Director Catherine Hardwicke wrote a list of possible dialogue options for Pattinson, and he selected the now oft-quoted line.
“You better hold on tight, spider-monkey.”
An oft-quoted, infinitely meme-able piece of dialogue from Twilight has a funny origin story. While many of the 2008 film’s most memorable lines were lifted straight from Stephanie Meyer’s novel of the same name (most notably, “This is the skin of a killer, Bella”), director Catherine Hardwicke devised the spider-monkey line.
Hardwicke, who stopped by the Entertainment Weekly Comic-Con 2024 studio to reminisce about the movie, explained that she felt a need to input more dialogue in some of Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward’s scenes. “I was kind of worried,” she said. “We were shooting for a few days and there were so many scenes where they just looked into each other’s eyes. Look, look, look. And I’m like, man, I better come up with some dialogue.”
“So, the night before we did the treetops, I wrote like 10 lines,” she continued. “And I thought, ‘I wonder if he’ll like to say any of these.'”
Hardwicke left the final choice up to Robert Pattison, who will be delivering the dialogue on screen as Edward. “I handed them to Rob,” she remembered, “and I said, ‘See if you like any of these. If you do, you can say them.’ And he said, ‘I like spider-monkey.'”
Pattinson, who was not a big star at the time, was often overcome by his nerves. “He was self-conscious because you had a lot to live up until you had this book that makes him the most fascinating and beautiful creature on earth,” explains Hardwicke. “That’s kind of intimidating.” But she kept reminding him to get through a scene without self-criticism. However, she adds, he had no trouble at all with the “spider-monkey” scene.
Hardwicke hand-selected Pattinson to play vampire Edward Cullen, despite studio doubts. The director had all four finalists for the role come to her house and read with Stewart. “They did the biology scene at my kitchen table, the kissing scene on my bed, and their chemistry was just electric,” she remembers.
However, Hardwicke’s biggest challenge wasn’t casting or coaching actors through their own self-consciousness. It was something altogether more…sparkly.
“That made me quite nervous, the sparkling,” she says. “Because we had a tight budget on the first Twilight — and sparkles cost a lot of money, okay. CGI is expensive.”
She ultimately decided that the moment would have to be brief to get the biggest bang for their buck. “When you read the book, when in they’re meadow, it seems like they’re out there for 10 minutes, chilling and sparkling,” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘Oh no, we need to limit it.’ We made it a moment of a revelation where he steps into that beam of light.”
From there, they started researching the best way to create Edward’s signature glittering skin, trying everything from visual effects to a shimmery make-up. “That didn’t look good,” Hardwicke adds.
