CATHERINE Hardwicke has been deriving a lot of pleasure lately from making grown men weep.

“Even the guy with cheese nachos was crying,” says the American director, recalling some of the after-screening reactions to her latest picture, Miss You Already, which follows two best friends after one of them is diagnosed with breast cancer.

“One after another men would come up and say, ‘Men cry too, we feel it too, our sisters, our wives, our mothers, our best friends are going through this’.”

Starring Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore, the London-set picture has a tough subject to tackle, and it does so with both drama and comedy. Hardwicke, working from a screenplay by Morwenna Banks (Absolutely) believes from personal experience that it was right and necessary to combine the two.

“My father had cancer and he was wicked funny, even when he was in the worst pain he would just make us laugh and say outrageous jokes. I love that he kept our spirits up and that gave us permission to laugh and be funny, and keep having fun in his life and our lives too.”

Behind Hardwicke’s honeyed, almost girly Texan tones is an accomplished industry operator. Her cv, first as a production designer, then as the helmer of films from her Sundance debut Thirteen to the first Twilight (which earned her the title, for a while, of the highest earning female director), mark her out as a filmmaker who can combine indie sensibilities with box office nous.

Hardwicke and her cast took advice from cancer charities and breast cancer survivors, and there were medical professionals on set during the filming of some scenes. It was important to her not to shy away from showing a little of what it means to go through treatment.

“I know a lot of people put their hand up and try to hide those moments. Not everyone can handle it.” But so many people will be going through this in one way or another, she adds. “We are going to have to deal with it. We took the challenge of showing some of the stuff people don’t really want to see.”

Hardwicke has her own special term for this - cinematherapy. “You can think of it that way. Try to laugh about it. Bring lightness and buoyancy to even the heaviest moments.”

The 55-year-old studied architecture before entering the film business as a production designer, seeing the former as ideal preparation. An architect needs to be able to go to a place where there is nothing and create something. It’s the same with a film, she says. “With production design we have to create worlds that don’t exist.”

So for David O Russell’s action comedy Three Kings, starring George Clooney, she had to make Arizona look like Iraq, and for Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys, Hardwicke created a whole series of period banks to be robbed by a gang led by Matthew McConaughey and Ethan Hawke.

Besides O’Russell and Linklater, Hardwicke the production designer worked with such noted filmmakers as Costa-Gavras (Mad City), Lisa Cholodenko (Laurel Canyon) and Cameron Crowe (Vanilla Sky). Though she “loved” working with all of them, she reckons she learned the most from O’Russell and Linklater and has remained friends with them since.

“They have very different temperaments. Richard is very zen. He really keeps his calm, very thoughtful at all times. If other people were in crisis mode he would stay cool and calm. David in some ways is the opposite. David brings a lot of energy to the set. He has every scene just crackling and he’ll just call things out in the middle of rolling the camera, ‘Okay, let’s move the camera over there, let’s do this’. Miss You Already has both kinds of scenes where you need that crackling, spontaneous energy, and sometimes you need the stillness.”

All her on set experience came to bear when she made the first Twilight movie. The 2008 adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s first novel in the bestselling vampire series attracted global interest from fans keen to see their beloved Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (played by Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson) transfer to the screen. Hardwicke did not disappoint, with the film grossing almost $400 million worldwide from a production budget of $37 million. The record for the highest earning female director has since been broken by, among others, Jennifer Lee, co-director of Frozen ($1.2 billion worldwide). “I was happy to have it even for five minutes. I’d rather give it up and have other female directors in the future do more.”

Such was the success of the first Twilight it was expected that Hardwicke would do the next film, but it wasn’t to be. Does she regret turning it down?

“No. I’m not that much of a sequel kind of person. I loved Stephanie’s first book the most. I related to the idea of this first love, this incredibly passionate, ecstatic first love. That’s what I thought was a challenge, how could I put that on film? How can I make audiences feel that giddy, crazy feeling? That was more in the first book for me. I didn’t have the super passion for the next one.”

Plenty of other directors would have given their right everything for a guaranteed box office hit, but not Hardwicke.

“Well, you know, all my films are guaranteed risky,” she laughs. Among those guaranteed risks are Thirteen, which she co-wrote with a 13-year-old, and biblical drama The Nativity Story. She sees Miss You Already as another leap, showing, as it does, life from the point of view of women.

We turn, inevitably, to the topic of women directors. It seems like the law that every woman director must hold a position on the subject. Male directors are never asked what it is like to be a man in the industry. Is about time, I ask Hardwicke, that we got off the subject?

“I used to think that. I used to think, ‘Oh I don’t want to talk about it because I’m just trying to do it and lead by example’. But I’ve found out that’s not true and that was extremely naive and that we do have to talk about it, because it has not changed.”

In the 12 years she has been making movies, and that groundbreaking best director Oscar for Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker notwithstanding, Hardwicke has seen the statistics grow worse.

“There are so many great female directors out there but only four per cent of the movies released are directed by a woman. Why should we accept that the male gaze is going to dominate when 51% of the world are women? Why can’t we have more diverse stories? Why can’t we see things that women and men are going through together?”

She is already working on her next movie, Stargirl, another beloved novel, this one by Jerry Spinelli, which is moving to the screen. Plus there is a screenplay about the music industry and a television show about architects.

“I’ve got a lot of projects that I’m dreaming about and going to keep fighting for,” says the Texan who never wants to be fenced in.

[itals] Miss You Already opens in cinemas tomorrow [FRIDAY]