CraveOnline: One of the most interesting fallacies of movies made for younger demographics, teenagers and younger in particular, is that they’re all made by adults…
Mark Waters: Yeah.
…who are kind of just trying to figure out what kids are into these days. Do you feel like you have your finger on the pulse, or were you consulting your daughters, or younger people…?
I try not to even worry about it. I feel like if I try to have my finger on the pulse and try to do what’s going to be appealing to young people, I’m going to fail. Certainly I remember when Tina [Fey] and I made Mean Girls, every choice we made was like, “What’s the movie we want to see? What’s the movie that feels true to our experience?”
The surface value of what people are wearing, what music they’re listening to, you need to treat that almost like an actor doing an accent. That’s not your character, that’s just something you’re doing on top of it. The core is like, what’s real to you.
Granted.
And that’s all I worried about.
But I’m not speaking about superficialities, because obviously movies set in the 80s… no one has a mullet anymore.
Yeah. I wish.
Right? Bring that back.
[Laughs]
But I’m thinking more in terms of the young experience. I find that a lot of adults, as they grow up they try to selectively forget some of the crappier parts of being in high school. Even now I look at people who grew up in an age of Absolute Communication, and how different they are than me in the way that their thought processes work.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s actually kind of the interesting thing about Vampire Academy, we were actually able to willfully have it be that these people live in a world where they don’t have full access to technology. The kids aren’t allowed to have cell phones. There’s not texting going on or anything like that, so they’re forced to live in this world that is strangely old-fashioned even though the technology around them is modern. You don’t get to be on social media or anything like that.
Was that in the text or was that added for convenience’s sake in the film?
No, that’s actually the nature of Richelle’s thing. We actually added some things of like, they strangled internet access years ago. But that was part of Richelle’s concept, these people that live in a world that’s outside of the normal world. I think the thing for me is that, when you say ,“you get so old that you forget what it was like,” I think that it’s still present. I think that’s what makes it fun to work in this arena, and why I’ve done it over and over, is because as a director and back when I used to be an actor you’re always looking for drama.
Especially when you’re acting, one of the first lessons they say is called “The Fight or Fuck Syndrome.” When you’re in a scene and it’s dying, you need to pick a fight or try to seduce somebody, and immediately it gives some energy to it. And the great thing about high school, you’re kind of bathed in a world where everything matters. That’s one of the reasons I keep coming back to it. I like the fact that people aren’t jaded, they have no perspective, they have no maturity yet. You’re doing things as if you’re crushed if you don’t know where you’re going to be sitting at lunch tomorrow. That shit’s always interesting to me, and it makes for good drama, and good drama makes for good movies. I willingly delve into it, and like to feel the uncomfortability and the awfulness of it because it makes the storytelling that much more interesting.
