Netflix’s The School for Good and Evil looks to tell the story of two best friends who find themselves in an enchanted school that raises heroes and villains who must protect the balance of good and evil.
These two friends, Sophie and Agatha, are put into the opposite schools and must not only learn how to excel at a school alongside the children of Cinderella, Captain Hook, and King Arthur, but they must also deal with an impending threat that may destroy everything they thought they knew.
The School for Good and Evil is the first novel in a series from Soman Chainani, and Paul Feig directs the adaptation for Netflix. We chatted this week with the filmmaker – who also directed 2016’s Ghostbusters, Spy, and Bridesmaids – about how he approached visual effects in the film, how his team avoided the obvious Harry Potter visual comparisons, how the story and humor are a mix of Frozen, Harry Potter, and The Princess Bride, and what the future holds for this magical world.
The School for Good and Evil is not the type of film Feig said he would usually direct, but its story made him fall in love with the concept and what it could become on screen.
“Truth be told, this is not my genre, fantasy and that kind of stuff,” Feig said. “So, when I was first told about it, I was like, ‘It doesn't sound like it's for me.’ But then I read the script and I absolutely fell in love with the characters and the story and the world that I could create, and that was really what it was.
“Honestly, I just loved this friendship between these two young women and the situation they go into. I love the idea that one is the daughter of a witch, the other wants to be a princess and they get dropped into the wrong school. The minute I was in it, I was just like, ‘Oh, I think I have to do this because it just seems like fun.’”
“Also, I always like a new challenge, definitely, but it's really the characters that grabbed me the most. I just thought it was just a lovely story that had a lot of opportunity to… not experiment with, that sounds too free form… to play with concepts I like in a new and bigger way.”
Woking on Ghostbusters appears to have helped prepare Feig for The School for Good and Evil as bringing ghosts to life requires some CG magic. However, Feig doesn’t want this new film to be all about green screens and such and wants his team to do as much practically as they could.
“Well, there's probably more [CG than Ghostbusters], and I think there is more in this one because we're building a world,” Feig said. “So, Ghostbusters is happening within our world, but this literally, we're building an entire reality out of nothing, but at the same time, it was really important to me to do a lot of it as much as we could practically, because I'm not a big fan of just lots of set extension and lots of green screen and all that.
“I just feel there's always a weird distance I pick up on when I watch those movies, and so, I wanted to make sure we had that balance and did a lot of in-camera stuff. We've got characters, they're animatronic. We have built these massive sets so that we didn't have to just put green screens up and all that, because I want the characters and the actors to be performing in that world so they become part of it.”
Feig also wanted this world to feel real despite it being one filled with magic. This is the kind of challenge that drew him to Ghostbusters as well as it was “science-based.”
“I have a great effects supervisor, Erik Nordby, who came on board for this movie,” Feig said. “I'd never worked with them before, but we really hit it off too, because the idea of making sure that this all feels like it's real world, even though there's magic in this world, we want to make sure everything plays by the rules of physics, because I have no interest in creating something that's just all magic and has no grounding in the real world.
“That's what drew me to doing Ghostbusters, it was science-based. Even though it was not real science, it at least was saying it was coming out of the scientific world. So, I think all that went together to just try to make this feel big and fantastical, but real at the same time, like it could actually be happening. You could go to this world and these things would happen and the magic that happens and it would make sense to you.”
Feig gave an example of this thought process when talking about the skeleton bird, known as a Stymph, seen in the trailer. While it is a fantasy creature, Feig and the team looked to real birds to make it feel real in the context of this new world.
“We worked a long time on that one because in the book it's called a Stymph, and it's basically the thing that comes and brings people to the school, but it's always referred to as this bird made of bones,” Feig said. “Again, going right there from our wanting to make sure that even though it's a fantastical creature, it feels like it has a real life to it, if you will.
“So, it took a long time to figure out, ‘Okay, how would it fly? It could be made of bones. It's this undead bird that still is sentient. But we want to keep the idea that it's made out of bones.’ So that then turned into looking at a lot of skeletons of birds and a lot of even decayed birds and all that, and how the tissue stays on them, what feathers stay on, how the bones interact with the tissue and the feathers and all that, so it really was exciting to get it right.”
Simply having your book/film being about magic and being called The School for Good and Evil will obviously bring forth comparisons to Harry Potter. Feig doesn’t downplay this notion and discussed how the team worked to make this new world stand on its own.
“I had a great production designer on this, Andy Nicholson. I met with a lot of production designers on this and I wanted to do something different because obviously, the first thing people are going to think about with a movie like this is Harry Potter,” Feig said. “I did not want to do anything that was going to look like that, and so I met him and we really hit it off.”
As a modification of the old adage goes, it takes a whole school, or in this case, a whole crew, to give The School for Good and Evil its own identity and not be seen as a Harry Potter clone. Feig and the team also had the benefit of pulling directly from a pre-existing book, but they still had to pick and choose from that first book as putting in everything included would have “cost a trillion dollars.” However, some of the set-pieces had to be examined with a fine-tooth comb so they didn’t retread well-worn ground.
“It's all based on the story, obviously, because it’s about the characters on their journey and making sure that that's what grounds us and keeps us going,” Feig said. “But then it’s about going, ‘Okay, these are the main set-pieces from the book that are important to people. These are the ones that I think we can make really cool, and really advance the story and tell the characters through them,’ and then you just apply, ‘How do we do it in a way that we haven't seen before?’ It's fun, it's a real exciting challenge.
“Part of me likes that I don't know that world like every one of those films so well, because then I can go, ‘Oh what about this?’ Then either somebody's like, ‘Okay, they've done that before,’
or, ‘Oh God, we didn't think of that.’ I'm not bound by so heavily trying to avoid something versus I can just think as is inspired by the source material and then other people can help me realize that in a way that hopefully, won't be derivative.”
The School for Good and Evil isn’t so much about poking fun at fairy tale tropes as it is about “putting a little twist on them” This school is all about training heroes and villains who then go on an adventure that will one day become a fairy tale. This all leads to the comedy being less irreverent and more a mix of Frozen, Harry Potter, and The Princess Bride.
“We treat a lot of stuff very, very seriously, and there's a lot of very dramatic stuff that happens, but also, we have fun with it, but it's not making fun of it,” Feig said. “It's the people within it, how they interact. This is how all my comedies are really, you know what I mean? I was bristle when somebody calls Spy a spoof, or whatever. It's like, ‘I don't do spoofs. I do the genre and then I put eccentric characters into the genre so they can react as an eccentric character, or we as an eccentric character would in a very heightened situation,’ so that's the tone.
“That's the only tone I know how to do. It's the only tone I'm interested in doing then, so that's what we bring here. It's very fun. It's very funny, but we're never going, ‘oh, look how dumb this is,’ or making fun of it. We're just having fun with the characters and having fun with some of the tropes within it.”
To make this film as fun as possible, it was important to bring in some incredible talent to help bring the characters to life. Two of the main stars are Charlize Theron and Kerry Washington, who play School for Evil head Lady Lesso and School for Good head Professor Dovey, respectively.
Theron is no stranger to the world of fantasy, as she played Ravenna in Snow White and the Huntsman, and Feig wanted to make sure she didn’t feel like she was doing something she’d already done before.
“Honestly, when I first went to her with this, I was like, ‘Oh, she's done these kinds of movies. I don't know if she's going to want to do it,’ but then the character's very different from those movies because she's a teacher in this school,” Feig explained. “She's the head of the school for evil, so she's more of a delicious professor/relisher of evil, so it was a chance for her to have much more fun in a way than some of those movies where you have to be very serious.
“Even though obviously, they have fun with them, but they're the serious one in the middle of it. I think what Charlize loved is she got to be this fun character who's really relishing teaching these kids evil, but then has an arc, has a really surprising arc in it.”
Feig also encouraged Theron and the other actors to help define their look, and Theron was partially responsible for Lady Lesso’s “distinct look.”
“She wanted this very tailored, severe silhouette look, but then it was her idea to do that hair, this red hair with that almost triangular wedge to it,” Feig said. “She had reference photos of people and models that she'd seen before, and I just loved it. But it's funny, she's like, ‘I'd never played a redhead before,’ and she was like, ‘Are you okay with that?’ I said, ‘If it works for you, man, I'm thrilled.’”
As for Washington, Feig has been wanting to work with the Scandal star for some time, but the timing just never worked out for them. That changed with The School for Good and Evil, especially due to the fact that Feig needed somebody funny and Washington is “very funny.”
“I've always been such a fan of her acting, but then I never forget when she hosted Saturday Night Live, I was like, ‘Okay, she's funny. She knows how to do comedy,’” Feig said. “But then I always have to match up the person with when I see their strength as a comedic actor with the right role. The minute I read this, I was just like, ‘It's got to be Kerry. It's got to be Kerry.’ My producing partner, Laura, could tell you just, I was just like, ‘I need Kerry for this role. There's nobody else I want this role.’”
While nothing is set in stone, The School for Good and Evil has the potential to become a new film franchise for Netflix as there are seven books from Soman Chinani to pull from. Much will depend on how the film is received when it arrives on Netflix later this year, but Feig is excited about its future regardless, and would be happy to either continue on as the director or take on a more creative overseer role.
“I really had fun directing this and I love this cast,” Feig said. “These young actors are so amazing, my God, and we just had a great time. I've finally got to create a full world, which I've always wanted to do, so I would very much want to direct at least one more, if not a couple more.
“But then, obviously, always I really would like to steer this creatively and produce orally, because I think it's a great world and there's a lot to play with. You've got all these books, but then there are ideas beyond the books that can be expanded on.
“Already out of this, some of our side characters I'm very interested in spinning them off into something, whether it's another movie or a TV series or what, it's one of these worlds, as these worlds can do, has a lot of branches.
“Then, I just think there's a great commentary within it, a great way to comment on life and people in current situations and all that within, not politically, in any way, but the idea of this black and white world that is good and evil and how that cracks, and how you discover that things aren't all one way, or all the other way and in how you deal with that. Then, what grows out of that is really fertile ground, if you will, and so I would love to continue with it.”
Jim Vejvoda contributed to this report.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Continue reading...
These two friends, Sophie and Agatha, are put into the opposite schools and must not only learn how to excel at a school alongside the children of Cinderella, Captain Hook, and King Arthur, but they must also deal with an impending threat that may destroy everything they thought they knew.
The School for Good and Evil is the first novel in a series from Soman Chainani, and Paul Feig directs the adaptation for Netflix. We chatted this week with the filmmaker – who also directed 2016’s Ghostbusters, Spy, and Bridesmaids – about how he approached visual effects in the film, how his team avoided the obvious Harry Potter visual comparisons, how the story and humor are a mix of Frozen, Harry Potter, and The Princess Bride, and what the future holds for this magical world.
A Magical World That Aims to Feel Real, According to Its Rules
The School for Good and Evil is not the type of film Feig said he would usually direct, but its story made him fall in love with the concept and what it could become on screen.
“Truth be told, this is not my genre, fantasy and that kind of stuff,” Feig said. “So, when I was first told about it, I was like, ‘It doesn't sound like it's for me.’ But then I read the script and I absolutely fell in love with the characters and the story and the world that I could create, and that was really what it was.
“Honestly, I just loved this friendship between these two young women and the situation they go into. I love the idea that one is the daughter of a witch, the other wants to be a princess and they get dropped into the wrong school. The minute I was in it, I was just like, ‘Oh, I think I have to do this because it just seems like fun.’”
“Also, I always like a new challenge, definitely, but it's really the characters that grabbed me the most. I just thought it was just a lovely story that had a lot of opportunity to… not experiment with, that sounds too free form… to play with concepts I like in a new and bigger way.”
Woking on Ghostbusters appears to have helped prepare Feig for The School for Good and Evil as bringing ghosts to life requires some CG magic. However, Feig doesn’t want this new film to be all about green screens and such and wants his team to do as much practically as they could.
“Well, there's probably more [CG than Ghostbusters], and I think there is more in this one because we're building a world,” Feig said. “So, Ghostbusters is happening within our world, but this literally, we're building an entire reality out of nothing, but at the same time, it was really important to me to do a lot of it as much as we could practically, because I'm not a big fan of just lots of set extension and lots of green screen and all that.
“I just feel there's always a weird distance I pick up on when I watch those movies, and so, I wanted to make sure we had that balance and did a lot of in-camera stuff. We've got characters, they're animatronic. We have built these massive sets so that we didn't have to just put green screens up and all that, because I want the characters and the actors to be performing in that world so they become part of it.”
Feig also wanted this world to feel real despite it being one filled with magic. This is the kind of challenge that drew him to Ghostbusters as well as it was “science-based.”
“I have a great effects supervisor, Erik Nordby, who came on board for this movie,” Feig said. “I'd never worked with them before, but we really hit it off too, because the idea of making sure that this all feels like it's real world, even though there's magic in this world, we want to make sure everything plays by the rules of physics, because I have no interest in creating something that's just all magic and has no grounding in the real world.
“That's what drew me to doing Ghostbusters, it was science-based. Even though it was not real science, it at least was saying it was coming out of the scientific world. So, I think all that went together to just try to make this feel big and fantastical, but real at the same time, like it could actually be happening. You could go to this world and these things would happen and the magic that happens and it would make sense to you.”
Feig gave an example of this thought process when talking about the skeleton bird, known as a Stymph, seen in the trailer. While it is a fantasy creature, Feig and the team looked to real birds to make it feel real in the context of this new world.
“We worked a long time on that one because in the book it's called a Stymph, and it's basically the thing that comes and brings people to the school, but it's always referred to as this bird made of bones,” Feig said. “Again, going right there from our wanting to make sure that even though it's a fantastical creature, it feels like it has a real life to it, if you will.
“So, it took a long time to figure out, ‘Okay, how would it fly? It could be made of bones. It's this undead bird that still is sentient. But we want to keep the idea that it's made out of bones.’ So that then turned into looking at a lot of skeletons of birds and a lot of even decayed birds and all that, and how the tissue stays on them, what feathers stay on, how the bones interact with the tissue and the feathers and all that, so it really was exciting to get it right.”
The School for Good and Evil vs. Harry Potter and that School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Simply having your book/film being about magic and being called The School for Good and Evil will obviously bring forth comparisons to Harry Potter. Feig doesn’t downplay this notion and discussed how the team worked to make this new world stand on its own.
“I had a great production designer on this, Andy Nicholson. I met with a lot of production designers on this and I wanted to do something different because obviously, the first thing people are going to think about with a movie like this is Harry Potter,” Feig said. “I did not want to do anything that was going to look like that, and so I met him and we really hit it off.”
As a modification of the old adage goes, it takes a whole school, or in this case, a whole crew, to give The School for Good and Evil its own identity and not be seen as a Harry Potter clone. Feig and the team also had the benefit of pulling directly from a pre-existing book, but they still had to pick and choose from that first book as putting in everything included would have “cost a trillion dollars.” However, some of the set-pieces had to be examined with a fine-tooth comb so they didn’t retread well-worn ground.
“It's all based on the story, obviously, because it’s about the characters on their journey and making sure that that's what grounds us and keeps us going,” Feig said. “But then it’s about going, ‘Okay, these are the main set-pieces from the book that are important to people. These are the ones that I think we can make really cool, and really advance the story and tell the characters through them,’ and then you just apply, ‘How do we do it in a way that we haven't seen before?’ It's fun, it's a real exciting challenge.
“Part of me likes that I don't know that world like every one of those films so well, because then I can go, ‘Oh what about this?’ Then either somebody's like, ‘Okay, they've done that before,’
or, ‘Oh God, we didn't think of that.’ I'm not bound by so heavily trying to avoid something versus I can just think as is inspired by the source material and then other people can help me realize that in a way that hopefully, won't be derivative.”
The School for Good and Evil Is ‘Frozen Meets Harry Potter Meets The Princess Bride’
The School for Good and Evil isn’t so much about poking fun at fairy tale tropes as it is about “putting a little twist on them” This school is all about training heroes and villains who then go on an adventure that will one day become a fairy tale. This all leads to the comedy being less irreverent and more a mix of Frozen, Harry Potter, and The Princess Bride.
“We treat a lot of stuff very, very seriously, and there's a lot of very dramatic stuff that happens, but also, we have fun with it, but it's not making fun of it,” Feig said. “It's the people within it, how they interact. This is how all my comedies are really, you know what I mean? I was bristle when somebody calls Spy a spoof, or whatever. It's like, ‘I don't do spoofs. I do the genre and then I put eccentric characters into the genre so they can react as an eccentric character, or we as an eccentric character would in a very heightened situation,’ so that's the tone.
“That's the only tone I know how to do. It's the only tone I'm interested in doing then, so that's what we bring here. It's very fun. It's very funny, but we're never going, ‘oh, look how dumb this is,’ or making fun of it. We're just having fun with the characters and having fun with some of the tropes within it.”
To make this film as fun as possible, it was important to bring in some incredible talent to help bring the characters to life. Two of the main stars are Charlize Theron and Kerry Washington, who play School for Evil head Lady Lesso and School for Good head Professor Dovey, respectively.
Theron is no stranger to the world of fantasy, as she played Ravenna in Snow White and the Huntsman, and Feig wanted to make sure she didn’t feel like she was doing something she’d already done before.
“Honestly, when I first went to her with this, I was like, ‘Oh, she's done these kinds of movies. I don't know if she's going to want to do it,’ but then the character's very different from those movies because she's a teacher in this school,” Feig explained. “She's the head of the school for evil, so she's more of a delicious professor/relisher of evil, so it was a chance for her to have much more fun in a way than some of those movies where you have to be very serious.
“Even though obviously, they have fun with them, but they're the serious one in the middle of it. I think what Charlize loved is she got to be this fun character who's really relishing teaching these kids evil, but then has an arc, has a really surprising arc in it.”
Feig also encouraged Theron and the other actors to help define their look, and Theron was partially responsible for Lady Lesso’s “distinct look.”
“She wanted this very tailored, severe silhouette look, but then it was her idea to do that hair, this red hair with that almost triangular wedge to it,” Feig said. “She had reference photos of people and models that she'd seen before, and I just loved it. But it's funny, she's like, ‘I'd never played a redhead before,’ and she was like, ‘Are you okay with that?’ I said, ‘If it works for you, man, I'm thrilled.’”
As for Washington, Feig has been wanting to work with the Scandal star for some time, but the timing just never worked out for them. That changed with The School for Good and Evil, especially due to the fact that Feig needed somebody funny and Washington is “very funny.”
“I've always been such a fan of her acting, but then I never forget when she hosted Saturday Night Live, I was like, ‘Okay, she's funny. She knows how to do comedy,’” Feig said. “But then I always have to match up the person with when I see their strength as a comedic actor with the right role. The minute I read this, I was just like, ‘It's got to be Kerry. It's got to be Kerry.’ My producing partner, Laura, could tell you just, I was just like, ‘I need Kerry for this role. There's nobody else I want this role.’”
The Future of The School for Good and Evil
While nothing is set in stone, The School for Good and Evil has the potential to become a new film franchise for Netflix as there are seven books from Soman Chinani to pull from. Much will depend on how the film is received when it arrives on Netflix later this year, but Feig is excited about its future regardless, and would be happy to either continue on as the director or take on a more creative overseer role.
“I really had fun directing this and I love this cast,” Feig said. “These young actors are so amazing, my God, and we just had a great time. I've finally got to create a full world, which I've always wanted to do, so I would very much want to direct at least one more, if not a couple more.
“But then, obviously, always I really would like to steer this creatively and produce orally, because I think it's a great world and there's a lot to play with. You've got all these books, but then there are ideas beyond the books that can be expanded on.
“Already out of this, some of our side characters I'm very interested in spinning them off into something, whether it's another movie or a TV series or what, it's one of these worlds, as these worlds can do, has a lot of branches.
“Then, I just think there's a great commentary within it, a great way to comment on life and people in current situations and all that within, not politically, in any way, but the idea of this black and white world that is good and evil and how that cracks, and how you discover that things aren't all one way, or all the other way and in how you deal with that. Then, what grows out of that is really fertile ground, if you will, and so I would love to continue with it.”
Jim Vejvoda contributed to this report.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Continue reading...