Breaking Dawn was too weird for Sofia Coppola to direct

Sofia Coppola, like the rest of us, just really couldn't get over the whole falling in love with a baby thing

By Emma Keates | October 24, 2023 | 8:19pm

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Breaking Dawn was too weird for Sofia Coppola to direct

Sofia Coppola; Jacob from Twilight Photo: Emma McIntyre (Getty Images)

Breaking Dawn—Part 2 is an exceptionally weird movie about a grown man who falls in eternal and unbreakable love with the most busted CGI baby to ever grace the big screen. Okay, so the final film in the Twilight series may be about a little bit more than Jacob the werewolf claiming to have fallen in deep and undying love with Bella and Edward’s daughter before she was even out of the womb, but this is the plot that’s lingered in the culture for an obvious reason (the fact that it’s absolutely insane).

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that Sofia Coppola—whose upcoming film Priscilla thoughtfully explores the relationship between Elvis Presley and his much younger beau—elected to stay as far away from the Cullens and their weird dynamic as possible.

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In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, the Marie Antoinette director revealed that she was in very brief talks to direct the franchise’s final film—or more specifically, “we had one meeting, and it never went anywhere.”

“I thought the whole imprinting-werewolf thing was weird. The baby. Too weird!” she continued. “[P]art of the earlier Twilight could be done in an interesting way. I thought it’d be fun to do a teen-vampire romance, but the last one gets really far out.”

Still, the idea of Coppola dabbling in genre film isn’t too far-fetched. “I think it’d be fun to do sci-fi and I think it’d be fun to do, not like gory, but I like gothic horror. I don’t have an idea, though,” she said.

Whenever that idea does come, fans can be safe in the knowledge that the auteur isn’t interested in selling out or appealing to the masses any time soon. “I was in a boardroom and some development guy said, ‘What’s gonna get the 35-year-old man in the audience?’ And I just didn’t know what to say,” the director said of a since-shelved Little Mermaid project. “It happens a lot because usually the people financing things are straight men… [Y]ou’re trying to explain, like, ‘People, not everyone’s gonna be into what you’re into,’ but I just wanted to make things that appeal to me and express that.”