Melissa Rosenberg is one of U.S. television’s most prominent writers with credits such as Ally McBeal, The Outer Limits, The O.C. and most recently Dexter. However, these days she’s more well-known as the poor soul who must adapt the Twilight novels into screenplays. This month sees the release of Eclipse, the third in the series and a considerably darker film than its predecessors. Melissa spoke to TD about her work on the Twilight series and the reason why US television drama is so damn good nowadays.
The Twilight franchise is outrageously popular. Is it daunting to take on the challenge of adapting the novels?
Well I’m thrilled to be a part of it, that’s for sure. It is daunting. And its also surreal. It’s so separate from my day to day life. I wake up, I go to my office and I sit at my computer and I have to come up with the next idea which is a very humbling experience. It’s very grounded, day in day out. It’s just me and my dog hanging out in my office every day and then you go out and you see this frenzy that surrounds the movies and all this connection and you think “wow, I wrote those”. It’s very divorced from reality for me.
What approach do you take to the material in terms of making it cinematic?
Film is a visual medium, the direction, the actors can tell so much more than dialogue can so very often what I’m doing is actually taking dialogue away so that the actors can tell the story with a look or a visual representation. It’s really about letting the visual tell the story and not just dialogue. I think a lot of people think writing screenplays is about writing dialogue but that’s just a very, very small part of what the screenwriter does.
Eclipse is much darker in tone than the previous two novels. Did you embrace the darkness of Eclipse?
I completely agree. It is darker. And the stakes just continue to grow and I completely embraced it. My job is to really bring the novel to the screen. There have always been dark undertones to all the Twilight movies but this one gave me the freedom to go even darker. It’s kind of my natural tendency anyway. I like dark. I like edgy.
Why is the Twilight franchise so popular?
I would say it’s two-fold. One, you have the character of Bella who is such a universal character. She is the “everygirl”. Everyone can see themselves in her. So you have a character that brings you into a world and everything is told from her perspective so you have a very intimate guide into the world. And then you place this character into this very epic romance. It’s so evocative for older people of their youth and the rush of first love and for younger people it’s just everything you could hope for.
People say TV is going through its best and worst time ever regarding quality. TV drama is better than ever but there’s a lot of terrible reality TV out there too. Do you have any thoughts on this?
I honestly feel that some of the best writing in the film industry in general is going on in television. And that has a lot to do with cable coming to the forefront. Cable is a very creative place to be. On network television you’re writing twenty episodes per season. You’re lucky if you get to write a second draft of a script. The time limitations are not particularly conducive to good writing. So when you have a successful, high quality network show, it’s amazing. I’m always in awe of the people who can pull that off because it’s very difficult. With cable, you’re doing only ten or twelve episodes and you have time.
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is in cinemas from July 9th.
Words: Charlene Lydon
