After all the buzz, following months of hype, the big-screen adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's best-selling novel Twilight will finally arrive in theaters on Nov. 21. The film sets the stage for a potentially long-running and lucrative film franchise, not to mention a cottage industry of clothes and posters and all the requisite tie-in products.

But that's getting a little too far ahead. First, audiences must bite into Twilight, in which the human teen Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) falls for Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a century-old vampire who stopped aging at 17 and whose clan drinks the blood of animals rather than humans. Their romance must withstand all sorts of challenges, as Edward must resist the temptation to turn Bella into a vamp and contends with the threat of other vampires who wish him dead and make no apologies for feasting on human blood.

Stewart is a fast-rising star whose credits include Catch That Kid, Zathura, The Messengers and Into the Wild, while Pattinson is a British actor best known for playing the doomed Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. During separate telephone conversations with SCI FI Weekly, Stewart and Pattinson talked about Twilight, their respective familiarity (or lack thereof) with the material and the pros and cons of Twilight exploding into a phenomenon.

Kristen Stewart, did you know about the Meyer books before the film came about?

Stewart: I didn't. I'd been working. I didn't go to high school. I did home school for high school, and I stick to the Classic Literature section in Borders and I don't really venture from there. So I don't know what sort of rock I was living under, but, no, I hadn't heard of them. Is it true that you and [director] Catherine Hardwicke knew immediately from his audition that Robert was the right guy to play Edward?

Stewart: Not to discredit anyone who came in to read for the part, and I wish I had a more articulate way to put it, but Robert came in and he wasn't just playing the strikingly handsome vampire. Deep down, I could see the pain in him. And he looked at me for real. He wasn't just auditioning. He was present. He was there. We could see each other. That's what needs to be in the movie.Give us a feeling for what it was like on set. Was it an easy shoot? A tough one? How complicated were the stunts and the green-screen sequences?

Stewart: It's funny, because it's kind of broken up into parts. There's a very quaint, quiet, progressively building love story of watching two people get to know each other, and then the next part of it is a really, really dire life-and-death action movie. And we did not shoot in sequence at all. We were jumping all over the place. We also had to wait for the weather constantly, because in Portland it changes every five minutes. It all kept you on your feet, which is good. I try to keep my head down and not pay attention to the technical aspects of filmmaking, because it just takes me out of it a little bit. The other thing is that this never started out to be a big movie. We didn't have tons and tons of money to do all these great effects and green screen and stuff like that. So most of it was real. I did maybe a day of green screen. Most of it was in-camera. Most of it was real makeup. We had this thing called the Magic Carpet, so it wasn't CGI, watching [the vampire characters] walk fast like that. They were on this thing going like 40 miles per hour. So that was actually kind of cool. It wasn't boring because it was all real.What did Catherine Hardwicke bring to the table as your director?

Stewart: Catherine's really a cuckoo bird. She's got an energy like no other person I've ever met before. She's very, very present. She doesn't leave you alone. You don't ever feel like you have to go through this by yourself. If anything, she does not lack enthusiasm. This is her life. She works 24-7. This was her life for like a year. So I've built quite a nice relationship with her. It was really good. It was very collaborative. We all had a lot of control. We didn't feel like we were being told what to do. We were all in it together.This little movie you shot in Portland has exploded into something much bigger. Suddenly there are big expectations. What are your thoughts on what's happening with Twilight?

Stewart: There's nothing to be said about that. I hate this term, but it is what it is, and there's nothing I can do. My job is done. I'm really the vessel for these girls. They're obsessed with Edward's character, but everyone sees Bella as themselves because they live the book through her. So I'm not expecting to appease everybody. I know that there's going to be a lot of people who are like, "What! This is just wrong!" because they covet the book so much. But it's fine. Overall, I think the movie is pretty good.You've said that you haven't read New Moon yet. Have you seen a script adaptation yet?

Stewart: I haven't read a script. From the outside looking in, it appears that you lean more towards independent features than mainstream Hollywood films. Is your plan to continue doing that?

Stewart: The one thing about Twilight is it's not a Hollywood picture, and I never would have done if it was, because they're empty and I would be terrible in them. I can only do films that I feel very much compelled to do and only play characters that I feel a responsibility to and for. I will never, ever do a film if I'm not, for whatever reason, thinking it should be something that people should see or something that I feel like I need to live through. There aren't many studio films that come along that ... I'm not bashing anybody, but I feel that a lot of time you have these frames of films. It's a great idea and they pour a bunch of money into [it] and it's like, "Wait! But it's not an actual movie." You just have a general idea, and that's what comes out. It's either really trite and cliché and boring and uninteresting. So I don't think in terms of how big the movies are going to be or if it's Hollywood or independent. I just want to work with the people that inspire me, and I want to be the characters that I feel responsible for.

Robert Pattinson, you'd not read the books prior to becoming involved with Twilight, and you had no way of knowing that even as you shot the film it was emerging as a phenomenon. How strange has it been to be in the eye of the storm?

Pattinson: It gets stranger and stranger every day, at the moment. I was literally completely and utterly ignorant until the last day of shooting of what it really was. Even the budget didn't reflect that kind of phenomenon that it is now. It wasn't that kind of $200 million budget movie. It was a relatively low-budget thing. So I literally had no idea it would get this kind of attention.Why are so many people so passionate about Twilight?

Pattinson: I think that for a lot of the fans of the book it's become a kind of cult now that they like defending. Other young people want to join it because they feel like they're missing out on something. I think it's a rolling stone gathering more and more people with it. I don't know for sure. I can't really tell you. What I always thought about it when I read the book was that it seemed like Stephenie Meyer completely believed that she was Bella, and so in a lot of ways, when you're reading it, it seems uncomfortably voyeuristic, like you're reading somebody's fantasy. And after meeting Stephenie Meyer it's absolutely not the case. But I really, really thought, when I was going to meet Stephenie, that it was going to be a very strange experience, with her thinking that I was a character. I think that's one of the reasons, that it's just such an intimate thing that people can really belong to. It's just one these rare things that everybody wants to have a piece of.What do you remember of your audition with Kristen Stewart?

Pattinson: I didn't even know I was doing a reading when I went into the audition. So I went in thinking one thing, and then Kristen was already there and she had already done readings with tons of other people. As well as doing this performance, which I really wasn't expecting, she was also a little bit jaded. I think she'd done about 10 readings that day. I was kind of intimidated by what she was doing. I was stunned because it was so different from what I was expecting. And I guess it never really changed the whole way through, which kind of works, just in terms of the story, me having to be the powerful one but being intimidated by her. The relationship built from that. It was always a struggle for me to say things to her in scenes. Everything seemed sort of strained and, weirdly enough, it came out looking right. Almost from day one there was just something which worked, but it was a completely unorthodox way of going at it. We really weren't trying to act like we were really in love with each other right from the beginning. It was more about trying to intimidate each other and showing how much we didn't care about the other person, which I guess worked. In a lot of ways that's how long-lasting relationships work.How pleased are you with the finished film?

Pattinson: I liked what [screenwriter] Melissa Rosenberg has done, which is make it a much more actiony-based film, but [she] managed to keep in a lot of the intimacy as well. It's a really good adaptation. Virtually every scene I did was with Kristen, and I really liked working with her, so I hope that translates. I never watch my stuff, so I don't know. But I really tried to go out of my way to make it not another cash-in on one of these teen-novel adaptations, which I think even 6-year-old children are sick of and know the only reason are being made is for money. I thought the core of Twilight could really be made into an interesting film, and I tried to do it as honestly as I could and as seriously as I could. And I hope it turns out all right.A sequel based on the second book, New Moon, is already in preproduction. What from that book are you eager to see on screen?

Pattinson: New Moon, out of the series, was my favorite one, though Edward is hardly in it. But I tried to set up a performance which would last the three movies without me getting bored of it. He becomes such a different character in the later stories, and I love that, and tried to allude to that in the performance in this one. He's kind of snappy, and there's a buried anger underneath this whole layer of being a gentleman. There's frustration and just a lot of self-loathing, which I liked about the character. I like that in the second one he's literally suicidal. Seeing this perfect being be totally suicidal will be very interesting to play.