Twilight Watch: Stephenie Meyer Says Fans May Swoo...

Twilight author Stephenie Meyer added an update to her blog today after a visit to the Twilight set. She shares some nice tidbits about how she felt watching the "humans" in the cast bring their characters to life, and has a funny anecdote about a prank pulled on her by Peter Facinelli (Carlisle) over the crucial issue of what happens to food vampires eat if they ever have to pretend to eat to fool humans (kinda gross answer: they eventually have to regurgitate it!).

Most interesting to me of Meyer's thoughts on how the filming is going, though, is what she has to say about Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson "channeling" Bella and Edward. Meyer seems very pleased with the performances by both actors so far, and notes that the chemistry between the two is so good that fans "might want to bring a paper bag to the movie, because their on-screen chemistry may cause hyperventilation." Dang.



That's certainly good news for all us Twilight fans out there who've been endlessly obsessing over this book being made into a movie. Harry Potter fans (of which I am one, as well) worried about those books being made into films -- we debated the casting, the choice of directors, the sets, the scripts, seemingly endlessly. Lord of the Rings fans (and I know you won't be shocked to know I count myself among that number, as well ... I'm a serious book dork, not just a film dork) did the same when Peter Jackson started working on those films. And, for the most part, I've been pretty happy with the way those movies turned out.

I find it interesting how much serious fans of a given work of literature tend to obsess about these things; we start to feel like these characters are real people, that we really know them, and we feel very protective of them. Not quite as protective as the books' authors, of course, but still. If I ever wrote a book that someone wanted to adapt into a film, I think I'd have to go all "JK Rowling" and refuse to let it happen unless I had control over the script (or wrote it myself) and was on the set every single day. It would be for me like raising my kids to a certain age, then just turning them over to strangers and trust that they'd do a decent job of finishing what I started.

Meyer's positive take thus far on how filming is going, though, ought to give Twilight fans some reassurance that the beloved series is not going to be butchered on-screen. And the more I hear about Stewart and Pattinson in their roles, the more excited I am to see this film in a nice, darkened theater, surrounded by hundreds of other ardent Twilight fans.