I: When you got the job for Vampire Academy, where did it fall in the vampire and teen lit phenomenon? Were there already some teen lit movies, or was this even before that started?
Oh, no, it was definitely late in the game. Perhaps naively, my brother and I thought, much like the way at the end of the ‘80s, people were sick of teen films and nobody wanted to see another teen film, but I did the movie Heathers and it was a new way of looking at the teen film so it was responded to quite well. Even if it didn’t make a lot of money, people liked it. Mark and I thought, “Okay, people are sick of vampire movies, but this book has its own kind of personality and its own kind of style. If we bring that to life, people will of course see what an original take on the vampire lore this is.” I think we just came at the wrong time where no matter what we did, people just had fatigue about the whole vampire genre and there was nothing we could do to change that.I: For fans of the book, if they get the DVD, are some of the additional scenes you wrote included?
Yeah, there are some additional scenes. Definitely there’s a big flashback scene that was in the book that was mystifyingly cut out of the movie. I know that’s on the DVD. I haven’t actually seen the final list of deleted scenes. To me there’s a lot of things just personally, stuff within scenes that exist in the movie now that I thought were cut down a bit too much. To me the famous scene from the book, the charm necklace scene, to me it went through an ABC Family Channelization process. It was much sexier before. Maybe I’m an old perv, but I miss the old version where it was much more sexy.
-Read Daniel's whole Interview with moviepilot HERE
