Catherine Hardwicke Interview with Collider

Question: You’ve done drama, supernatural romance and historical films. What attracted you to doing a supernatural thriller?

CATHERINE HARDWICKE: Since I was a little kid, I did like this fairy tale. I did dress up like Little Red Riding Hood. My mom had to make me a cape. When I read David Leslie Johnson’s script, I found what he had done quite interesting. He twisted it all around and had these reveals. I didn’t figure out who the Wolf was, when I read it. I liked the un-peeling of the secrets and the lies in the town. I thought it would be quite a challenge to direct a mystery thriller. I hadn’t really done something like that. If I could really keep that mystery of who the Wolf was until the end, and create that feeling that you are suspicious of your friends and family, and have that growing paranoia, I thought that would be a fun challenge, and also relevant to current day. We read about secret lives that people have on the Internet, or alternate lives of a serial killer where the whole family didn’t know that their dad or their brother or their child was that. There are all the things in our heart that no one really knows, and I thought that that was interesting territory to explore.

Once you signed on as the director, were there any significant changes you made to the script?

HARDWICKE: Oh, yes, I did a lot of work with David. I got his first draft, and then he and I just holed up for days in my office and talked through every single thing. The things I didn’t really respond to in the script, we got them out. He had the grandmother like the ‘50’s, crotchety grandmother, nagging and scolding the kids and teaching them how to sew. I was like, “No, this is a lady that lives out in the woods. She’s a bad-ass. She’s got to be tough enough to live out there. She’s got to be cool enough to be bohemian and collect the herbs and live in her own world. The people in the village probably think she’s a witch because she’s different. She’s got dreads and amulets.” I wanted her to be a lot more interesting than a finger-wagging grandmother, so we did a revamp on that. We did a revamp on a lot of stuff, like what was the nature of the village? I had the idea that they would have the sacrifices, they would have rituals, they would have walls around the village, and they would have that paranoia. David was very cool, and we just started getting all these ideas and weaving them into the script. The blood moon wasn’t there, at the time. There were many things that weren’t there, but there were many awesome things that were there. 

Check out the entire interview here.