Love Letter to My Favourite Vampires

I am not going to beat around the bush for too long; I’ll tell you here and now: back when life seemed slower and my simple dreams were built on the idea of getting a Motorola flip phone — just so my future boyfriend could send me an sms — I watched Twilight, and I loved its romance to Forks, Washington, and back. Yes, I was Team Edward. And one more yes: I secretly hated Bella.

Not because her face always looked the same or her mouth was slightly open, but because I was simply jealous. She got the cute vampire, and I was getting sms delivered by pigeons. I also never got a flip phone, and Robert Pattinson never sneaked into my parents’ house in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Europe. What a surprise! He never watched me sleep. That sounds creepy, I know, but that is what vampires do. At least, that is what Twilight taught me right before my dreams shifted and I learned to separate Edward Cullen from Robert Pattinson.

By the time I had my first boyfriend, and my slow-tempered small town life sped up like a train wreck before the crash into Facebook and LiveJournal pages, I was over any kind of vampire bullshit. Somewhere in there, I stopped following where the saga went — who dated whom in real life, who was cheating on whom, and what, in general, was going on in cinemas on the other side of the ocean. Why would I care?

I didn’t, but Hollywood marketing was buzzing like tinnitus in my ears. I tried to cover them with my hands, but that sound comes from within; the volume of those persistent longitudinal waves isn’t easy to muffle. So, I changed the substance. I replaced them with a different kind of wave, the ones that do not need to travel far. French, Romanian, and many other “New Waves” of cinema. That felt very transverse.

I was not aware that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart had the same sense of artistic vibrations, moving on the same wavelength as me. It hit me years later, by accident, when I watched Good Time by the Safdie brothers.

By then, I had graduated in journalism, moved to Western Europe, got married, worked as an assistant editor on a first feature film, and was about to graduate one more time. Without me even being aware of it, my life was moving without a speed limit, like cars on a German Autobahn. I wasn’t using a seatbelt, even though everyone told me to; they rightfully blamed me when I finally crashed. Metaphorically speaking.

The sad remnants of me shifted to my iPad and deep-dived into binging, trying to process my losses the way it felt naturally easy to do. I was lost, and I was barely watching films on the big screen anymore. But on one very unhappy, rainy November day, I went to a local film festival in Cologne to see something I wasn’t really aware of. Robert’s face on the poster promised a “good time.” And I needed one.

I will never forget the state of my brain after that film — dizzy, yet bedazzled with a million ideas. My eyes went wide when Robert Pattinson, without any announcement, walked onto the stage for a Q&A. Well, it was sort of announced that there would be a “little surprise” after the screening. So, there he was: the little surprise. My favorite vampire himself, who in just 1 hour and 41 minutes had managed to shift my well-being up the hill, uplift my dreams, and, most importantly, change my entire perception of his talent.

From that moment on, I was going around the world yapping non-stop about how talented he is, how massive his career development has been since I first “met” him through Twilight. Little did I know. Way too little.

I thought he was taking indie roles to run away from Edward Cullen. I thought Edward was chasing his shadow. But no one was chasing Robert’s shadow. It was Robert who was overshadowing the entire saga at once.

When it comes to Kristen Stewart, I have to admit: it was a false start. I watched her go in different directions, but back in my motorola-dreams-time, it never crossed my mind that she would one day be directing films or serving as the Jury President at Berlinale.

And yet, there she was… the youngest-ever Jury President at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, talking about cinema with such awareness, love, tenderness, and coolness. It changed the angle of my view. The table of my silliness turned. Suddenly, it was me standing there with my mouth slightly open, hanging on every single word she said. I started admiring her immensely.

Only two years passed, and she was showing her feature-length directorial debut The Chronology of Water in Cannes. It wasn’t a surprise. But once I saw the film, I fell in love with her artistry — her vision, the way of communicating her visual and spiritual world.

I am not going to beat around the bush for too long; I’ll tell you here and now: Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are my favorite artists, hustlers, and of course, vampires.

In those old stories, humans transition into vampires to gain superpowers. Kristen and Robert learned to gain theirs by transitioning from Twilight into the versions of themselves we see today. With the insane amount of money they earned through the vampire saga, they could have retired at twenty-five. Instead, they chose to go high-speed and hustle, taking risky, twisted paths, defining their own limits, and testing our engines for the level of art we can handle. Maybe they could only do that because they were “set”1 by twenty-five? Either way, they took the risk.

I find their art wildly beautiful. Since 2017, I have known that I am in for any film where Robert acts. Now, I can’t wait for Kristen’s next film as a director. All they do fits perfectly on my wavelength. I move with them fearlessly — admiring their growth on the big screen, slowly but steadily learning from them, and hoping that one day our paths will cross professionally.

For now, I will flip my iPhone over to keep myself away from the Substack buzz overnight. I’ll keep dreaming big in the calm power of my sleepless ambition.