'Twilight' director Catherine Hardwicke says original script had Bella 'on jet skis being chased by the FBI'

• "Twilight" Director Catherine Hardwicke said she did not like the original script of the movie.
• Hardwicke said the screenplay was too distant from the book series.

"Twilight" director Catherine Hardwicke told "The Big Hit Show" podcast that the original script had a scene where Bella Swan was "on jet skis being chased by the FBI."

The 2008 movie starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, adapted from a book series of the same name by Stephenie Meyer, was incredibly successful leading to four sequels in the following years.

Two episodes of "The Big Hit Show" podcast, hosted by journalist Alex Pappademas, were released this week about how "Twilight" was turned into a movie. During the second episode, Pappademas read extracts from the original draft script for the movie including one scene where Bella fires a shotgun at a jock vampire.

Mark Lord, who wrote the draft screenplay, told Pappademas that he was told to add more action to the story when the movie was originally being produced by MTV Films.

"They wanted it to take a concept and build in a structure that was far more like a cinematic structure," he said. "And they wanted to just put in some more action to advance it more and give something more for the male audience. They thought they were going to lose the male audience with too much of a romance."

However, Hardwicke, the director of the first movie, told Pappademas that she did not like the first script.

"I said, 'First of all, this script has to go in the trash. No good. You've got to make it like the book. It's the reason, I think, people online read the book, they like it, is because there's this feeling of the first time you've ever fallen in love. And it's kind of an ecstatic feeling. And you have none of that in this script,' which was in turnaround from Paramount," Hardwicke said on the podcast.

She added: "And the original script literally had Bella on jet skis being chased by the FBI. She was a star athlete. Nothing to do with the book."

Pappademas reported that Meyer, the author of the original books, also disliked the original script. When the rights of the movie were given to Summit Entertainment, who produced the "Twilight" saga, Lord was replaced by Melissa Rosenberg who went on to write the scripts for the entire franchise.