JC: Is it true that you were in the running to direct "Twilight"?
GVS: Yeah. In an interview, Robert Pattinson was asked, "What's up for the next Twilight?" They had been asked this a thousand times. So he said, "We want to get a filmmaker like Gus Van Sant to do the next one." I was surprised at reading this and I thought, "Am I actually considered? Am I in the running? Would they actually even think that way?" So I told my agent to put my name in the hat.
I went out to the interview and, naively, I wasn't aware that I was expected to sell [myself to] them. They wanted to see your plan even though the plan was to do the movie exactly the way the book read, because if you deviated an inch, you'd be killed by the fans. Of course, the other filmmakers who were much more savvy had long 45-minute displays of these ideas and they got the job. It was a really bad scene because I got really nervous and I realized it was just completely going down. Obviously, I screwed the whole thing up.
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