Sofia Coppola Reveals She Almost Directed ‘Breaking Dawn’ But Thought The “Whole Imprinting-Werewolf Thing” Was “Too Weird” For Her

Auteur Sofia Coppola revealed she was once asked to lend her hand at directing the final installment of a rather surprising franchise, but, unfortunately for us, it did not pan out.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the Priscilla director admitted she was approached to direct The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, but the lore of Stephanie Meyers‘ bestselling series was a bit too “far out,” even for her.

“We had one meeting, and it never went anywhere,” Coppola said. “I thought the whole imprinting-werewolf thing was weird. The baby. Too weird!”

She’s clearly referring to the plot twist that occurs in the two-part film, in which Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) imprints on Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen’s (Robert Pattinson) baby, despite having spent years pining for Bella.

“Part of the earlier Twilight could be done in an interesting way,” she continued. “I thought it’d be fun to do a teen-vampire romance, but the last one gets really far out.”

Coppola has made a name for herself making introspective films about young women, whether it’s a historical drama like Marie Antoinette or a book adaption like The Virgin Suicides, but Twilight would have definitely been a foray into a new genre for the filmmaker.

“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.

Twilight was not the first time she was approached to work on a genre film, however. She previously spent quite a bit of time developing a live-action Little Mermaid, which she exited in 2015 over creative differences.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Coppola admitted that she felt like she was out of her element while working on that film. Her breaking point, she says, occurred during a development meeting.

“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. I just was not in my element,” she recalled. “I feel like I was naive, and then I felt a lot like the character in the story, trying to do something out of my element, and it was a funny parallel of the story for me.”

Though we could have had a Coppola-directed Twilight, it certainly would have looked very different than the dark two-part film we got from Bill Condon.

If you want to refresh your memory on the drama of Forks, Washington, and the series’ “far out” lore, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 are both streaming on Tubi and Prime Video.