“I’m really excited for ‘New Moon,’ ” grinned the 23-year-old star, stopping by MTV’s offices Wednesday to promote the “Twilight” DVD hitting stores March 21. “I go on Sunday the 8th to rehearse and do our screen tests and make sure the contacts fit — which I’m not looking forward to. But we do rehearsals for about a week, and then I go up in April and we start shooting.”

and AnnaLynne McCord are potentials in it, but I think that’s all the stuff like ‘Michael Copon to play Jacob,’ ” he laughed, remembering the actor who had supposedly taken the role from Taylor Lautner. “I’ve known AnnaLynne for years now. It would be fun to work with her, but I won’t have any scenes with her; [she'd be] doing the Italy stuff.

“Her potential character is Heidi. I think they’re looking for someone who is local up in Vancouver,” he revealed of the recent casting scuttlebutt. “I don’t know what the chances are of her getting it.”

Along those same lines, we had to ask Kellan about the rumor that Jacob’s American-Indian friends (including fan favorite Solomon Trimble) are being replaced for the sequels, and he revealed that some unnamed friends are in the running to populate the Quileute tribe.

“I know [casting director] Joseph Middleton has been reading some of my friends for the werewolves’ parts,” Lutz told us, saying that new director Chris Weitz is determined to keep the American-Indian actors genuine this time. “[They're] really sticking to them and making sure of their ancestry, that they are real Native Americans. They asked a buddy of mine to bring in his family tree to show that he was part Navajo! It’s interesting; I really think it is important to have somewhat-real Native Americans to play these roles to some degree, but it’s really interesting to see the way things are handled.”

Asked for the names of his possible Quileute friends, Lutz grinned. “I could tell you,” he replied, “but then I’d have to hurt you.”

The most interesting revelation of our interview, however, might have been for Lutz rather than us. When we asked him about Summit Entertainment’s announcement two weeks ago of the release date for “Eclipse,” the actor was genuinely surprised to hear the news that he’d be immersed in Emmett until at least mid-2010.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard that!” he marveled. “I’m the last to know anything. It’s been funny doing these conventions that a bunch of us castmembers have been doing, to a bunch of states and countries. The fans know more of what’s going on with our jobs than I do!”

As we all know by now, Twilight was one of last year’s biggest hits, New Moon starts shooting any minute now, and the studio most recently announced they’ve officially started work on developing Eclipse.

“We all really hope there is going to be a number four,” Stewart, 18, told me yesterday afternoon when we sat down to chat in a suite at L.A.’s Sofitel hotel. “I’m pretty confident that the fans aren’t going to all of a sudden lose interest. The only case that a fourth one wouldn’t be made is if all of a sudden people stopped caring, and I really don’t think that’s going to happen.”

And that’s not about to happen for Stewart, either. In fact, she’d like to set the record straight about critics who have come to attack her as some sort of Hollywood ingrate who doesn’t think very highly of Twilight or its more dedicated—some would say obsessed—fan base.

“I love the fans,” she insists. “I feel like I am one of the fans and any direct interaction I’ve ever had with them has been the most warm and pleasant and enthusiastic. If anything, it’s the biggest driving force that could propel you to do something.”

That doesn’t mean all the new attention—OK, hysteria—can’t be overwhelming at times. But when she was recently quoted in a magazine as describing some of these experiences as “psychotic,” some felt she was taking a dig at the fans. “It’s not normal for me to be in a situation that Twilight puts you in,” she explains. “It’s not personally normal for me to see 5,000 screaming girls. But I’m not criticizing them for being ‘crazy’ about me. I’m sort of going, “Wow, this is just crazy!’ ”

Crazy too are the yet to be proven rumors that she and Robert Pattinson are more than just friends. “Rob and I are great friends,” Stewart says. “But I understand why you would assume that when we lean on each other for support, there must be something more…And I’m not criticizing anyone for thinking it either. If anything, they’re really perceptive, because they can see a closeness.” (Her longtime boyfriend, actor Michael Angarano, isn’t fazed by the talk either. “We laugh about it,” Stewart says.)

When Stewart wasn’t at the Oscars last month, critics pounced again. Did she dislike Twilight so much that she wasn’t willing to support it like Pattinson, who was a first-time presenter? Was she scared the supposed secret romance between her and her costar would be too hard to hide if they appeared together on the same stage on Hollywood’s biggest night?

Um, no! She had a very good reason for not being there—she wasn’t asked. “If I was invited to the Oscars, I would be there in a nanosecond,” she says. “If I got an invitation to the Oscars, I wouldn’t turn it down!”

Perhaps next year she and Pattinson could sing together at the Oscars? Late last month, the two engaged in some late-night karaoke while promoting Twilight in Tokyo. Stewart and Pattinson covered Elton John’s “Your Song.” “Rob could definitely do a musical,” Stewart says.

Also belting out tunes were Hugh Jackman and director Baz Luhrmann, who were in Tokyo for the local premiere of Australia. When Stewart first arrived at the bar, Pattinson and Jackman were already engaged in a “really, really elaborate ABBA moment.” Later on, Luhrmann joined Pattinson at the mic. “It was really funny seeing Baz Luhrmann and Rob singing a David Bowie song,” Stewart says. “It was a talky one so they both could sort of talk to each other, and they were riffing back and forth.”

She adds with a laugh, “They were looking longingly into each other’s eyes.”

As for Stewart, she starts rehearsals for New Moon next week, followed by about four months of filming in Vancouver and Italy with new director Chris Weitz. Then she’s off to play Joan Jett in a biopic about her 1970s all-girl band, The Runaways. Stewart plans to do her own singing. “I don’t see any reason not to,” she says. “If it’s not going to be Joan, it’s going to be me.”

Her research included spending New Year’s Eve with Jett. “We were in a little city in Washington and she played through midnight,” Stewart says. “And then we spent, like, hours into the morning talking.”

On her plate right now are two upcoming indies. In the quirky and very sweet Adventureland, from Superbad director Greg Mottola, she’s an angst-ridden coed spending her summer working at her hometown amusement park, where she finds herself torn between a married man (Ryan Reynolds) and a lovable nerd (Jesse Eisenberg). In first-time director Mary Stuart Masterson’s The Cake Eaters, she’s a high school student with a fatal neurological disorder trying to find love before it’s too late.

“I get to do something that literally if I didn’t get to do I would implode,” Stewart says of acting. “There’s really no better position for me to be in right now in my life, and I am entirely grateful.”

Source.

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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Publishers had fretted openly about how they would maintain sales after the publication of the final part of the series Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Figures published by the retailer amazon.com show Meyer’s books dominating the top 10 lists for the last year in Britain, the US, Canada and France, enjoying an international success not seen since the height of “Potter-mania”.

In many of the national lists, compiled to chart international reading habits for World Book Day on Thursday her name appears two or three times in the top 10.

The American author has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide of her series Twilight – which was made into a film – New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn.

Kes Nielsen, head of books buying at the British arm amazon.co.uk said it was rare for a book to have such appeal in many different countries at the same time.

“Stephenie Meyer, in particular, has achieved incredible success across all the English-speaking nations and Europe and many will say that her Twilight series has filled the hole left by Harry Potter.

“Indeed, I don’t think we have seen one author have so many books in the best-sellers lists since J K Rowling in the early days of the boy wizard.”

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So far, audiences seem sold on the film, sight unseen. Twilight cost $37 million to make, but judging from the groundswell of support from Meyer’s fans—many of them teenage girls—producers should have little trouble recouping their costs, especially considering the ensemble cast of young male heartthrobs they’ve assembled. Meyer may not be J.K. Rowling, but she’s certainly no slouch. The final book in the series, Breaking Dawn, sold about 1.3 million copies on the day it was released last August (about a sixth of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ first day). Translation rights to the books have been sold in thirty-three different countries, and the second, New Moon, spent thirty-three weeks on the New York Times children’s best-seller list. Vampire stories have some staying power—especially vampire stories about lovelorn kids.

In adapting the first book, Hardwicke and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg opted to stay faithful to Meyer’s narrative. (Probably a wise decision, considering how rabid the readership is.) Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is an average teen living in Phoenix who decides to move to her father’s house in Forks, Washington, a dreary place where it rains three-quarters of the year, to give her mother and her new stepfather time to travel. At school, Bella meets Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), an alluring and initially distant presence, whom she begins to suspect is a vampire. As it turns out, Edward belongs to a coven of beautiful vegetarian vamps—a family of sorts, brought together by a shared mandate to drink animal blood instead of the human kind.

The two begin a relationship, fraught with all the usual, uh, interfaith difficulties. Meanwhile, a rival group of equally beautiful but less friendly bloodsuckers descends on the town, one of whom decides to hunt Bella for sport. The chase is on, and it’s up to Edward to save her. “It’s just such a great metaphor for unrequited love,” says Rosenberg. “Bella feels very normal, and that can be hard when she’s surrounded by these modelesque figures, who are so difficult to relate to physically. It’s the same for any kid growing up in L.A., when you’re surrounded by models and actors.”

Perhaps energized by the beauty-myth subtext and the allure of forbidden love, Meyer’s fan base has proven to be an active one. Groups like Twilighters, Twi-Hards, and even Twilight Moms have organized online, and in July they flocked to San Diego’s Comic-Con, where Meyer, Hardwicke, Rosenberg, and members of the principal cast showed footage and took questions from the crowd—at least when they could be heard over the screams. The response to actors Robert Pattinson, Cam Gigandet, and Taylor Lautner was “a little like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan,” Rosenberg recalls. “It was insanity.” The coming-of-age story’s sequels have yet to be planned, but given the reaction so far, Hardwicke is sanguine about her chances of revisiting the series. “I mean,” she says, “who wouldn’t want to be bitten on the neck by a handsome vampire?”

TWILIGHT IS OUT IN NOVEMBER 2008 FROM SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT

See all 11 photoshoots by VMAN Magazine

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Taylor Lautner’s smile arrives in the hotel lobby before he does — a huge white movie-star grin.

The 16-year-old Hudsonville native has a lot to smile about.

Monday, he’ll be on TV in one of NBC’s most-hyped shows of the new season, a spy drama called “My Own Worst Enemy,” starring Christian Slater.

The buzz couldn’t be bigger for his November movie, “Twilight,” based on the phenomenally popular teen vampire books by Stephenie Meyer.

Last month, his cool quotient went up when he was a presenter at MTV’s Video Music Awards, appearing with “Twilight” co-stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.

As Kimberly writes on the Taylor Lautner fan Web site: “Taylor is SO SO SO SO SO HOT!”

Taylor hails from Hudsonville but moved to Los Angeles in 2003 to pursue an acting career.

Things worked out. His big break came at age 13 when he was cast as Shark Boy in the 2005 movie “The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl.” Then he won a role in “Cheaper by the Dozen 2,” with Steve Martin and Hilary Duff.

He sat down to chat in the hotel lobby at Country Inn and Suites on 28th Street SE, where his family stayed during a recent trip to Michigan to visit family.

He’s wearing the jeans and hip T-shirt of a 16-year-old, but he has the confident self-assuredness of somebody older. Easygoing with a near constant smile, Taylor seems comfortable in his skin, although he has this disconcerting jiggly knee thing he calls “my worst habit.” He twists his hip, styled-but-messy hair with his fingers a lot as he talks.

Taylor says he’s a regular kid who loves football, movies and cake batter ice cream. He poses shirtless for teen heartthrob photos, but still says stuff like, “Oh, my goodness.”

“I’m no different than anybody else,” he shrugs.

Except girls everywhere are giddily typing, “I love him sooooo much!” and “His smile makes me melt” on Internet fan sites. He’s featured in just about every teen magazine on the stands. He’s all over YouTube.

“I try not to pay attention to it,” he says of the “Taylor is so hot” talk. “That stuff just comes with it.”

That stuff is building with the frenetic anticipation of the teen vampire film “Twilight,” which opens Nov. 21.

When Taylor auditioned for a role in the film last November, he had never heard of the book.

“My agent said, ‘You really want this — it’s a big one.’”

He auditioned, then heard they had narrowed it down to three actors to play Jacob Black, a teen werewolf.

As days and weeks passed, “I realized how big it was,” he says. “Suddenly, it was all over the Internet. I started hearing about all the hype, all the fans. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness. If I get this, it’ll be huge.’ I realized I really want this.”

Not since Harry Potter has a book-to-film project inspired so much excitement. More than 100 fan sites are devoted to the “Twilight” phenomenon, some solely about Taylor’s popular character, Jacob Black.

A month after Taylor auditioned, he got a phone call. His dad, his agent and his manager were all on the phone.

“I knew,” he says with a grin. “I was sweating, I was so excited.”

His character is introduced in the first book of the series, but isn’t huge. “I’m only in three scenes in the first movie,” he says.

But Jacob becomes a big part of the story in the books that follow, as his rivalry with vampire Edward intensifies. Which means fans already are rabid for the loyal werewolf.

Taylor was amid the frenzy at RiverTown Crossings’ Barnes & Noble in August at the midnight-release party for the final book in the “Twilight” series, “Breaking Dawn.” In town to visit family, he dropped in for a surprise visit.

As he entered the book store, he heard the buzz start: “That’s Jacob Black! It’s Jacob Black!”

“Then I heard this mom say, ‘No, that kid’s name is Taylor. He used to live across the street from me.’ And the girls said, ‘No, that’s Jacob Black.’ And the mom said, ‘No, that’s Taylor — he’s my old neighbor.’” He laughs.

“She didn’t know I was gonna be in the movie.”

He signed books for two hours.

“I didn’t realize 1,000 girls were gonna be there,” he says. He stayed at the bookstore, signing and posing for photos, until the last gleeful girl had left — at 2 a.m.

“I would feel miserable if I left and there were still 100 girls who had been waiting two hours to get my autograph,” he says.

He says nothing prepared him for the reaction at Comic-Con International in July in San Diego — the huge convention for comic books and other popular art forms — when 125,000 people tried to get into a preview of the “Twilight” film and a panel discussion with the cast. Only 6,500 fit in the auditorium.

“There were 11,000 people waiting in line for autographs,” he says, shaking his head. While he was there, he and other cast members did 52 online and radio interviews and 25 TV interviews, he says.

How does he keep from getting a big head?

Taylor laughs.

“My parents wouldn’t allow it,” he says. “That’s not the way they brought me up.”

Taylor’s dad, Dan, says as Taylor’s star rises, so does their determination to keep him grounded.

“Because of all that’s happening for him, we want him to do normal things,” Dan says. “We kept him in public school as long as we could, so he could be with his peers. We give him responsibilities at home — chores he has to do. He gets an allotted allowance and he has to budget it.

“We’re trying to teach him things, so that when he goes out on his own, he’ll be prepared.”

It’s been a crazy couple of months for the whole family, Dan says, adjusting to Taylor’s increasingly higher profile among obsessed fans as buzz builds for the “Twilight” movie. They’re doing their best, he says, to keep their son’s personal life private.

“We want to protect him,” he says. They also want to celebrate.

“We had no idea what was gonna happen,” Dan says of his son’s career. “We tell him ‘You have no idea what’s gonna happen tomorrow, so enjoy today. Have fun.’”

Early days

Taylor was born in Grand Rapids and lived on Rosewood Avenue SE until he was 4, then moved to Hudsonville with his parents Dan, a commercial airline pilot, and mom Deb, a former Herman Miller employee and now project manager for a software development company. He has a younger sister, Makena, 9.

A sports kid, he loved wrestling, football, basketball. At age 6, he started lessons at Fabiano’s Karate in Holland.

By age 7, he attended his first national karate tournament in Louisville, Ky. There, he met Mike Chat, who specialized in extreme karate, with stunts and flips. He ran a camp at UCLA and invited Taylor to attend.

“I fell in love,” he says. “By the end of the camp, I was doing aerial cartwheels with no hands.”

He trained with Chat for the next several years, earning his black belt and winning several junior world championships. Chat suggested Taylor try acting.

“He saw that I wasn’t shy, that I was confident, that I talked a lot,” Taylor says.

That you were cute?

He looks embarrassed. “Yeah, I guess.”

The Lautners would fly to California for auditions when the talent agency called.

“They’d call at 9 or 10 at night, which was 6 or 7 their time, and say, ‘We’ve got an audition tomorrow — can you be here?’ We’d leave really early in the morning and get there about noon,” Taylor says. “I’d go to the audition in the afternoon, take the red-eye back to Grand Rapids then go to school.”

They’d do that a couple of times a month. Taylor was 11.

“Then we decided, ‘This is insane,’” he says. “We can’t keep on doing this.” The family decided to move to L.A. for a month, “to try it,” he says.

“I got one call-back,” he says. “That gave me the drive to keep going.” He grins. “It happened on our very last day there.”

The next step — move there for six months. Taylor landed a Rugrats movie commercial for Nickelodeon.

“It was my first job — I was so ecstatic,” he says with a grin. “I thought, ‘This is what I’ve been waiting for.’”

The Lautners moved to L.A. five years ago.

“It was a big deal to leave,” Taylor says. “All our family was here.” His dad’s family is in Traverse City, his mom’s in Manistee. Several aunts and uncles live in Hudsonville.

“There were more auditions. I heard no, no, no, no. So many times.” He says karate helped him hang in there.

“From karate, I had the confidence and drive to push myself,” he says.

He had those traits early, says his former karate instructor and family friend Tom Fabiano, who started teaching Taylor when he was 6.

“A lot of boys that age are bouncing off the walls, but Taylor was always deliberate, focused,” says Fabiano, owner and instructor of Fabiano’s Karate in Holland. “He wasn’t a typical kid. He always worked extra hard.”

Taylor stops by to see him every time he’s in town visiting family, Fabiano says.

“He signs autographs for all the kids, poses for pictures. He’s still that well-mannered, great kid.”

Moms love him, too, Fabiano adds with a laugh.

“There was one mom here, a big ‘Twilight’ fan, and when I told her Taylor was gonna stop in she screamed, ‘I have to meet him!’”

In his first months in L.A., Taylor landed some small TV roles and voice-over work. Then, at 12, he won a starring role in the movie “The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl,” a superhero kid movie directed by Robert Rodriguez, who had directed the popular “Spy Kids” films.

“Oh, we freaked out,” Taylor says with a grin. “My whole family couldn’t sleep for, like, a week.”

When “Shark Boy” hit theaters in summer 2005, Taylor was in Canada filming “Cheaper by the Dozen 2,” playing Eliot Murtaugh, a neighbor of the Baker family. He had scenes with Steve Martin.

“That’s when I stopped looking at movie stars as movie stars, and just looked at them as people,” he says.

He returned from Canada to newfound fame as the kid star of “Shark Boy.”

“Ten-year-old boys were the ones who first recognized me,” he says. “I’d be in the store, and boys would whisper to their moms. Then the moms would say, ‘Excuse me — are you Shark Boy?”

He grins.

“I just thought it was so cool,” he says. “I couldn’t believe people wanted my picture.”

The number of fans approaching him tripled after “Cheaper by the Dozen 2,” he says. “But now, it was girls.”

At school, he says, he remained a regular kid.

“Kids still looked at me as Taylor, because they knew me from before,” he says. “You gotta remember who your friends were before you got famous.” There are people, he says, who “suddenly want to be your best friend.”

Monday night, he’ll be more famous.

In “My Own Worst Enemy,” which debuts at 10 p.m. Monday on NBC, he plays Jack Spivey, the teenage son of main character Henry Spivey, played by Christian Slater. Commercials have been hyping the show for weeks.

“My character is a star varsity soccer player,” Taylor says. “And I’m gonna be able to use some of my martial arts.” He grins. “It’ll be cool.”

He’s firmly rooted in Hollywood, “but I love coming back here,” Taylor says of Michigan. “In L.A., whatever you do for fun, you gotta spend money. Here, you go jet skiing on a lake. It’s such a fun place for me. I go fishing with one set of grandparents, I go quad riding with the other set. We go trap shooting. It’s so much fun.

“Here, people are way more down-to-earth.”

Lautner may be “just like everybody else,” but he’s movie-star guarded about his personal life.

“I date, like any teen,” he says. Girlfriend?

He laughs.

“My dad won’t let me.”

Five things to know about Taylor Lautner:

Source.

But the comparison with Harry Potter ends at cost: Twilight came in at only a $37 million negative cost. This notion of a low-cost blockbuster for a start-up studio just doesn’t happen often in the film biz. So if the movie lives up to the advance hype, Summit will be sitting on a big new franchise. How big? Well, the new Twilight trailer played with Quarantine this weekend and as soon as the title came up, a chorus of high-pitched screams of joy emanated from the women in the audience in one Southern California theater. Only to be properly drowned out by a loud chorus of male boos. It’s conventional wisdom that boys won’t go because there’s not enough gory fang action. But Summit is also marketing to an online contingent called Twilight Moms because of the chaste love story set in the picturesque locale of Oregon and directed by thirteen’s Catherine Hardwicke. Still, I think Summit is lowballing by hoping for a $20M North American opening weekend from 3,500+ venues.

Like Potter, Twilight has a built-in audience of book fans with, a total 7.5 million domestic sales for all four Stephanie Meyer novels in the series which was a New York Times #1 bestseller for 59 weeks. Not to mention big sales overseas like Italy, Germany and the UK. That’s one reason Twilight is opening day and date in 10 territories, including the U.S.

Summit may spend in the high $30sM for P&A. That’s a bargain consider skyrocketing marketing costs in the movie biz. That’s because indies these days must spend more efficiently than studios by not just attracting long lines at Comic-Con but almost solely relying on My Space and other social networks instead of costly TV ads. Look, for example, at how Summit rolled out the new trailer. First, Nancy Kirkpatrick (one of the best in the biz) heightened fan anticipation by creating a countdown clock to the widget. Then came the trailer’s free debut on Entertainment Tonight. That night, Summit gave fans a special opportunity to see it online first as a way of thanking them for their support. The trailer was streamed through Twilight’s widget from 8 PM to 9 PM for fans, then debuted for the general audience in HD on MySpace Trailer Park at 9 PM. The result: 2 million views in the first 24 hours on MySpace alone and 3.5 million views in cyberspace within the first 48 hours.

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The 22-year-old first caught our eye as the ill-fated Cedric Diggory in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.”

The “Potter” films made Daniel Radcliffe an international superstar, and we predict Robert will follow in his footsteps.

The British-born actor plays the lead in the film adaptation of a successful fantasy book franchise: Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight.”

Robert portrays Edward Cullen, a vampire who appears to be 17 years old but has been living for over a century. Edward falls in love with Bella Swan, a human girl, and must protect her from being hunted by rival vampires. Their relationship forms the foundation of “Twilight” and the consequent novels “New Moon,” “Eclipse,” and “Breaking Dawn.”

Robert is perfect for the role! He’s handsome in a brooding, Johnny-Depp kind of way, with just a hint of danger in his eyes. Like his fictional counterpart, Robert is very musical. In fact, his songs will be featured in the “Twilight” soundtrack. He’s also athletic, which helped him film action scenes, including a high-speed chase through the forest.

Since wrapping up “Twilight,” Robert’s been able to explore the Hollywood scene in relative anonymity.

Enjoy it while it lasts Robert, because soon you won’t be able to go anywhere without screaming fans and paparazzi wanting to sink their teeth into you!

“Twilight” is a far cry from anything that’s come before for Stewart, whose resume boasts roles in films by directors as diverse as Mike Figgis, David Gordon Green, Jon Favreau and Sean Penn.

The first to be filmed in the bestselling series of teen fantasy novels by Stephenie Meyer, “Twilight” centers on a romance between Bella and forever-17 vampire Edward Cullen. Thousands of teen girls would kill to be in her shoes.

Indeed, Stewart already had a taste of her imminent fame at last summer’s San Diego Comic-Con panel, where she was greeted by the kind of screaming one usually associates with a Miley Cyrus concert. “That was the first time a physical manifestation of what everyone was talking about presented itself to me,” she says, still a little shell-shocked.

Stewart says it was Bella’s novelty that made her want to play the part. “She doesn’t fit into the obvious role of victim,” she explains. “The power balance is fascinating between her and the vampire. It’s funny that she is so unsure and tortured about this relationship and that she is surefooted and confident for no reason. Bella is a powerful character.”

“Twilight” may make her a star, but Stewart is already thinking about what’s next, including “Welcome to the Rileys,” starring James Gandolfini, and “Adventureland,” directed by Greg Mottola.

“I was thrilled to do (“Adventureland”) because it takes place in the 1980s and Jesse Eisenberg was already involved,” says the actress. “It was a very cool project because we were in a theme park doing a comedy with the ‘Superbad’ team.”

Recent breakthrough: Landed the role of Bella Swan in “Twilight.” If you don’t know what that is, ask any teen girl.

Role model: “My grandma, for her strength and resilience.”

What’s next: “Adventureland,” in which she plays opposite 14-year-old Jesse Eisenberg of “The Squid and the Whale” fame.

From http://www.variety.com

That’s an understatement of course, considering the rabid success of Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling four-book series, whose fans call themselves “Twihards.”

“The book is incredible. It draws you in. You feel what it feels like to be this teenage girl,” says Hardwicke, who met Summit’s Eric Feig and Patrick Wachsberger by chance at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where she was a juror. At the time, “Twilight” had only a small, albeit devoted, fanbase. “I don’t think any of us had any idea it was going to turn into this,” she says.

Today, “Twilight” is a full-fledged pop-culture phenomenon, and Hardwicke is feeling the pressure of pleasing the ever-growing audience of fans. Finding the right Edward Cullen, she says, “I think would be clearly the biggest casting challenge ever on the face of the earth. Because he’s in every scene, he has to be this great actor, 17 years old, pale and the most beautiful man on the planet. I got calls from people of all ages: ‘You’d better get this right, Catherine.’”

She picked 22-year-old Robert Pattinson, of “Harry Potter” fame. Many of her other actors are still teens, including Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner. “Thirteen” star Nikki Reed, now 20, also appears as young Rosalie Hale.

“It’s been really a wild process, but really fun that the fans have been so excited about it,” Hardwicke says. “We’d be in the middle of the night freezing our asses off in the rain and there would still somehow be 25 die-hard fans that found us. I want them to love this movie.”

Recent breakthrough: “Twilight” has been called “the next ‘Harry Potter,’” and her adaptation brought the teen girls screaming at Comic-Con.

Role models: “Thirteen” collaborator Nikki Reed. “She’s got a lot of fire and spice. I’d love to work someday with Dakota Fanning. I don’t know what the right project is, but she does blow my mind.”

What’s next: “I’m looking at everything else (asking), Is it as cool as ‘Twilight’?”

From Variety