Mark Waters Talks Vampire Academy

Vampire Academy: Blood Sisters is based on Richelle Mead‘s YA novel and concerns a pair of discreet vampires (Zoey Deutch andLucy Fry) who return to their vampire boarding school to rediscover the sinister hierarchy within it. Sarah Hyland costars in a role that stands in pretty stark contrast to her character Haley on Modern Family, and the movie dishes out as much wicked dialogue as you’d expect from the minds of Mean Girls/Heathers originators. We caught up with Mark Waters to discuss his path to moviemaking, his favorite irreverent comedies, and the legacy of Mean Girls‘ great gay character.

The Backlot: I read in your Huffington Post essay about making Vampire Academy you were drawn towards the original YA book’s irreverence. Why is irreverence such a powerful force in this and many of your movies?

Mark Waters: My brother says that he likes to work on a genre when the genre is dying because then people are ready to poke into it and riff on it. When he wrote Heathers, we were at the tail end of the John Hughes era of teen movies. People were kind of sick of teen movies, so then Heathers came along and kind of tore the whole house down on what people thought they could expect from a teen movie. With Vampire Academy, we realized early on that the vampire genre is way overplayed right now. People have a lot of fatigue with the Twilights and Vampire Diaries of the world. But there’s something about the books that Richelle wrote that felt fresh, interesting, and fun. It’s mostly this character of Rose — there’s something about her that’s different from all the other characters in the YA books. That made me say, “Danny! We could do a vampire movie where we’re servicing the life-or-death stakes of a vampire movie while injecting some of that high school comedy.” People say it’s a mashup of Harry Potter and Twilight, but if anything we’re taking those ideas and doing something fresher and dare I say irreverent. We’re riffing on both of those kinds of movies. If it were another serious, sincere, on-the-nose vampire movie, people would want to vomit. But with the Waters humor in it, hopefully that makes it worth checking out.

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