If Channing Tatum hasn’t read the Twilight books, he may want to start.

At least one very important person in the movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire love story thinks Tatum would be perfect to play bad-boy vampire Riley in Eclipse, the third in the four-book series.

“There’s a very big battle at the end with Riley, and I think Channing would do that so well,” Twilight and New Moon screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, who is currently writing the Eclipse script, told us this weekend at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival benefit for the Writers Guild Foundation.

“And there are some complexities to that character,” she adds. “He really is tragic. He’s a puppet for Victoria [bad-girl vampire played by Rachelle Lefevre]. So he has to break your heart a little bit at the end when he realizes that she doesn’t want him. Channing could do that beautifully.”

Rosenberg also confirmed some good news for Robert Pattinson fans…

Even though Edward Cullen may not be in the New Moon novel as much as he is in the others, she promised we’ll be seeing plenty of the Brit actor in the flick, which is currently shooting in Vancouver with director Chris Weitz.

“In the book, he’s actually an enormous presence in [Bella’s] mind,” Rosenberg said.

“He’s so present in her mind throughout the entire center of the book, so we really played off that, and it kept him alive in a slightly different way, but fans will feel it’s true to the book. You can’t have a Twilight without Rob Pattinson.”

And Rosenberg says you also can’t have a Twilight movie with anything more adult than a PG-13 rating. She has yet to be hired to write the script for the fourth, Breaking Dawn, but she thinks it’s safe to assume the book’s more graphic violent scenes will be tailored to keep it accessible for Twilight’s teen moviegoing audience.

“Our fans are in the PG age range, and I don’t feel a big necessity to see violence, and to see gore,” Rosenberg said. “I don’t need to see that. This whole series is more about their relationship. It’s not about the gore. I mean, there are some scary and special elements to it, but the series is really about relationships and coming of age and owning one’s power.”

PDT by Marc Malkin at E! Online
Additional reporting by Dahvi Shira

We were fortunate enough to get a chance to talk with Twilight mega-star Kristen Stewart (aka ‘Bella Swan’) at her press day for a sweet little indie she did for Mary Stuart Masterson called The Cake Eaters, and of course we made sure to get the Twilight scoop.

When asked what she thought about the bad press she’s been getting in the wake of her Nylon interview, Stewart is adamant that her words are being taken out of context—professing, believably might I add—to having nothing but the utmost respect and care for the Twilight story and situation as a whole. “I love the Twilight fans. I have literally never said anything remotely negative about them,” she told us.

So all the hullaballoo? She attributed that to learning the ropes about what is going to read in print and what isn’t. “You have to stay away from certain key words that can be twisted in a negative connotation. Like the word ‘psychotic’ apparently is really bad,” she said, provoking laughter around the table.

“I feel like it’s a really humble position to take that it’s not normal—you know what I mean?—to find yourself in a situation where there are 5,000 screaming girls. I feel like that’s not normal and it’s not something I should just say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s really cool, I love them,’” she continued. “I feel like everything I said in that Nylon interview, if you actually read the whole thing, was very honest and genuine and talking about something that I am so immersed in and I have absolutely no control over. And I’m just trying to stay honest and true to something that I care about.”

According to Stewart, cameras are set to start rolling on the next installment of the Twilight saga, New Moon, on March 23rd and she’s eager to dive back in. “It’s a completely different story. It’s like it completely undermines the first,” she explained. “Edward’s gone and for me that was the whole story. It’s hard for me to get past—I don’t know how Bella’s going to deal with that. She matures. A lot. And it’s a much more painful story than the first one. It’s actually quite devastating. It’s a smaller scale as well. She’s very solitary for quite a while, so that will be interesting. I’m excited about that.”

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