Those creative risks paid off at the box office, as Twilight made a staggering $407 million worldwide, making Hardwicke one of the most successful female directors of all time. Its monumental financial success left the ambitious director hopeful for the future of her filmmaking career.

“I immediately thought, ‘I’m going to get to do anything I want after this’. But that wasn’t the case,” she recollects. “At the time, people weren’t shining a light on female directors, so all the other Twilight movies were directed by men. The Hunger Games movies were directed by men, and Divergent too.”

Despite her passion for the Twilight franchise, Hardwicke chose to not return for the sequels, to focus on developing her original films. However, if she had returned, Hardwicke says she would have done things differently.

“I try to make a film in a personal way and I think they got less personal,” she says of the subsequent four installments, “I would have stayed with the tone that we created in the first film, where you’re more intimate with the characters.”

After Meyer published 2020’s Midnight Sun, a re-telling of the Twilight story from Edward’s perspective, it seems the Twilight universe may return to the big-screen in the future – and Hardwicke doesn’t rule out revisiting the franchise.

“Sure – I love it still,” she says, before offering a curveball for a new direction for the franchise. “I’d love to do it in outer space. That would be awesome.”

“I’d love to do something with it. I’m not against it, as I’m very interested in cool stories like Twilight and creating another world. I’m open to anything.”

For now, though, Hardwicke is at the helm of a new female-led dark comedy, Mafia Mamma. Each of her films might be “quite different” but the focus remains the same - to “just live in somebody else’s skin for a while”.

“I thought [Mafia Mamma] was kind of great,” she says, “This woman has been silenced and ignored. Her husband doesn’t really care about her, her son is ready to go away to college and her bosses are toxic men who don’t respect her voice. So the fact that she finally finds her voice as the film progresses is exciting.”

“We were also still filming during the pandemic, and I knew I wanted Toni Collette and for the film to be a fun, female empowerment story about a woman finding her voice and some cool revenge in there too.”

Mafia Mamma is available to stream on Prime Video from November 17.

Images: Courtesy of Catherine Hardwicke, Getty, Gilles Bensimon

Twilight at 15: Catherine Hardwicke on creating a cult classic and whether she’d return to the franchise