Describe the process of selecting women to appear in the film? Did you find that many of them had reservations about sharing such personal stories?
The process of selecting women was challenging. I wanted to interview women of all ages and ethnicities, but I also wanted them to be somewhat insightful about why love Twilight - I would ask them: Most of the time, they would say "Oh my G-d I love Twilight so much. I could NOT stop reading it when I started." And I'd say "Wow...so what do you think it is about Twilight that affected you so intensely? What did it bring up for YOU?" Once we would get to those kinds of questions it was pretty clear whether it would be an interesting enough interview!
Many of them said they actually never thought about it before and even when prompted, had difficulty tapping into it. So that's pretty much how we screened women. I didn't want it to become a situation where I was pulling teeth in the interview, so I tried to select women who had some initial insight into their love of Twilight. With practically no budget, we could not afford to have a ton of interviews that we were not going to use. I think we only had one interview that we did not end of using. In terms of the women we did interview, there were moments where it was clear that they had reservations about getting into certain issues and I respected that. But for the most part they were all pretty open about their thoughts and feelings.
As you can imagine, some were more comfortable talking about deeper feelings than others, which was fine. I have tremendous respect for the women who let us interview them and talked so openly about their personal lives.