At the 2010 Academy Awards, director Kathryn Bigelow won the Best Director Oscar over such film heavyweights as “Avatar’s” James Cameron and “Inglourious Basterds’” Quentin Tarantino. It was the first time a woman had ever won the award. Immediately, entertainment writers and bloggers began noting the significance of Bigelow’s award as a break-out moment for female film directors.

However, there were female directors before Bigelow’s award making critically acclaimed movies and box office blockbusters. One of those esteemed filmmakers is Catherine Hardwicke, who is coming to the Weasler Auditorium on Thursday, Dec. 1 at 7:30 p.m. for “A Director’s Life: An Evening with Catherine Hardwicke.”

At the free event, the filmmaker plans to discuss her personal journey that led her to working as a director in Hollywood. Hardwicke’s main emphasis, though, is to show how the creative process works in making a feature length film.

“I have clips from different films that I’ve done, and then I have the ways that I prepared to do those scenes,” Hardwicke said. “I can show inspirational photographs that I drew for others, storyboards and music. I hope that there’s filmmakers and film enthusiasts that want to get in deep because I’ll go deep and give all kinds of details.”

Despite only directing five films so far, Hardwicke has plenty of insider information about directing and working on big and small films, including the first installment of the wildly popular “Twilight” series. When Hardwicke was directing the film, however, the movie and its stars were not the household names and tabloid fodder they are today.

“When we did the first one, we had no idea it was going to be a massive hit like that,” Hardwicke stated. “Paramount had paid for the script, but they didn’t think it would make a dime. So at that time, there wasn’t this big pressure on me.”

As a result, Hardwicke and her collaborators were able to do things that big budget blockbusters often cannot. For instance, she was able to cast unknown actors like Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson for her main characters. At the time, Lautner’s biggest role was in 2005’s “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D.” Pattinson was only slightly more known for his turn as Cedric Diggory in the fourth Harry Potter film.

“It was almost more like doing an indie film,” Hardwicke said. “We were fighting for pennies, and they kind of let me do what I wanted to do with it.”

The film took off, grossing almost $200 million in the United States and even more worldwide. The entire series took off as well. The fourth installment, “Breaking Dawn: Part 1,” has already grossed $220 million despite being released less than two weeks ago on Nov. 18.

But the series has many detractors, and Hardwicke often finds herself fighting against her most financially successful feature.

“It’s freaky because obviously so many people hate it and so many people love it,” Hardwicke said. “Even on my next movie, ‘Red Riding Hood,’ I didn’t think it should necessarily be on the poster or in the trailer that it was from the director of ‘Twilight.’ Half of the people are going to hate it just because it says that.”

If it wasn’t enough to have to avoid being pigeonholed as the director of “Twilight,” Hardwicke also has to fight off the misconceptions of being a female filmmaker in a field dominated by men. According to an article in The Guardian by Rachel Millward, women make up less than 10 percent of film directors working in Hollywood, and many of those directors are working on little-seen independent films.

So far in 2011, a miniscule four of the top 200 grossing movies were directed by women, and only four more are set to release in the final month of the year.

“The hardest part I think is getting the jobs because they think ‘oh, you’re a female director, so you don’t understand action’ or something like that,” Hardwicke said. “Guys can do girly movies, but even though Kathryn Bigelow has proven it ten times, they don’t believe that women can do action.”

Before “Twilight,” Hardwicke had done several films that challenged those faulty mindsets. Her debut feature, “Thirteen,” was a harsh and realistic look at teenage troubles, and her follow-up, “Lords of Dogtown,” was a skater film featuring a male-dominated cast. Hardwicke, however, doesn’t select films to prove a point. Instead, she looks for strong and interesting characters for the audience to follow.

“For my first twenty movies, I was a production designer, and I worked with a lot of really great filmmakers,” Hardwicke said. “And I realized that as much detail and everything that I put into the set design, none of it mattered at all if you didn’t care about the characters or story.”

This emphasis paid off for Hardwicke on “Thirteen,” which earned a supporting actress Oscar nomination for Holly Hunter, as well as recognition at the Independent Spirit Awards and the Sundance Film Festival.

Despite the critical success of “Thirteen” and the financial success of “Twilight,” Hardwicke still struggles to get some projects off of the ground. She’s currently working on several, including a boxing movie starring Noomi Rapace, the lead actress from the Swedish “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” films and co-star of December’s “Sherlock Holmes” sequel.

“There’s a list of people like George Clooney, Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese that can get pretty much any movie that they want made,” Hardwicke said. “I’m just not on that list yet.”

Despite the challenges that feature filmmaking may entail, Hardwicke still enjoys her job. She’s moved from architecture to animation to production design, but in the end, live action filmmaking is where she plans to stay.

“It’s tough, but I’m so madly in love with it.”