Recently some of our pals (we were busy telling our intern, Robert Normalson, how we like our coffee) had the chance to sit down with Mark Waters, the director of The Vampire Academy, and chat about the upcoming film.
We’re all very excited about Vampire Academy. There are so many YA movies coming out and there’s the pressure of succeeding or failing. What attracted you to Vampire Academy and what made you put your belief into this project?
Mark Waters: “It was weird, but I kind of came into it through my brother. My brother was approached to write the screenplay and when he started to talk about the story and talk about this lead character of Rose and the interesting connection he had with Lissa, I found myself getting intrigued. Then, the producer separately came to me and sent me the books and when I read the books I realized, well quite frankly I read a lot of YA fiction myself anyway and when I read Vampire Academy, I was very struck that I liked this lead character. She wasn’t an innocent. Most of the time when you meet these people, they don’t know anything about the supernatural world and they are brought into this world and you learn about it through their eyes. They are basically these virginal innocents and I loved the fact that Rose wasn’t that. Rose was somebody who was already deeply embedded in the world and wasn’t a sweet, naïve, or shy creature. If anything, she was somebody who was rambunctious and pertinent, funny, subversive, and I liked everything about that energy. My brother’s screenplay frankly was the thing that put me over the edge. He was able to stay very loyal to the books, but make something the even amped up the humor and wit that is already there in Richelle’s book. I think he took it and put it on steroids. That also got me very excited by it.”
When you first read the screenplay, did you have a vision of how you wanted to portray the academy and the characters that are in the story?
MW: “It’s an interesting thing, because when you read something, you have this image that comes in your brain of, ok this is what this thing looks like, then you proceed to go about trying to find that thing in your brain. It’s very difficult to do sometimes. We’re making this movie not for a large budget, I mean; this is not a movie where we are given a $100 million tent pole budget. It was made for significantly less than that, so we knew that we had to find a place that was the same location. We scouted all around the United States, around Massachusetts. We had this idea that, the thing in my head was that in the middle of Montana, in the middle of the mountains, there’s this academy that was built more than 200 years ago and existed there and is old world European culture and an older Gothic academy, but its in the middle of present day Montana. Once you kind of get out of the modern world and go behind the gate, it’s almost like you are in a place out of time that doesn’t feel like it’s modern strip mall America. It kind of led to a search all over the place. We scouted Czechoslovakia and a few other countries. We ended up finding a place that was Southwest of London called the Charter House School and an interesting tidbit, it is where Peter Gabriel and Genesis met and formed their band. We found this school and as soon as we drove onto the campus, I thought that this is Vampire Academy. This is the closest thing I’ve seen to it, to the image in my brain of what this place should look like. You know, a large campus with a lot of interesting buildings and connections to a lot of secret passageways to it. It had the feeling of the school sitting right there already, so we were lucky they agreed to let us shoot there.”
For all the rest of the juicy gossip and whether the cast played In Your Eyes on set constantly head over to Fangirlish for the complete Vampire Academy interview!
Check out the brand, spanking new trailer for The Vampire Academy! See it in a theater near you on February 14th. Can you believe we’re already talking about movies in 2014?! Where has the year gone?
