mystery to me. I know why I respond to it — because I wrote the story basically for myself.”
However, she does understand why some readers felt a special connection to the second book, “New Moon.”
“With the books, the one that surprised me initially, there’s a small subset of people who really respond to ‘New Moon’ because of the issues with depression and loss and working through that. People who have been through something similar, although obviously in a realistic sense, really respond to someone just going through that pain, and it has helped people.”
An English graduate of Brigham Young University, Meyer, her husband and their three boys live in Phoenix. Like vampires, Meyer does some of her best work at night, but a late-night writing routine is a luxury she cannot always afford.
“It’s kind of a challenge because right now my kids get up really early for school. So it’s all about trying to write during the daytime right now, which is just killing me.”