CraveOnline: The obvious parallel, or at least the one I think people are trying to make in their heads, is with Mean Girls, which came in at the end of the teen movie boom and injected new life into it, and had something really interesting to say.
Mark Waters: Mm-hmm.
Now everyone’s going, “Oh shit, Mark Waters is doing a young adult movie. He’s going to satirize the fuck out of that. He’s going to completely flip this genre around.” Was that the intention? Was that how you were looking at it?
Well, certainly. My brother is a screenwriter. He likes to say, “I like to take on a genre when it’s dying, because then people are ready for you to shake it up a little bit.” We actually treated it as more like, let’s make a high school movie – and a high school movie that would just intrigue us on that level – and add the factor of it happens to be vampires. Add that it happens to have this element of real danger, and even though when you’re in high school you feel like everything has life and death stakes, it does not? In this case it really is, and that seemed kind of interesting to us.
So I would say this: it’s certainly way more funny and has way more cleverness and wit to it than anything else in the genre, although we weren’t really trying to make a comedy. Because if you go too far with something where the stakes are truly life and death, then you get cheeky and a little bit arch.
You can’t get involved in the drama that way.
Yeah, you have to make it feel like… yeah, we actually really care what these kids are going through, but we can’t help ourselves. We’re going to sneak in humor where we can because that’s our nature.
It seems like it’s being marketed as more of a comedy than most of its brethren. Do you think that’s accurate?
To a degree. I would say this, the trailers that they did, that were in movie theaters, were certainly more letting people know that this is something different. This is not the precious swoony romance version of a vampire movie that’s already been done. This is something that has comedy to it. You should know that we’re trying to do something different.
I think the commercial spots they’ve done in the past few weeks have definitely being skewing more towards the way there’s actually real stakes and real action in this too. And sure, there’s humor to it, but there is actually is something where it has real dramatic storytelling at the same time.
Do you feel that there is a value to the “precious swoony vampire romances” themselves, or are we beyond that now?
Oh yeah! There’s always going to be an appeal to that. You can’t deny the fact that Twilight was a huge hit, and that there’s something that really keys in with young women that makes people love that. I mean, I watch those movies with my daughters and I can see the effect that Robert Pattinson has on them, and it’s like, that’s valid. You can’t deny that. It just happens to be not anything that I’m really good at.
What do you think it was about the films that were post-Twilight – and I guess the post-Harry Potter wave – that so many of them didn’t catch on with mainstream audiences?
I think there was an element to them that were trying to please the fanbase at the cost of everybody else. You can see something even in the marketing materials for those movies. “If you don’t know the story already you’re not invited to be part of our club.” We’re trying to go the opposite way, so I took great pains to make sure that Richelle Mead, the author, and the fanbase are going to like the movie and feel like we delivered on the promise of the series. But also we’re really shooting higher than that, saying let’s make sure the action and the entertainment value is something that anybody who sees the movie and has no concept of what the books are is going to love it.
