MARK WATERS

Daydreaming allows you to play out scenarios where you miraculously save the day. You play out scenarios in your head that are kind of crazy, and then you personally, heroically resolve them.

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.

Kids are funny.

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.

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.

After 'Freaky Friday,' another teen movie was not on my playlist.

Drama is played at the pace of chess... or billiards... or poker. Engrossing? Sure. But comedy is played at the jubilant, high-octane speed of sports like basketball or hockey.

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.

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.

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.'

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

In college, I stopped doing pre-med and went into theater, and then I moved to San Francisco and lived there for five years.

When I'm in the middle of making a movie, I have blinders on; it's all about just getting the movie out.

The one thing about 'Beautiful Creatures,' 'The Host' and 'The Mortal Instruments,' which are all well-made movies, is that they were all infected with a dreadful sincerity.

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.

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.

A lot of first-time filmmakers are almost apologizing for their movie by saying, 'Well, we only had 18 days to shoot, you know.'

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.

I find women much more interesting than dudes.

I've read the whole 'Divergent' series, the 'Pretty' series. I just read it because I find this stuff interesting to read.

Most adaptations of plays I hate, because they don't envision something as cinema at all, you know?

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.

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.'

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.