by James Mottram

It’s lunchtime at the midway point of the Mediterrane Film Festival in Malta and Catherine Hardwicke has just taken centre stage. The director of Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown and Twilight has just delivered a masterclass, even offering the audience an exclusive clip of her just-finished new movie, Street Smart. Last Friday, the 69-year-old filmmaker was in L.A. until 10pm in the final mix, before finishing it for good. “And I got on the plane and came here.”

Now she’s on the festival jury, alongside other distinguished guests including Rick Carter, the famed production designer who has worked with Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, and James Price, who won an Oscar for co-designing Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. It’s a discipline Hardwicke knows well; before she made her debut with 2003’s teen angst tale Thirteen, she designed for such esteemed directors as Richard Linklater (The Newton Boys) and David O. Russell (Three Kings).

Her biggest production design gig was undeniably Cameron Crowe’s dreamlike 2001 film Vanilla Sky, with Tom Cruise, an “absolutely radical, intense, inspiring” time, she says. A remake of the Spanish-language film Open Your Eyes, it marked one of Cruise’s most experimental movies. “You would never think of him doing that now,” says Hardwicke, who enthuses about the star. “He inspired me because he never gives up. He keeps trying to raise the bar. ‘Let’s make it better!’ Even if he’s worked 60 hours that week.”

Her time with Cruise remains seared on her brain. “I would go up and say, ‘Do you want to see where we’re shooting tomorrow, Saturday morning? It’s 10 at night now, but if you want me to change something, I’ll get the crew in at 4.30 and I’ll try to change it.’ He’s already worked all week on camera. We go down there at 10.30 and he goes, ‘Let’s act out the scene.’ We work two hours on the scene, and he doesn’t give up. He wants it to be good.”

How was it ‘acting’ with Cruise? “I wasn’t a director at the time,” she remarks, “so I was in shock!”

Since then, Hardwicke has been a major trailblazer as far as female Hollywood directors go. Arguably, HBO’s hit show Euphoria wouldn’t exist without Thirteen [below]. “I’ve seen some articles comparing [both],” she says. “I mean, they did a lot of creative things on their own too.”

Then, following skater story Lords of Dogtown, in which she worked with Heath Ledger at a key moment in his evolution as an actor, she hit the motherlode with Twilight, the vampire romance based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer.

After reading an early draft, which left her unimpressed, Hardwicke went back to the book. “I said, ‘I think we’ve got to throw this script away and make it more like the book, that ecstasy of falling in love. I want to see if I can put that on film.’” Even so, it was a near-impossible task to finance the movie. “Nobody wanted to make it… because no one thought it would make any money. They didn’t think it was going to be a blockbuster.”

This lack of confidence in the project was the reason they hired her, she says. “If they thought it was a blockbuster, they wouldn’t have hired me. There had never been a blockbuster by a woman before. I mean, now we’ve had Wonder Woman and Barbie, but back then, we didn’t. And then after mine, they didn’t hire any women.”

Indeed, Chris Weitz, David Slade and Bill Condon came in to direct the sequels. “Then they did The Hunger Games based on the success, same studio, all men. Then they did Divergent, all men.”

The original Twilight made $408 million worldwide, but Hardwicke wasn’t enthused to continue with the franchise. “I didn’t relate to the second book so much,” she says. “I’m not that big on sequels. I like something that I’ve never seen before. If I had my choice… I guess I’d try to do something original.”

To this date, she’s never made a sequel, instead making forays into television, directing episodes on shows like This Is Us, Under the Bridge and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Still, she’s proud of being there at the inception of the careers of her leads, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, who have since gone on to work with incredible directors, like Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas and David Cronenberg. “They’re like a mini-Sundance,” she says. “They’ve made so many indie films that would [otherwise] never have gotten made.”

She’s kept in touch with both. “I guess a year-and-a-half ago, somehow, I ended up at Rob’s birthday, at his house, and Kristen was there too.”

Now Hardwicke has Street Smart ready for release, an indie film that is taking her back to her Lords of Dogtown and Thirteen roots. “I shot it in Venice Beach, where I live, and it’s based on six characters that I know. They’re very creative, very cool, but they’re homeless. One’s an artist, one’s a musician, a sound engineer, all this. It’s kind of a reality for people now all over the world. Even if they have a job, they can’t afford the apartments, all the rent and all that stuff.”

Like Harris Dickinson’s Urchin, which just debuted in Cannes and touches on a young homeless man in London, Hardwicke promises that Street Smart will look into the same depressing phenomenon in Los Angeles. “Venice Beach is very attractive because you can go in the water. You’ve got restrooms there with showers, so it’s a good place if you’re homeless. But certain people want no homeless there. There’s always the battle, which we address in the movie.”

Co-written with 13 Reasons Why’s Nic Sheff, the film features a mix of veterans (Virginia Madsen, Marcia Gay Harden) and rising stars, like Isabelle Fuhrman, Yara Shahidi, Miles McKenna [pictured with Hardwicke in main image, courtesy of McKenna’s Instagram] and Michael Cimino. Pro skateboarder Isiah Hilt also features, while the production has teamed up with charitable partners Covenant House and Safe Space for Youth, both of which focus on assisting unhoused and at-risk young individuals.

Hardwicke is even contemplating turning it into a TV show, such has been the early response to the young characters who forge bonds over Robin Hood-style antics. “Some people have seen it, they’re like, ‘I want to keep it going.’ People say it’s kind of like the homeless Breakfast Club,” she says. “It’s shining a light on people that we sometimes might just walk past on the street. It’s like Skins or Shameless or Reservation Dogs, where if you fall in love with these characters, [and you think] let’s follow them.”