Do you all remember when Nicole Kidman went on The Tonight Show, and admitted to Jimmy Fallon that she had had a crush on him more than a decade earlier – that's pretty much how we feel knowing right now, having woken up to the news that we were robbed of a Sofia Coppola-directed Twilight Saga (sorry Catherine Hardwicke).
Yes, that's right. The juggernaut films that made up a significant proportion of most tween girls' personalities in the early 2010s was nearly in the hands of a Coppola – the director herself revealing in a recent interview with Rolling Stone that she was originally one of the directors slated to take on the three-film franchise based on the bestselling novel trilogy of the same name.
"We had one meeting," Coppola said "and it never went anywhere".
She admits that she thought it might "fun to do a teen-vampire romance" and that "the earlier Twilight [film] could be done in an interesting way". The content of the first film certainly wouldn't have been too far outside the remit of her already well-curated body of film work.
But, the director said that the nail in the coffin of the Twilight-Coppola universe was the third book's off-rails ending. "I thought the whole imprinting-werewolf thing was weird," Coppola said, admitting that the final book's human-vampire hybrid baby was "Too weird!... the last [film] gets really far out.”
Coppola is currently making the rounds on the press tour for her latest film, Priscilla, based on Priscilla Presley's autobiography about her relationship with the late Elvis Presley – a film that is set to be released in cinemas globally later this year.
She also released an archival book of her life's film work this year, complete with behind-the-scenes photographs and insight into her canon of work – an edition of which is honestly pretty high up on our holiday season wish list.
