Particularly in these high school-set movies, there’s something about being in high school that’s like a cauldron, a boiling pot of emotion and joy and heartbreak that you feel so intensely. Because you don’t have any awareness yet, you don’t realize that it’s a finite time and feeling. Mark Waters Read Quote
Unlike other young actors I’ve worked with who will remain nameless, Zoey Deutch and Lucy Fry would never go out partying after work, but would immediately hunker down to start working on the reams of labyrinthine dialogue they had to navigate for the next day’s work. Mark Waters Read Quote
Once I went to film school, I realized that film directing was actually much better than theater directing, because you kind of get to stay in control of it all the way through. You don’t relinquish the piece to the actors like you have to in theater; you stay in control through the very end. Mark Waters Read Quote
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.’ Mark Waters Read Quote
When I’m directing actors, I often find myself slipping in sports metaphors, like: ‘Don’t go for the punch line here, just put it up on a T-ball stand so she can hit it out of the park.’ Mark Waters Read Quote
Usually, like, on ‘Mean Girls,’ the task that Tina Fey and I set for ourselves was we wanted to maintain a comic intensity throughout the movie, where people just don’t really get a break from laughing. And if they do, it’s for a brief emotional scene, and then we’re going to once again try to knock them on their heels again with comedy. Mark Waters Read Quote
