As much as she has brought glamour to the lives of teenage girls with her Romeo and Juliet-with-blood lust story, the glamour she surrounds herself with is decidedly unglamorous, unless you are a boy, that is—the backyard is an aspiring athlete’s paradise. Inside, the kids’ playroom is actually played in, though Meyer fights her sons on having to buy the absolute latest video game, indicating to them that their heads will not explode if they do not get it. “The idea of enjoying something you already have has been lost,” she says. For her, happiness is being at home or attending a Little League game or the elementary school band concert. She believes this is what success in writing has given her, a kind of luxury that would not be listed as an asset by the IRS. “Luxury for me is getting to take care of your kids,” she says.

Yes, she will show up at a star-studded opening of her own film, mugging with the actors more like a schoolgirl than the creator of this gothic juggernaut, and yes, she clearly loves her fans (mostly girls), but the very thought of her own success can make her a little queasy. Just about a year ago, on the set of Twilight—a film even the studio had modest hopes for but that eventually was a phenomenon, like everything else Meyer has touched since she suddenly appeared on the scene four years ago—she watched dozens of people re-create the cafeteria she had imagined as the lunchtime home of her heroine, Bella, and Bella’s problematic suitor, Edward Cullen, who is older than Bella by a century or so, as well as undead and living with a large family of vampires. “I suddenly realized that all of this was happening because I wrote a story down,” she says, “and it made me a little sick to my stomach.”

It’s only when she waves goodbye to her husband and son and jumps into her Infiniti that a reader familiar with Twilight’s hunky vampire would quickly notice something a little Edwardesque about the 35-year-old author—she drives like Danica Patrick on her day off. “I like to drive,” Meyer says. As she exits the dirt road that runs through her desert neighborhood, her foot is on the pedal like teeth on a neck. She is cranking her iPod on the car stereo, a tune by Muse, a band that is exactly that to Meyer. She is not breaking the law, but the law should be a little nervous. “My husband sold our coupe,” she says, “and I was so mad.”

As far as writing goes, she is certainly cruising, driving in a fast lane that few authors ever make it to. Meyer has sold a gazillion copies (actual number, 28 million), so that it sometimes seems as if the interiors of Barnes & Noble are built not with bricks and mortar but with the phone-book-thick volumes of Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and, of course, Breaking Dawn, the latest book in the series, which alone sold 1.3 million copies on the day it was published last summer. And while she is a mom at home, in the publishing world Meyer is a superhero, an author who can make publishers feel a little better about an industry that is repeatedly described as being zombie-like, all but passed away. “It just gives you a lot of hope for the future of this business,” says Megan Tingley, her editor at Little, Brown. (The real hope being, of course, that she’s the next J. K. Rowling, who has to date sold in excess of 400 million books.)

And that’s not even getting to the films of Meyer’s novels. Teenagers stood in line for days all over the country to help the movie version of Twilight gross $70 million in its first weekend last November, after having been made on the relative cheap ($37 million, compared with, say, The Dark Knight, which cost about five times that). New Moon is currently in production. And all for a couple of characters that—literally—came to Meyer one night in a dream. “It’s an uncomfortable kind of power,” she says. “It’s not like, Aha! Now I am going to take over the world! It’s like, Really? Are you sure? I’m constantly waiting for someone to say, ‘You are on Candid Camera. You’ve been punked!’ ”

We cruise through a town called Carefree, a beautiful place with dry, boulder-covered hills and forests of streetlight-tall cacti, and Meyer pulls into the parking lot of the Horny Toad, an old-style Western saloon, a little embarrassed—her husband had been hyping the burgers to this reporter. “Try the torpedo!” he was saying, torpedo being Arizonan for a pepper-infused burger.

“I guess this is what people think of when they think of Arizona,” Meyer says. She orders the saloon’s Caesar and recounts her life pre-Twilight.

She was born Stephenie Morgan in Hartford, Connecticut, her father a finance guy who named her after himself—Stephen plus an “-ie.” By the time she was four, the family, who are Mormon, had settled on the outskirts of Phoenix. She is the second of six children, three girls and three boys; she thinks of her family as The Brady Bunch, sans Alice, the maid. The neighbors kept horses on their suburban Arizona lots; her family built huts, bike paths, a paintball range. “It was a free-for-all land,” she recalls. “Later, my brothers made it a lot more weaponized.”

Books were to Meyer as war games were to her brothers. “I was the bookworm,” she says. A childhood memory: her father, in the hall between the bedrooms, reading them not kids’ books but, according to his writer daughter, “the books he wanted to read.” Specifically, Tolkien-like fantasy, such as The Sword of Shannara, the 1977 epic by Terry Brooks (soon to be a motion-picture series). Her father would read a little, knocking off at bedtime. “The next day I would hide out in his closet with the book,” Meyer recalls, “feeling like I was doing something wrong, like I wasn’t supposed to sneak ahead.” Her mother was more nineteenth-century. “She was the one that had the Austen in the house,” Meyer says. “The reason I’m obsessed with the love side of any story is my mom. I always evaluate a story on relationships and the characters.”

She won a National Merit Scholarship in high school and studied literature in college, at Brigham Young, where she enjoyed writing papers on Shakespeare but stayed away from creative writing, for fear of potential criticism. “It’s not ‘You didn’t write that paper on Jane Austen so well,’ it’s ‘What’s going on in your head? You’re a crazy person!’” In college she married Pancho Meyer, whom she first met when she was four. His real name is Christiaan, but he was nicknamed Pancho as a kid on a whim, believe it or not, by his grandmother. “It’s not even a good story,” Meyer laments. After a stint working as a receptionist at a real estate office, she became a stay-at-home mom upon the birth of their first child, developing a phobia about her kids and swimming pools. “I’m a very neurotic mom,” she says. “My kids could swim when they were two. There are so many drownings around here. That’s one of my personal nightmares.”

Her phobia is the reason she remembers it was on the day of the kids’ swimming lesson that she woke up with a dream reverberating in her head. It was a vampire dream. She had not dreamed of vampires before, had not been reading about vampires. To this day, she has not figured out why vampires; she’s not a horror person, which is clear when you meet her, though she has always loved superheroes—she’s a Batman girl. “I like that he’s not so clean-cut, that he has a dark side, that he’s doing things that are not clearly legal or illegal,” she says. And let’s face it, a vampire—especially the star Twilight vampire, who is good-looking, incredibly fast, strong, and smart—is a sexy superhero, Batman with some bite. From her Web site: “In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately.”

With a little Internet research, the meadow became the woods outside Forks, Washington, one of the rainiest (and thus potentially most vampire-friendly) places in the United States, and the two people became Isabella “Bella” Swan—a teenage girl who had moved to Forks from Phoenix—and Edward Cullen, vampire. It took precisely three months of typing, late at night, her husband wondering what was going on at the computer. She shared pages only with her older sister. “What if it was completely stupid?” she says now. With her sister’s encouragement, she sent it to an agent, where it landed in a slush pile, where an assistant found it. It was then sent to Tingley, senior vice president of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers—Little, Brown was seeing a trend emerging for horror books featuring young women. After reading it on a plane to California, Tingley was offering a three-book deal, which terrified Meyer. “I was just totally bowled over,” Tingley says. Meyer had been hoping to pay off her car and ended up with a $750,000 advance. For her it’s a dream come true in terms of youth-reading interest. “Books are a big entertainment deal for teenagers now—that’s the coolest thing in the world,” she says. “What an amazing gift for me that someone could say, ‘I read now.’ ”

One thing you learn quickly if you spend a day with Stephenie Meyer is that she doesn’t so much write stories as transcribe them; they are playing in the multiplex that is her mind’s eye. “I’ve been an editor for 20 years, and I’ve never worked with a writer who speaks of their characters as if they are so completely real,” Tingley says.

“I had always told myself stories my whole life and assumed that everyone does,” Meyer says. “You know, it’s funny; in Jane Eyre, which is something I’ve read 40 million times, there’s this scene where she shows Rochester her paintings. And she explains that in her head it was so different. And Rochester replies that she captured just a wisp of what she was seeing. I used to paint, and I won a few watercolor contests, but I could never get it to look exactly like it did in my head. But with writing, I discovered I could get it to look exactly like it did in my head.”

Which is why Twilight, especially, as well as its sequels, is not a horror book but a good old-fashioned romance. There are vampires, and they are wicked quick and excel in killing animals in the woods, which assuages somewhat their hunger for teenage humans. But that’s mostly offstage. Twilight takes place in a teenage fermata, an emotional arena that is, for many young girls, simultaneously imaginary and absolutely real. And the boy, by the way, is completely intoxicated with the girl. The courtship is everything, a prolonged ecstasy, because once consummated, the relationship will change, like, totally.

“The sexual tension that she’s managed to sustain is just incredible,” says Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the movie. “You’ve found your soul mate, and that the person who you are in love with and who is in love with you could kill you—even better!”

“I think that the reason the books were that way, unintentionally,” Meyer says, “is because I miss those days of ten and thirteen when a boy looked at you, and oh, my gosh, you could talk about it for two weeks because he looked at you funny. ‘What does that mean? What is that about?’ Everything was analyzed.”

To her great credit, Meyer knows she is not Gertrude Stein. “I’m not a professional yet,” she says. “I’m still just an amateur.” But she knows her audience like Nielsen. “A twelve-year-old girl has already in her head imagined out fourteen different lives, including if she gets married, if she doesn’t get married, if she falls in love with someone who lives in Paris,” Meyer says. Indeed, one might argue her authorial success has something to do with her being surrounded by non-girls. “I live in a house filled with testosterone,” she says. “There’s always sports on my television, and there’s nothing except hockey and scooters, and there’s nothing of that side of myself left, and so it’s great to have a different place to find it.”

Her authorial power is also changing her relationship with her readers; where there was once a manageable number of E-mail correspondents, now she stands before oceans of fans. And as she has changed from underdog—mom writing with a baby on her lap—to Superauthor, the press has begun to wonder about her, most frequently citing her religion and speculating as to whether the Twilight series has something Mormon up its sleeve. Meyer says her religious faith is part of the fabric of the book the way it is part of her. “When you grow up with something your whole life, it influences your work,” she says. Regardless, the books are by no means tracts. If they are supposed to be undercover lectures on abstinence, as critics sometimes imagine, then Meyer accidentally made them a little too titillating, though she is, theologically speaking, enthusiastic about where her characters end up—specifically, the way they, as she sees it, take control of their lives rather than allowing the world to dictate control. “Like the idea of freedom of choice—that there’s no place that someone can put you that you can’t choose a different way,” she says, speaking like the Sunday-school teacher she is.

A more interesting and controversial story is the fifth book in the Twilight saga, a version of the first book told from Edward’s perspective. It was leaked last year by a source still unidentified onto the Internet, all but about six pages. It was a huge blow. “Now I’m over it,” she says, “but I feel really distanced from the project. It was oddly devastating.” Although she is currently taking a break, she may continue the Twilight story, but she seems wary of books in series. “I’m experiencing, I think, a little bit of stage fright at this point.” This past spring, Little, Brown published The Host, her first adult novel, pure science fiction, in which a woman is taken over by another consciousness—two souls in one human. It, too, was (and, like all her books, remains) a best seller—debuting at number one. For Meyer, the subtext was body image. “I’m not critical of others, but I am very critical of myself,” she says. “When I was working on this, I had to imagine what a gift it is to just have a body, and really love it, and that was good for me, I think.”

Returning home—fast—Meyer finds the boys are out, her assistant gone. She may be to the publishing economy what Detroit was to the U.S. economy in the fifties, yet she runs her show like a kitchen-table business. One of her brothers, an optometry student, is in charge of her Web site, which means that if a film company wants their representatives’ statements posted on stepheniemeyer.com, they can’t just snap their fingers. “Somebody will want something done right away, and it will be like, ‘No, it has to wait. My brother has a test,’ ” she says. “It’s a small business for me still. I mean, people don’t understand; it’s just a little family thing. I couldn’t deal with it if I didn’t keep it small. It freaks me out.”

Vogue, March 2009.

Even though he doesn’t consider himself as a vampire’s stories fan, Robert Pattinson didn’t hesitate in acting in Twilight, as long as he get to work with Catherine Harwicke and Kristen Stewart.

“I’ve never been a big fan of vampire’s stories or that kind of movies, I didn’t like them, but with this one, I changed my perspective, the story inspired me.”

I wanted to do this partly because I really liked the main actress. I remembered her role in Into The Wild, she seemed excellent,” explained the British actor.

Visiting Mexico to promote the film, which premieres Nov. 21, Pattinson recalled that when he came to the audition with Stewart, he liked the fierce that she projects.

“They’re two people that make the cinematography in a very interesting way, and not so much from the commercial perspective”

“Even though he’s one of the hottest and he doesn’t look like a vampire, people is afraid of him. It was such a challenge to portrait a character that is 108 years old and looks like a 17 years old teenager, because I got to play both situations.

“The fact that he is a vampire that likes drinking blood had to be in my head, but at the same time I had to play a regular human being”, pointed the british actor.

“The vampire’s stories are very popular, but in the case of Twilight, I wouldn’t say that it’s a vampires movie, it’s more like a love story”

“The difference between this and the others are that in the others, when the vampires are exposed to the sunlight they die, they are affected by garlics, there’re others that they’re determined to kill humans, and in this one, he just love the life as a typical teenager”

Pattinson added that the filming of Twilight was very intense because of the environment in which they had to shoot.

“What happens is that vampires during the day, must have a very specific weather, it had to be very cloudy all the time and that limited us a lot, because you could not shoot when there was much sun or when it was raining.”

Read in Spanish
Traslated by E-Cullen.org

Pictures from Robert promoting Twilight in Mexico

It’s 5 p.m and Taylor Lautner is the first to arrive at the Venice, California studio for our CosmoGirl shoot. A few minutes later, his Twilight costar Kellan Lutz walks in. The guys high-five and joke about how Robert Pattinson – their other costar – is always late. By 6:30, I’m getting a little impatient because we’re still waiting for our lead vampire. Finally, Robert tiptoes in, sleepy-eyed and full of apologies, “Sorry, I overslept,” he explains in his sexy British accent.

He’s so charming that my aggravation immediately vanishes. I totally see why Kristen Stewart’s character, Bella, would want to spend an eternity with this guy, vampire or not. As the three actors change into jeans and white shirts, every girl on set finds an excuse to sneak into the dressing room, hoping to get a peek. Then – as if on cue, just around twilight – Rob, Kellan and Taylor emerge. Check out what we chatted about during the shoot.

Q: So how would you describe your three characters?
Rob: [My character] Edward is the conflicted and reluctant vampire. He’s a poet, and very deep and profound. He’s just extraordinarily troubled.
Kellan: Emmett’s the tough guy, the protector, but he’s a big old teddy bear to his little brother. He’s a goofball, but when he snaps, he’s menacing and there’s no stopping him.
Taylor: Well, in the first film, Jacob is a normal high school guy – outgoing, friendly, and loyal. I’m a lot like him in Twilight, but I’m excited to play him in the sequels as his character evolves.

Q: Are you at all similar to your characters?
Kellan: Rob is definitely Edward. He’s so complicated, so poetic… I mean, you cannot help but like this guy! I’d say I’m definitely the protector type. I have six brothers and one sister, and I got beaten up a lot because I was in the middle. But then I learned to defend myself.
Rob: Yeah, Kellan protects me all the time. It’s like having a globe around me. Really, he’s like a globe of protection!

Q: Twilight isn’t just a “vampire movie”, it’s a love story. Do you guys like romantic films?
Taylor: I really liked Enchanted. In fact, I’ve seen it five or six times.
Kellan: I like The Notebook, Tristan & Isolde, and Romeo + Juliet. [I enjoy] period pieces that aren’t just about winning the girl but are also about the struggle of class, wealth and privilege.

Q: What about horror movies?
Taylor: My friends just introduced me to how great they can be. I really liked The Hitcher, and Gothika gave me nightmares.
Rob: I don’t like that “hiding behind doors” element when suddenly it’s like “Boo!” I like the more eerie and disturbing horror flicks. One of my favorites is The Exorcist.
Kellan: I love scary movies. I think the pure gore movies are pretty funny. It doesn’t bother me to see someone get their head chopped off.

Q: Twilight’s tagline is: “When you can live forever, what do you live for?” Would you want to live for eternity?
Rob: Uh, yes, I think so, especially if I could turn it on and off. I kind of like the idea that I could see what death is like and then come back again. That sounds good to me. I want to have my cake and eat it too.
Kellan: I can’t wait for the afterlife, to spend eternity wherever it might be. But it would also be cool to live for hundreds of years and get to see how the world turns out. If I could stay 23 years old for 500 years, I’d probably take that deal.

Quotes:

Rob: I never felt like I was making a ‘vampire movie’, even when we were ripping each other’s heads off.

Taylor: I hadn’t heard of the Twilight books before the movie. Now I see girls everywhere reading them. The series is huge!

Kellan: I loved vampires growing up. I dressed up as one for Halloween three years in a row.

From Cosmo Girl – October 2008.

“I walked up to this group of people and I said, ‘What are you waiting for?’ ” Kirkpatrick recalls. “Because I didn’t think for a second that they were there for ‘Twilight.’ ”

But they were, one of several signs that Summit had on its hands something more than just a midrange teen vampire romance. For those in the schoolgirl demo, the hunger for “Twilight” has become a blood lust as instense as their male classmates’ desire to see summer superhero movies. Summit is counting on those fans to spread the word to other age groups or even to come back for “Titanic”-esque repeat viewings.

But will the buzz translate into blockbuster boxoffice?

The question has become one of the industry’s most debated. Its answer will offer a referendum not just on Summit’s ability to shepherd a studio-style hit but also on whether franchises can be created on modest budgets at a time when production and distribution costs are skyrocketing and the YouTube generation is harder to reach than ever.

Summit is careful not to overplay expectations for the film. Yet the hype ramped up after the company moved swiftly to snag the Nov. 21 pre-Thanksgiving release date when “Harry Potter” was pushed to 2009. Now, some boxoffice analysts are predicting the $37 million-budgeted film (according to Summit; some peg its cost at $40 million-$50 million) could earn back close to its budget during its opening weekend alone.

A year ago, few took notice when Summit said that it was developing a movie based on the first of young-adult writer Stephenie Meyer’s four-book series detailing a tragic high school romance between Bella, who comes to a small town after her parents split, and Edward, her secret crush who as it turns out is a vampire.

That Summit had attached Catherine Hardwicke, director of the arty “thirteen,” confirmed for many that the studio saw the film as a niche play.

But in the months that followed, a cultlike obsession about the film project grew.

Fans analyzed casting moves, especially leads Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, like investors monitoring the Dow. They whipped themselves into a frenzy over reported reshoots (mostly weather-related, it turns out). And they followed with skeptical eyes the script’s faithfulness to key book scenes.

Even the city where the story takes place — Forks, a real-life depressed timber town in rural Washington — saw a spike in tourism as tween girls arrived by the minivan.

Summit, at first surprised by the hoopla, began to play along.

Executives decided to release trailers and tidbits on MySpace and MTV.com. They invited fansite operators to the Portland, Ore., set. And they sanctioned an Entertainment Weekly cover story a full six months before the film’s release.

But as expectations grew with the hype, the strategy shifted. Now, only six weeks before the film bows, Summit is keeping a tight lid on all but a few more planned trailers before the prelaunch ad buy kicks in.

“Pacing is important on any campaign, especially this one,” says Kirkpatrick, who was a consultant to the company before she was brought on full time in September in part to handle the “Twilight” release.

That there is such care — some would call it nervousness — about the film is not simply because a startup studio is protective of its first potential franchise. The film represents an ambitious and risky experiment that could set a new template for how to fuel boxoffice by reaching enthusiastic young audiences at reasonable budgets. If “Twilight” becomes a blockbuster series — Summit already has optioned the second book, “New Moon” — it could challenge the conventional wisdom that the four-quadrant, nine-figure tentpole is the only way to go.

There are reasons why that might be tricky.

Unlike “Potter” or “The Da Vinci Code” — two other literary sensations that became film franchises — “Twilight” is not a mega-best-seller. And the teen demographic that devours the novels can be especially fickle when it comes to its film choices.

Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg notes the “sheer excitement but also terror” she felt when the Comic-Con footage was shown. “I thought, ‘The scenes are similar to the book but different enough that if they didn’t like it, they’re going to ride me out of the room.’ ” (Rosenberg pointedly did not read any of the other books when she was writing “Twilight” to keep the focus tightly on this story.)

It doesn’t help that few films have blended elements like “Twilight” has. Teen romances like “A Walk to Remember” aren’t typically as dark or as moody, and most of the youth-themed supernatural films like “Eragon” aim at least partly at boys.

At the same time, female-oriented teen films, from “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” to “High School Musical,” document adolescence without a genre cloak.

Summit’s challenge is to use the film’s raised profile to expand its appeal beyond the very audience responsible for bolstering expectations. As one rival studio marketing exec puts it, “If they just get teenage girls, they’re dead.”

Recognizing this, Summit has come up with some savvy ideas. Kirkpatrick’s team has been marketing to an online group called Twilight Moms, women who have embraced the book after being turned on to it by their daughters.

The studio is planning an aggressive television rollout during shows that 12- to 24-year-olds are likely to watch, and it has undertaken a broad MySpace campaign that it says has yielded millions of hits. “You can’t get that (traffic) just from teenage girls, no matter how many times someone hits enter,” Kirkpatrick says.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to reach not just girls and adult women but also boys, who for decades have been willing to embrace metaphors for their own adolescence via superhero movies. To this end, Summit has generated trailers (including footage shown at Comic-Con) stressing the action scenes.

“If I were marketing this movie, I’d want to make sure it doesn’t look like it’s based on the books, because anyone who reads the books is already in the tent,” Syracuse University pop culture professor Robert Thompson says. “Make it look like a rip-roaring good story about vampires that doesn’t make a 12-year-old boy say, ‘That’s what the girls are reading.’ ”

Few have seen the final cut, but the film is said to remain true to the tone and the pivotal moments in the book, including two key sequences involving Bella and Edward being chased at a baseball game and Edward showing his daylight self in a meadow.

Several scenes that were interior in the book were condensed in the film. Most notably, a scene in which Bella confronts Edward about his vampire secret went from a slow reveal over dozens of pages to a single high-pitched confrontation.

“The big moments are easy,” Rosenberg says. “What’s more difficult are the moments between them.”

The film’s ending leaves things more open than in the book, particularly when it comes to the toothy villains. Summit is hoping its strategy has just as much bite.

From The Hollywood Reporter October 2008.