Mean Girls Director Mark Waters C'86 Is Taking a Shot at R-Rated Comedy with Bad Santa 2 This Thanksgiving—And Still Trying
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Mean Girls director Mark Waters C’86 is taking Mean Girls director Mark Waters C’86 is taking a shot at R-rated comedy with Bad Santa 2 a shot at R-rated comedy with Bad Santa 2 this Thanksgiving—and still trying to figure this Thanksgiving—and still trying to figure out out his place in ever-evolving Hollywood. his place in ever-evolving Hollywood. By Molly Petrilla By Molly Petrilla DIRECTOR GONE 40 SEPTSEPT || OCTOCT 20162016 THETHE PENNSYLVANIAPENNSYLVANIA GAZETTEGAZETTE Photograph by Ethan Pines C’92 BAD THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE SEPT | OCT 2016 41 ere’s what directing a big-budget When the first Bad Santa came out Suddenly a story about mother-daughter Hollywood movie is like, at least in 2003, Waters was starting work on relationships felt personal. Hif you’re Mark Waters C’86 mak- Mean Girls and had just finished Freaky When the movie turned a $140 million ing The Spiderwick Chronicles in 2007: Friday—a Disney remake of the 1976 origi- profit, Waters jumped onto Hollywood’s You show up to shoot in Montreal just nal. Both movies starred Lindsay Lohan. radar as someone who could pull off a before the leaves have left the trees. It Both dealt with familiar teen issues (moms popular family film. “And obviously it’s turns out to be the rainiest fall in recent can be so annoying! popular girls, ugh!). something I’m attracted to,” he says. “I history—freezing cold, too. Both quickly entered the teen girl canon. like the idea of trying to please the par- You get used to standing outside in Waters knows that Bad Santa 2, due ents and the kids.” your jacket, water slipping down your out this Thanksgiving, is his first chance Besides, the real-life Waters is more hood, the chill knocking into your bones, to show audiences and studio execs that Freaky Friday than Bad Santa 2, at least waiting for any break in the rain so you he can make funny movies for adults. according to Andrew Gunn, a producer on can film something. When one finally It’s the first raunchy, R-rated comedy both movies. “He’s got daughters. He calls comes, you run the actors out under he’s ever done. his wife ‘Bunny.’ They live down in Laguna,” umbrellas, shoot a scene, and mutter to “It means that in the future, people he says. “It’s all very squeaky clean.” your director of photography, “Yeah, I aren’t going to say, ‘Oh, Mark Waters, he In explaining Waters’s resume, Gunn don’t think we can see the rain in that.” can only do family films or teen girl mov- says it’s easy to be typecast in Hollywood You coach a kid who’s playing identical ies,’” Waters says. At least, that’s the plan. as the person who can do X thing. Studio twins and has to argue with his invisible executives want a director who’s already second self. He’s also having trouble pull- Waters broke into Hollywood 20 years made family comedies to direct their ing off an American accent. ago with a very different type of family next family comedy. They don’t want him One studio president hires you, another movie from the ones he’s made since. for their next R-rated drama. shows up for script development, a third The House of Yes stars Parker Posey Of course, Waters has nothing against for the actual production process. You and Josh Hamilton as twins who turn the teen girl movies, either. He likes making edit the movie with a fourth executive, Kennedy assassination into foreplay for them, and he says it isn’t hard to under- then plan its release with a fifth. Each of their incest. (Sample lines, delivered by their stand the characters, even as a middle- those five bosses has a different idea of mom: “Jackie and Marty belong to each aged man. “We’re all teenage girls, you what the movie should be. You fight every other. Jackie’s hand was holding Marty’s know?” he says. Waters laughs at this, day to keep your own vision for it intact. penis when they came out of the womb.”) but he isn’t kidding. “A hair-pulling experience” is how Waters adapted Yes from a play with “The fact is, everyone is insecure, every- Waters sums all this up. “But no one the same name. His version had a $1.5 one has body image issues, everyone has cares at the end of the day because the million budget, one location, five actors— issues about popularity. Boys are just better movie came out well and it made money.” and soon a splashy debut at the 1997 at hiding it, but we all relate to these things.” Just over $162 million, to be exact. It also Sundance Film Festival. landed a near-perfect rating from Roger “It was a feeding frenzy,” says Jessica Mark Waters doesn’t assume that you’ve Ebert: three-and-a-half stars out of four. Tuchinsky, Waters’s former agent and seen every Mark Waters movie out there. So that’s what happened the last time current producing partner. Studios bid for He goes to football games at his daugh- Mark Waters made a movie in Montreal. the movie and agents scrambled to land ter’s high school on Friday nights. Of the 10 feature films he’s directed, he Waters. “Everybody was like, who’s Mark Friends say he talks to the screen in movie says it was the toughest one to pull off. Waters? How can we get to Mark Waters?” theaters (“don’t go in there!”) and has an But this past winter he went back to the Tuchinsky remembers. He became her insanely loud laugh—an ear-popping “HA!” shivery Canadian city and shot another first client, and she represented him for Even after 20 years in Hollywood, “he’s movie—one with a smaller budget, dirty the next nine years. as regular a person as I know,” Tuchinsky jokes, and hard edges. One that may redi- But instead of chasing more indie suc- says. “Some directors are mercurial— rect his 20-year career in Hollywood. cess, Waters followed Yes with a PG-13 such assholes. Mark’s the most easy- It’s a movie about Santa, but not the romantic comedy starring Freddie Prinze, going, friendly, nicest guy who knows jolly one. The alcoholic, thieving, pissed- Jr. (Head Over Heels), then drove further exactly what he wants.” off one. Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa. into the family-friendly lane with Freaky As Waters himself puts it: “I am some- For the past two decades, Waters has been Friday. He’s hovered there ever since, body who’s brutally honest, yet in a very making movies that families want to watch right up until Bad Santa 2. friendly way. It leads to having really together and teen girls want to crawl inside. How did he go from sibling incest to a good friends, but also some people going, Spiderwick has goblins, faeries, trolls, and PG comedy about body-switching mother ‘Man, I can’t handle Waters, I have to get a PG rating. Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011) is and daughter? Waters says he took on away from him.’” based on the beloved 1938 children’s book. Friday partly at the urging of his wife, On set, he says that brutal honesty is Vampire Academy (2014) came from a YA fic- actress Dina Spybey Waters. He inter- aimed at himself rather than the actors. tion series. A handful of romantic comedies viewed for the directing job while she They get gentle encouragement instead, show love at its PG-13iest. was pregnant with their first daughter. and he tries to keep it short and simple. 42 SEPT | OCT 2016 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Faster or slower or attack her more. He ean Girls is still the title that fol- and allure of, ‘Wow, these people are liv- finds that those nudges often change a lows Waters’s name in articles ing life at a different level than I am.’” clunker into the right note. Mand tops his IMDB page under “I was definitely enamored with it and “He’s a very good actor’s director,” “Known For,” yet he almost passed on it kind of pulled into it in a bad way for a Gunn says. at the time. Fresh off of Freaky Friday, short time,” he adds. “Then eventually I Waters has been working with actors he didn’t want to direct any more scenes came out and realized I need to define since the early 1990s, when he moved that started with locker doors slamming. myself as who I really am.” from acting in plays to directing them. “But the script was hilarious,” he says But first those wealthy friends exposed He’d never been a movie buff, but he also of Mean Girls, which was written by Tina him to something transformative. On started visiting his older brother Daniel on Fey and going by Homeschooled when he weekend trips to Manhattan, where many sets around that time. A screenwriter whose first saw it. “It was R-rated, too. Filled with of his new friends had grown up, Waters credits include Heathers—the 1988 dark cussing. Regina George had more ‘fucks’ and his fraternity brothers would get comedy featuring croquet, murder, and big than Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. I was like, this wild and … go to the theatre? perms—and Batman Returns (1992), Daniel is kind of great, but I’m cautious about it.” Up until then, he’d only seen plays at his was “the hottest writer in show business” In Mean Girls, the main character Cady own high school, and he thought they were in those years, Tuchinsky says.