Catherine Hardwicke, Queen of the Universe - Heir Apparent

This week I got to do a phoner with Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the upcoming world-taker-over-er, Twilight.

If you do not know what Twilight is, then you are neither a teenaged girl nor a horny housewife. Since I think being neither of those is a good thing, then I will tell you that Twilight is a series of books about a prenaturally responsible teenaged girl named Bella who falls in love with a vampire. In short it is: tween porn, and the books have successfully managed to knock Harry Potter off the shelves, so you can imagine that the movie will take over the universe (assuming it is not an hour and a half of a vampire farting) with equal vigor.

The fans of the book are of the completely Star Trek, Star Wars, fanatical, insane 'No, Edward Cullen died in 1887 not 1886, you moron' variety. But instead of getting out more, they are busy cutting up construction paper in their basements to make daisy chains counting down the days until the movie hits the theaters (Wait, no one has done daisy chains since I counted down the days to George Michael's birthday in 1987? Oh well.)

Anyhow, so the movie is going to be HUGE, and Catherine Hardwicke is basically going to go from being a tiny indie movie director that no one paid much mind to to 'Will you please bring the blue Maserati around, Jeeves? The red one doesn't match my outfit.' She has directed three movies before this one--Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown, and last year's Nativity Story and has basically been able to go low profile. Not so much anymore.

For that reason, I got to profile her for a big-name industry magazine, which means that when you email anyone's people and say, 'I want to interview X' they say, 'Are you sure you only want X? We can also give you the head of the studio and the Princess of Canada if you would like.' So that's nice. I got a half hour on the phone with her, which is basically unheard of for dinkier outlets such as I usually write for.

She is very cool and chill and 'yeah, man' and happy and in no way acted like she was sick of answering the same questions over and over. She also called me from what must be her cell phone. This is the second time someone has called me from their private number (normally the handlers connect the calls through lots of blocked lines and hotel suites and whatnot) and neglected to block the number. So now, in short, if I feel like calling Catherine Hardwicke to hang out or trying to get her to buy someone's Girl Scout Cookies, I have the direct line. I have a feeling once she becomes Queen Twilight, this won't happen anymore.