Mark Waters

I love sports. When I'm not playing, I'm watching, reading, or otherwise obsessing about them. This probably stems from growing up in Indiana, where if you didn't at least attempt to play basketball, you were considered of dubious moral character.

My first inkling that I might have a yen for directing came when I realized I enjoyed creating plays for my various sports teams more than I actually liked playing the game.

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.

Frankenstein's actually interesting; he's kind of like a zombie.

I can tell you that from the director's chair, young actors love to be challenged, to be given killer lines that take time to wrap their mind around.

Twilight' was about a naive person who knew nothing of a certain world, basically discovering that this world existed and totally being indoctrinated into it and falling in love with a vampire, which is interesting.

I read things and imagine them and then kind of start trying to kind of take what I imagine and make it visual for everybody else to see. It just happens to be my personal vision, and every person's is going to be different, every book reader.

If you look at the least effective of the 'Twilight' movies, it was when they brought in an action-movie director instead of a director who was really a good storyteller. And you can tell the difference.

I've done some effects shots. I've done some compositing. And in 'Just Like Heaven' did a lot of, like, motion control and things like that. But never done, like, computer-generated imagery in action.

Kids are funny.

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.

The 'Twilight' movies are great in their own right, but they certainly don't have any sense of humor to them.