Director turned down final Twilight movie because the concept was ‘too weird’

A director has revealed why she turned down the opportunity to work on the final movie in the Twilight franchise.

Despite the franchise doing very well at the box office, the Academy Award-winner has said that it only took one meeting for her to realize that this project was not for her.

On a press tour for her new film Priscilla, Sofia Coppola told Rolling Stone: "We had one meeting, and it never went anywhere.

"I thought the whole imprinting-werewolf thing was weird. The baby. Too weird!"

For the uninitiated, shortly after the daughter of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) is born, their indigenous ('where have you been, loca?') werewolf third wheel 'imprints' on their child.

This is a thing where werewolves become involuntarily attached to their forever soulmate, even though in this case he's a fully grown wolf man and she's a literal infant.

'Weird' is putting it mildly!

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But that's not to say she might not have been interested at all. It was more the direction that the plot takes later in the story which put her off.

Coppola continued: "Part of the earlier Twilight could be done in an interesting way.

"I thought it'd be fun to do a teen-vampire romance, but the last one gets really far out."

The final movie in the Twilight Saga (Breaking Dawn - Part 2) sees the ever-moody Bella and the ever-sparkly Edward face off against the Volturi vampires from Tuscany. They are after their half-human half-vampire child as they think she's an infant who was turned into a vampire, which they understandably aren't that keen on.

But Twilight isn't the only big ticket movie that Coppola has been in the running for.

She also revealed why she backed out of directing Disney's live action-remake of The Little Mermaid.

In 2014 Coppola started developing the movie alongside Universal Pictures and Working Title, but she later resigned.

Getty/ Emma McIntyre / Staff

Coppola said that she had wanted to take the film in a different direction - closer to the original fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen.

This version is considerably darker than Disney's. The prince marries someone else and the sea-witch offers her another option where she can kill him and return to being a mermaid, which of course she can't do, turning into sea foam and becoming an ethereal spirit.

Coppola said that the moment which persuaded her to leave the project came in a board meeting.

She explained: "I was in a boardroom and some development guy said, 'What’s gonna get the 35-year-old man in the audience?' And I just didn’t know what to say."

Ah yes, 35-year-old men, definitely the target audience for The Little Mermaid.