Today, the film world is in mourning. A deep, dark mourning of what could have been. In a recent interview, Sofia Coppola revealed she was one of the directors originally slated to take on the Twilight Saga. “We had one meeting,” she told Rolling Stone, “and it never went anywhere,” despite her thinking “it’d be fun to do a teen-vampire romance”. The director also said that “the earlier Twilight could be done in an interesting way,” but admits that the franchise goes somewhat off the rails by the end. “I thought the whole imprinting-werewolf thing was weird,” she says, “the baby. Too weird!... the last [film] gets really far out.”

Despite her hesitation at some of the saga’s more experimental themes, we couldn’t help but imagine what a Sofia Coppola-directed Twilight might look like. The majority of Coppola’s films – from The Virgin Suicides, to Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette – feature female protagonists engulfed by the intricacies of their own minds. Some might say depressed, others might say psychologically challenged. Twilight’s Bella Swann fits the bill perfectly! She’s moody, she’s miserable, but with a weirdly captivating demeanour – the perfect Coppola girly.

Also, if Coppola were to take on the Twilight series, then we’d need to do something about that colour grading. The first film is famous for its stark, grey-blue look, and while Coppola is no stranger to a muted palette, her films possess a much broader range of hues. Maybe she’d go for a hazy, 70s Polaroid look, à la Virgin Suicides? Or some luxurious pastels in the vein of Marie Antoinette? Whatever look she could’ve ended up with, it’s sad to know that we were robbed of the chance of seeing Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson attempt to immortalise Edward Cullen and Bella Swann.

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