Catherine Hardwicke To Give Workshop

Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke will be giving a workshop for filmmakers called The Art of Prep: Directing Workshop. It is a 75-minute seminar in the Vancouver area and will cover a variety of topics.

Hardwicke also will discuss her experience directing Twilight, the vampire blockbuster that grossed $69.6 million on opening weekend — the highest opening ever for a film by a female director.

“I’ll talk about how we prepped the treetop sequence and the seven different locations we used to film that — what was the first unit shot, what was the second unit shot, what did Rob [Pattinson] and Kristen [Stewart] do, where we put the platform.”

Hardwicke, who began her career in Hollywood as a production designer, said she developed her techniques through trial and error, a year of schooling at the University of California, Los Angeles, and watching and working with a number of “awesome directors” including Cameron Crowe, David Russell and Lisa Cholodenko.

“Being a production designer, I was a department head right in there with them, next to them, coming up with ideas, pitching, running through rehearsals with them,” she said.

“I saw a variety of directors’ techniques and then on each movie I used what seemed to work best for that film.”

See more details on The Vancouver Sun