Vampires come out at night and go to the Manitoban

Anyone whose read Stephenie Meyers’ series Twilight when it first came out in October 2005 is unlikely to have been surprised by the success the series has enjoyed. The books rival even the phenomenal Harry Potter series in terms of sales and now seek to do the same on the silver screen.

The film adaptation of Twilight, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, hit theatres last weekend, and as with any highly anticipated bit of cinematic pop culture, the Internet has been buzzing with excitement and speculation for months. Fans of the novel have increasingly high expectations for the film as the release date approached, and if they were disappointed, the backlash would be severe.

The new film, Twilight, covers the first stage of protagonist Bella Swan’s romance de rigueur with local high school heartthrob Edward Cullen. The catch? Edward is a 100-plus years old vampire with an almost unbearable craving for Bella’s blood. The Manitoban was invited to participate in a roundtable interview with English actor Robert Pattinson who portrays Edward in the film.

It is unarguably a daunting task to try to fulfill the hopes of thousands of teenage girls whose laments of “Edward Cullen looks different in my head” are already echoing through the blogosphere. How did Pattinson deal with the expectations?

“By ignoring it,” he said with a laugh.

Pattinson approached his character with the mindset that the Edward we read in the book is Bella’s idealized vision of him, and that she “would see him however she wanted to see him and it wouldn’t necessarily have to correspond to reality.”

The approach gave Pattinson room to interpret the character more freely, and he explains that his movie Edward isn’t “as strong as he seems in the book.” Likewise, Bella (played by Kristen Stewart) might show a bit differently in the film than what fans expect, as without Bella’s own self-deprecating internal discourse “she seems to have just as much hidden depth as Edward does.”

Twilight is largely driven by Edward and Bella’s intense love connection. As Pattinson describes it is that “whenever these two people are together the rest of the world just tones down.”

Just how difficult was it to translate that passion to film?

“There was something that was just natural about the casting [ . . . ] We tried to just play it and time will tell if it worked or not.”

Despite his seemingly blasé attitude toward the film’s success, Pattinson took his portrayal of Edward very seriously. In preparation, Pattinson went to the Oregon location months before the rest of the cast and crew. He spent the time in seclusion, “reading the books and script obsessively” in order to capture Edward’s solitude.

Pattinson mostly did his own stunts, including wire work, which he described as being “really hard [ . . . ] I had to be sort of agile and look like I was controlling the movement.”

However, the biggest challenge of playing Edward was neither the stunts nor the American accent (Pattinson’s first on film), but rather capturing Edward’s “fundamental effect on people [ . . . ] there’s an elemental attraction and fear which he emanates all the time.”

Pattinson credits Gyorgy Legeti’s Requiem for inspiring his “scary face,” and explains that “the hardest thing was to be scary because [Edward] is and he’s supposed to be scary and when you’re trying to be pretty and scary at the same time, it’s quite tough.”

Pattinson portrayed young wizard Cedric Diggory in two Harry Potter films. Much was made online of the fact that the eight-month delayed release of the latest Harry Potter installment, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, was to avoid box office competition with Twilight. Any comment, Pattison?

“I wouldn’t go about teasing the Harry Potter people. They’ll just bring the hammer down [ . . . ] It’s so weird to me that [Twilight’s] ended up with so many connections to Harry Potter.”

Many of Pattinson’s previous roles have had a supernatural element to them. When asked if he has an affinity for such material, Pattinson seems amused.

“Every single job I’ve done has been some kind of period thing or some kind of supernatural thing [ . . . ] it’s kind of been totally random that I’ve done all these supernatural jobs but [ . . . ] I hope to eventually play a sort of normal person in modern day.”

Perhaps some innate quality of his lends itself to such roles? When asked what he and Edward have in common, Pattinson observed that “when you’re doing jobs for a long time you forget which parts of the character you had before, within yourself in your real life, and which parts just start happening because you’re thinking about them all the time.” This is a bit of a mysterious statement, but then again, Edward has “kind of an enigmatic, mystery thing to him.”

Those who want to uncover the mystery for themselves will just have see Twilight.

—With files from Ashley Gaboury.