Director Mark Waters of the Vampire Academy film based on the books by Richelle Mead, chats to EW about the differences between VA and Twilight.
“Twilight was about a naive person who knew nothing of a certain world, basically discovering that this world existed and totally being indoctrinated into it and falling in love with a vampire, which is interesting,” Waters said. “It’s also different from Harry Potter in that sense. This is about two people who are deeply embedded in this world, and the audience is the one who is taking the journey of being transported and learning about it for the first time while the characters are deeply, deeply in it and trying to just live and survive day to day within this world.”
“I find a lot of YA movies … are almost kind of navel-gazing in a sense of sincerity and self-importance. I think the nature of this material is that it doesn’t go that direction. Even when things are deadly serious, they are still really kept interesting and kept in a place where we never lose that wit and humor, which is kind of the thing that my brother and I like to do in all movies.”
Waters’ brother Dan, wrote the script and tried desperately to keep the essence of Richelle Mead’s world.
“I think the big difference tonally from the other movies that you could say are kind of globally put under the YA genre really comes from that humor and subversive wit that comes from my brother’s writing and from Richelle Mead’s book themselves.”
Waters’ knows that pleasing all fans is futile, and admits he made it his own ‘personal vision’.
“I think every person who reads the book has their own images that come to mind when they read it, just like I do and part of my job is. … I read things and imagine them and then kind of start trying to kind of take what I imagine and make it visual for everybody else to see. It just happens to be my personal vision, and every person’s is going to be different, every book reader.”
The Waters’ brothers were eager to please Richelle Mead–and so they should be!
“As soon as I signed on to the project, my brother and I flew up to Seattle and sat down with Richelle Mead and talked about all of the books. … The good news is that she loved the screenplay and thought it was hilarious and thought it very much captured her books while still kind of adding, making things more cinematic and putting the action on steroids — but never straying too far from being loyal to her storylines and loyal to her characters.”
“It just so happens in this movie that the stakes and the drama and the intensity of it is real in the sense that, yes, they’re going through classic things about ‘does this boy like me or not,’ ‘is this girl out to get me,’ but at the same time underplaying all of this is a true life-and-death saga because they are vampires who have predatory, evil vampires out to kill them. It makes everything very potent because … there actually is real, scary stakes and an urgency going on at all times.”
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Tags: film, Interview, Mark Waters, Vampire Academy
Mead also talks about what we should expect in future trailers. “It’s got its heart-wrenching, dramatic moments, absolutely. But there’s also action, romance (both sweet and hot), suspense, darkness, and snarky teen humor. The editors had to show a little of each of those things…all in under a minute! It’s a big task, and they pulled it off. I imagine in future trailers, things will slow down a little, and we’ll get to focus on one type of scene at a time. Certain things that went by fast and out of context will also make more sense. But for now, this just laid out everything we’re in store for! Definitely exceeded my expectations.”
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