Director: Catherine Hardwicke Directed: Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown, The Nativity Story, Twilight.
"The fact that men and women are nominated this year in films that women have directed is good for women filmmakers generally."
Catherine Hardwicke's work as a director and has been on movies centered around young, teen characters. Her films include Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown, The Nativity Story and Twilight. She is known for having the opening weekend of her film, Twilight, being the biggest opening ever for a female director. Each of these movies takes place in different time periods with completely different scenarios, but Hardwicke directs each with the same idea of being a teenager figuring out who you are and what you want and the transition form teen to adult. Twilight features a romance between a vampire with a human, The Nativity Story follows the Virgin Mary through her pregnancy and Lords of Dogtown takes place in the 70s with the teen boys in California who started skateboarding.
Hardwicke turned down directing the hugely popular 'Twilight' saga because she "just didn't think I could make a good movie under those circumstances;" those circumstances being a tight deadline and modest budget, (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/12/catherine-hardwicke-i-tur_n_166295.html). This quote of Hardwicke's directly relates to the auteur theory: Hardwicke would not consider making a movie under circumstances where she feels she would not give her best work even though she was offered a significant amount of money and of course the fame to come with the second Twilight movie, New Moon.
Her most acclaimed work is Thirteen, a movie based on the life of her ex-boyfriend's daughter. The film takes a honest, hard, gritty look at the life of a 13 year old girl in Los Angeles as she befriends the popular girl at school and becomes involved with drugs, alcohol and sex. The Nativity Story received the worst reviews because of Hardwicke's approach to film: her perspective of the movie, focusing it on the Virgin Mary and her struggles as a pregnant teenager (a modern theme) was not well received because it took out the holiness of the Biblical story. Hardwicke likes to relate her characters to real-life people and real-life situations, even though some of her films are not realistic. Youth teens and adults can always find themselves relating to Hardwicke's films because she creates a bond to young people and what they may experience in life. Hardwicke many times expresses her films according to her own life and her teen years or the life of teens around her as I mentioned before. As one great writer put it "Movies do not merely offer us the opportunity to re imagine the culture we most intimately know on the screen, they make culture." (Making Movie Magic, page 9, Bell Hooks).
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