When Twilight hit theaters now almost ten years ago, it was the beginning of a massive franchise. Friendships were melded over the shared love of the story and divisions were created between Team Edward versus Team Jacob. It was a pop culture phenomenon that propelled its young stars into celebrity status, as they were slapped on teen magazine covers and on their fans' bedroom posters. In my interview with Twilight's Kellan Lutz, he reminisced about how things changed on set as its actors became household names. In his words to CinemaBlend:
There was something so innocent and pure with all of us in that first movie because we weren't really aware what we are part of. So no one had their own security guards at that point. It was just fun hanging out, throwing the baseball. Everyone was pretty approachable and then as the movies progressed, it got crazy because people would show up on set so then we had more security guards and the people just went to their trailers versus congregating in the cafeteria and hanging out.
It looks like filming Twilight was the calm before the storm. Before the vampire love story came to theaters in 2008, names such as Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson were blips on the radar. After their iconic roles graced the screen, adoring fans followed them wherever they went, even often to their filming locations. This popularity seemed to have a bit of an anti-social effect on the cast, who no longer hung out and had as much fun in between takes, per Kellan Lutz's comments.
The now 33-year-old actor said he enjoyed the experience of the first film the most because of director Catherine Hardwicke's vision of the movie and characters. Twilight had a much lower budget than the rest of the series' films and was combatting uncertainty from the studio of its success. An early script of the first film even had CIA agents on jet skis and Bella as a track star at her high school, according to Hardwicke. As any fan of the books can tell you, that would have been quite an imaginative adaptation of it.
For the cast of the Twilight franchise, those movies have kicked off and defined their careers even today. Kellan Lutz describes much of the fanbase as his friends today, some of whom he gets coffee with or receives birthday and Christmas cards from. It famously propelled the careers of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart into the spotlight, who are each currently working steadily in the indie space and have continually received acclaim for their work over the years.
Ten years later, Lutz says the cast have families and jobs around the world, so it's tough to get them all together for a reunion. They'll always have the fun and innocent moments in between shooting that iconic baseball scene and in the high school cafeteria. The first Twilight movie is now available on 4K.
