| Mark Waters Interview, The Spiderwick Chronicles |
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| Wednesday, 27 February 2008 | |
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The story revolves around the three Grace children – Jared and his twin brother, Simon (both played by Freddie Highmore), their older sister, Mallory (Sarah Bolger) and their recently separated mother, Helen (Mary-Louise Parker). Peculiar things start to happen the moment the Grace family leaves New York and moves into the isolated, dilapidated Spiderwick Estate, the former home of their great-great-uncle, Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn) and great-aunt Lucinda (Joan Plowright). Unable to explain the strange disappearances and accidents that seem to happen on a daily basis, the siblings investigate what’s going on and uncover the extraordinary truth of the Spiderwick estate and the creatures that inhabit it, including the crafty, evil ogre, Mulgarath (Nick Nolte).
Mark Waters graduated from the directing program at AFI in 1994 and first gained Hollywood's attention by adapting the screenplay for and directing the 1997 Sundance favorite “The House of Yes,” starring Parker Posey. Waters went on to direct the Universal comedy “Head Over Heels,” then the VH1 Original Movie “Warning: Parental Advisory.” In 2003, he directed Jamie Lee Curtis (Golden Globe nominee) and Lindsay Lohan in the critical and commercial success “Freaky Friday.” He subsequently directed the 2004 hit “Mean Girls,” starring Lindsay Lohan and Tina Fey, and then “Just Like Heaven,” with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, in 2005.
Q: Where did you get the idea to cast Freddie as both twins? Did he say he wanted to be both when he came in?
MARK WATERS: He did. He did. And he had the confidence to know that he could pull it off. And frankly, we thought we were going to find identical twins. I remember John Sayles, when he first started working on the script, he said, 'Should I just write them as fraternal twins? Believe me, it's going to make it a lot easier on you.' I'm like, 'No, they have to be identical. Don't worry, we're going to find them. We're going to find them.' And when we searched North America, the U.K., Australia, we did not find good identical twins who could act. And eventually said we just need to find the best actor out there and hope that he can play both parts. And it turned out that Freddie could. He had the willingness to bite it off and then the talent to achieve it.
Q: With Freddie, he's British. Did you ask him to audition to see if he could do the accent?
MARK WATERS: Oh, yeah. It's funny. That's one of those classic discussions between agents and casting directors and studios. Nobody wants their star to have to read. But he was that motivated to try and get the part, and knew that there was a bit of a stretch of being able to create two distinct characters, both of whom were American, and one of whom couldn't be further in temperament from the actual Freddie. It's like he is the sweetest, most polite British kid you're ever going to meet. He doesn't have any of that, like, rage-filled Jared energy.
Q: He's more Simon?
MARK WATERS: Simon was closer to the vest, I think. It's interesting, we had one day early in the shoot where I was thinking, we should move this scene up in the schedule where he has to fight with himself by the side of the trail, because if he's able to shoot that scene, he's going to get in touch with his rage. So we moved it up and he spent the entire day in the dirt fighting with the photo doubles and coming out like with mud in his mouth and spitting out leaves and going back in. And by the time the day was done, he'd gotten in touch with his inner American. I mean, to continue with that, like even Sarah Bolger too, is like, she didn't understand sarcasm. And I said to her, 'No, this line's sarcastic.' And she'd say it, and I'd be like, 'You don't really understand what it means to be sarcastic, do you?' And she's like, 'No.' And I would have to kind of like explain it to her and do it for her and she was like, 'Oh. Okay. I get it.' And it turned out like Freddie and his brother never fought with each other, they never wrestled. And she and her sister were always very pleasant to each other. You know? And I'd say, 'No, you see, in my family, my brother and I beat each other up when we're not insulting our little sister, and that was our sign of love.' Once again, that's how Americans do it.
Q: Dealing with actors that age, they tend to grow. Were there any growth spurts on the set?
MARK WATERS: Oh, you have no idea. For Freddie it was incredible. Because it was a 90-day shoot and we took a little hiatus in it because we wanted to get spring weather for the glade sequence, by the time we'd finished shooting, he had grown two full inches since we started shooting. And so we had to redesign his outfits and get him new stuff and it was a whole can of worms because of that. The good thing is, his voice really didn't change that much. However, by the time we got around to doing ADR, like almost a year later, his voice definitely had changed. So there were certain scenes where he had to almost act with a higher voice. When he was doing ADR he had to consciously pitch shift himself to make it work. So it was tricky, actually. But he totally made it work.
Q: The book was aimed at seven year olds, but they wanted to make this for an older audience. Is there a risk when you do that that you're going to lose the readers of the book, because it's a very intense film?
MARK WATERS: The good news is that Tony and Holly, the authors, who you'll probably meet today as well, were really supportive of saying, 'You know what? You guys are spending a ton of money on this movie and it's got to play bigger than the audience for Charlotte's Web, one of Karey's movies,' because Karey had just gone through this, he'd just made this movie Charlotte's Web. Beautiful movie, but it played really soft and really young and didn't expand beyond that audience. And so we were all conscious of the fact that if yeah, you're going to make a movie of this scope, you'd better hope that you're appealing to the parents as much as appealing to the kids. And the thing is, Tony pointed out that the book came out in 2001 and the kids who were 10 years old when they read the book, were now 17. And so in a way the readership had been growing and aging over the years, but they still wanted to turn on that crowd, you had to pump up the volume a little bit. So they were very supportive of us saying, 'Let's make these action sequences more dynamic, more visceral, more scary.' And I just had this kind of barometer in my mind of, okay, I want it to be so scary that my five year old will want to either grab my arm or jump into my lap while she's watching. But I don't want it to be so scary that she runs out of the room. And we would show sequences to her in the editing room, and she's like, 'Ooh, ooh.' Like, 'This is a troll!'' But keeps watching. It's like, oh good. My five year old gets scared by Ratatouille. She's a wimp. And so I figured that was kind of my barometer of whether I'm pushing the boundary. And if it's so scary that it makes me cringe or makes her want to look away, then obviously we've gone too far.
Q: You've done CGI before in other films?
MARK WATERS: Not really. I've done some effects shots. I've done some compositing. And in Just Like Heaven did a lot of motion control and things like that. But I’ve never done computer-generated imagery in action. Page 2: Interview with Mark Waters on The Spiderwick Chronicles
    
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