Laremy Legel: When I talked to you for Twilight you were just dipping your toes into the fandom, and what it was all about. Do you check fan sites these days?
Melissa Rosenberg: I stay off the Internet, because I'm very sensitive to commentary. There could be 10 comments of "Fabulous job!" and one "She's horrible!" and it completely throws me. When you're writing you're constantly fighting demons to sit down and do what you do. If you listen to the voices outside your head, in addition to the ones inside your head, you'll never get anything done. There's enough inner strife.
I do, however, maintain a fan site, where people are mostly kind. It's interesting reading their comments, because they talk about what's important to them, what things really register, what things I need to capture. So I do rely on that.
Melissa Rosenberg is a busy woman. In the past few years she's adapted three parts of The Twilight Saga for the screen, all the while writing and producing for the hit Showtime series Dexter. How does she balance her life and work? What can we expect from Breaking Dawn? And what's the difference between the three directors she's worked with on Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse? All those answers and more in our exclusive interview.
LL: I think your writing has amazing range; from Dexter to Twilight is a pretty big distance. But do you worry about being locked into a particular genre? Do screenwriters get typecast? Or does that not happen?
MR: Oh, it happens all the time. You become the "teen voice" writer. Studios, because they are investing a great deal of money in movies, they want a guarantee that when they hire somebody that person can deliver for them. Everything is fear based, so they pigeonhole people. But I've written everything, from Westerns to sci-fi to dramedy, I've done it all. I have my strengths and my weaknesses, and the things I prefer not to do, but like most writers I can do, and like to do, a variety of things.
I'm sure I'll be offered all sorts of romantic teen dramas as I move forward, because I've now written plenty of them, and I won't be doing that again. It's not of interest me. I do lean more towards doing different kinds of things.
Read the whole interview HERE.
