'Twilight' author Stephenie Meyer on music videos and mermaids

Susan Carpenter of the Los Angeles Times caught up with "Twilight" author Stephenie Meyer on the set of a music video for Jack's Mannequin, the Orange County band. Stephenie has had a rough few weeks as her fans know, but she was all smiles by the sea.

Here's what Carpenter found out:

It was 1:30 in the afternoon Thursday, and a mermaid's tail was bobbing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast at Pt. Mugu. The shimmery, blue sea creature was playing siren to Jack's Mannequin singer-keyboardist, Andrew McMahon, in an upcoming video conceptualized by bestselling "Twilight" saga author Stephenie Meyer.

Meyer is being billed as the co-director of "The Resolution" video, even though "I've never directed anything," the 34-year-old author said on set, where dozens of fully clothed music and movie folk were milling around the Ventura County beach. "Clearly I have no experience. They're just running things by me."

Her impression midway through the shoot, which, in reality, was being shot by director Noble Jones: "It looks good. It looks the way I imagined it, so that's really cool."

What Meyer had imagined for the video was a mermaid who's also a stalker. Everywhere McMahon goes, the mermaid follows, flooding the landscape as the 26-year-old singer moves from ocean to desert to mountaintop, hauling his upright piano in the bed of an ancient Ford pickup. (Any similarities to the vintage red Chevy that heroine Bella drives in the “Twilight” books are purely coincidental, said director Jones; Meyer had written the video with a U-Haul in mind.)

Never mind that "The Resolution" has absolutely nothing to do with old trucks or with mermaids. When the band's frontman wrote the song last year, "it was sort of about my experience dealing with the cancer thing," said McMahon, who was diagnosed with leukemia in 2005 and later received a bone-marrow transplant from his sister. "It was me coming to some place of acceptance with the past and deciding maybe I haven't figured out what I'm trying to accomplish, but I know I'm looking for some kind of resolve."

Meyer wasn't aware of that story when she wrote the video's treatment. Mermaids, she said, are "a subject I've always been fascinated with. When I was letting my imagination run wild for this [video], there were several different story lines I came up with and this one I thought had the most visual impact."

As for the longstanding rumor that Meyer will pen an upcoming book involving such a creature, "I don't know if I will or not," she said.

You can read the rest of Carpenter's very intriguing piece over at our sister blog, the righteously rocking Soundboard.

-- Geoff Boucher

Photo of Jack's Mannequin singer Andrew McMahon and author Stephenie Meyer courtesy of Warner Bros. Records

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