(EW) Catherine Hardwicke on leaving 'Twilight': 'I do not regret it at all, thank the Lord'

Director Catherine Hardwicke, who launched the Twilight series into theaters and has the similarly thematic Red Riding Hood coming out March 11, tells Newsweek that she wasn’t fired from the blockbuster series but simply decided against directing subsequent Twilight films. “I couldn’t even be fired, that’s what’s so funny,” she tells the magazine. “In my contract, I had the first right of refusal.”
At the time, there was some speculation that Summit had fired Hardwicke for being difficult, but Hardwicke had expressed concern about Summit’s hurried schedule for New Moon and that film’s Edward-less plot arc, telling EW in 2008: ”You have to get the chemistry as strong between Jacob and Bella as it was between Bella and Edward. You also have to do something with that arc: She’s in love with somebody, he disappears, she falls in love with someone else, and the first guy comes back. Movies like Pearl Harbor have tried it. It absolutely didn’t work.”
Looking back now, she tells Newsweek, “I do not regret it at all, thank the Lord…. The truth is I liked the first book the best.”
It must be difficult to walk away from this kind of success, but I can’t count how many readers of the Twilight saga have told me the same thing about which book was their favorite. Do you share her diminished affection for the book’s sequels? Did Hardwicke make the right call, cutting loose after one film?

EW