Twilight writer, star greet end of era

— Even after all this time, author Stephenie Meyer, the Mormon mother of three who became an overnight literary sensation with the 2005 publication of her young-adult novel Twilight, can’t explain the phenomenon that surrounds the grand romance between vampire Edward Cullen and human teenager Bella Swan, characters played on-screen by Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.

“I don’t know what makes people love it, I don’t know what makes people hate it,” said Meyer, seated comfortably in a suite of a Beverly Hills hotel. “But I do know that the feeling of being in love is a good feeling. We want to feel that emotion.”

“I’ve always said that,” Stewart said to Meyer, sitting beside her. “It’s so vicarious.It’s not like you are watching two people or reading two people. You feel like you are doing it. It’s rare.”

There’s no question that Twilight is that rare gem: a book and movie property that stokes a kind of unquenchable fire among its largely female fan base. That following has been so sizable and so fervent that the “Twihards,” as they’re called, have helped transform Meyer’s supernatural tale into a $2.5 billion business, proving that girl-centric tales can be powerful forces at the box office.

With the fifth and presumably final big-screen entry, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2, due to arrive in theaters today, Meyer and Stewart seem to share a bond reminiscent of the connection between Meyer’s two protagonists.

Their closeness stemsfrom the unlikely duo’s joint goal of ensuring that the beloved material, for all its melodrama, remained intact as it was translated to the big screen. That required them to battle nervous studio executives who wanted Stewart’s interpretation of Bella to be less tortured, hardened detractors who railed against overwrought story lines and pop culture satirists who often turned the franchise into its own punch line.

Meyer had already made the leap from Arizona housewife to best-selling author when she met Stewart, then an up-and-coming actress building her career primarily through roles in independent films. In the intervening years, Meyer’s stature and influence as a young-adult author became comparable to that enjoyed by J.K. Rowling or Suzanne Collins, although critics never responded to her writing the way enthusiasticreaders did.

Stewart, however, has garnered plenty of acclaim - if not in the often tepidly reviewed Twilight movies, then in small, challenging roles in films such as Sean Penn’s Into the Wild or Walter Salles’ forthcoming adaptation of the Beat Generation classic On the Road. She has also endured a tabloid celebrity she never planned for thanks to her on-again, off-again relationship with Pattinson.

Reaching the end of the saga was particularly satisfying for the actress, who seemed pleased to be able to take Bella to the happy if somewhat complicated conclusion of her journey - and to move on to the next phase of her career.

“I’m so ready to be done,” said the 22-year-old.

Directed like its predecessor by Oscar winner BillCondon, Breaking Dawn - Part 2 begins with Bella as a newborn vampire and a new mother, whose halfhuman daughter, Renesmee, threatens to spark a war among tribes of vampires from around the globe. The ruling class in Italy, the Volturi, wrongly assume that Bella and Edward have transformed a human child into a vampire, something that is expressly forbidden, and gather forces to take down the entire Cullen clan.

The story line gave Stewart the opportunity to bring a new dimension to a character who’d always considered herself ordinary and clumsy; with her supernatural powers, she could be graceful and beautiful, lightning-fast and lethal.

“I played her as human for so long, so the enhanced version of her made so much sense to me,” said Stewart, her long limbs folded under her on the couch. “Everything so perfectly fit that I was so amped to do it.”

Meyer recalled standing in front of the monitor on the set of the film when Stewart shot her first scene as vampire Bella, nervously anticipating the outcome.

“We were dancing by the monitors - ‘Look at her go,’” Meyer said as Stewart pretended to leave the room, not wanting to hear the compliment. “It was such a huge weight lifted. It wasn’t a different character. It was Bella, but it was a totally differentBella. It was so exciting.”

The 700-page-plus Breaking Dawn novel was released just a few months before director Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of the inaugural Twilight reached theaters in 2008. The book was met with controversy, even among Meyer’s loyal fans.

Renesmee’s birth is an especially gruesome sequence - one that Condon had to carefully navigate for the previous PG-13-rated movie - and some readers complained about Bella’s choice to carry the child to term despite obvious risks to her own health.

There was also grumbling about an ending that felt too soft, too anticlimactic.

“I had a lot of concerns about making Breaking Dawn a movie,” said Meyer, who holds final approval on the scripts for the Twilight films. “There were a lot of things they wanted to change. There were some serious problems.”

Fealty to source material on beloved properties like Twilight is always a concern - deviate too much from the book and fans, even those who maybe weren’t wild about what was on the page initially, will cry foul.But it was Meyer herself and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, who has written each of the five scripts for the films, who devised a new ending over dinner one night in Vancouver while the second Twilight movie, New Moon, was filming.

Of course, neither Meyer nor Stewart will reveal the new conclusion, but Meyer believes the solution is one fans will embrace.

MovieStyle, Pages 34 on 11/16/2012

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