CraveOnline: Do you get the same thing out of vampires? Or is there something so familiar about vampires that it’s just an academic concept now, and it’s hard to eke new drama out of them?
Mark Waters: That’s something that’s actually built in, and was attractive about Richelle’s book, is that it’s really an interesting mythological concept she came up with. It’s an old school one. It’s based back in Romania and Transylvania where you have good vampires and bad vampires, and you have these in-between ones who are the half-breeds, who are there to protect the good ones. It’s a very different worldview of vampires than I’ve seen in anything else. So that made it seem like even the vampire thing feels a little bit fresher, because you’re trying to educate the audience about this new way of thinking, and then deliver on the promise of it at the same time. It’s kind of cool.
I feel like vampires started off as a terrifying monster…
Yeah.
…that evoked ideas of death and seduction and necrophilia and blood…
Yeah, yeah…
And now they’re the source of PG-13 romance and comedy.
You haven’t seen the movie yet.
I haven’t seen the film. I’m asking you to tell me!
I think the great thing is that we’re having our cake and eating it too. The Strigoi, the bad vampires, are fearsome, and less “sexy fearsome” than “realling f-ing scary fearsome.” These are ferocious monsters who are going to eat you and drain you dry, and the good vampires are genteel about the whole thing. They’re the royalty from days gone by who live off blood, but they do it in a way that they live off willing participants. So I think being able to have this, you still kind of have this romantic note – vampires as genteel beast-creatures – and then you have the true beasts – that they have to fight against – I think that stuff is cool. Hopefully we were able to have a balance of both.
Are you still attached to Sabrina the Teenage Witch? Is that still happening?
I’m vaguely attached in the sense that Don [Murphy] and Susan [Montford] would like me to take it on. I have yet to read the screenplay that they’ve worked on yet because I’m so involved with this [Vampire Academy].
Sure. I was wondering how what you were talking about in terms of vampires might apply to witchcraft. But you’re not there yet…
Yeah. It’s funny, I directed a pilot in between. I directed the Lifetime show “Witches of East End.” I directed the pilot for that too, so…
So between vampires, witches and spiderwicks you’re starting to get all the monsters in there.
I know! Cover everybody. I gotta go to zombies next, I guess.
I don’t think we’ve seen a teen romance Frankenstein movie. You need to make that happen. That’s your job.
[Laughs] Frankenstein’s actually interesting, he’s kind of like a zombie.
He’s a zombie with an existential crisis. What are you working on next? What’s coming up?
I have no idea.
You have no idea? SOMEONE GIVE THIS MAN A JOB!
That’s my problem. When I’m in the middle of making a movie I have blinders on, it’s all about just getting the movie out. Frankly I’ve been getting Danny [Waters] working on a sequel to Vampire Academy in case we are a smashing success and we want to make a sequel.
What would it take to make this movie a smashing success? Would you need to knock it out of the park…?
I would say that we need to do like the business that Warm Bodies did, as opposed to the business The Mortal Instruments and Beautiful Creatures did.
And you know what the tragedy is? I liked both of those movies, Beautiful Creatures and The Mortal Instruments.
I say Warm Bodies, I really like that movie.
That was a good one.
That was the one movie that I felt tonally is more in the pocket of what we’re doing, where it had a little bit of that whimsy to it at the same time.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
