Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/571027
MONSTER MASH www.postmagazine.com 22 POST SEPTEMBER 2015 the human world. It was more of the third act where we went into the town of Transylvania, where there was a mon- ster-fest going on, and the humans were loving the monsters and dressing up like them. And they are on an airplane at the end. That was the most that we saw. This one, we really crack it wide open. We meet Johnny's family. We go back to where he grew up. "That gave me an opportunity to go, 'What would the human world look like in the scheme of Hotel Transylvania?' I like contrast and this movie is about contrast, so if you look at what was set up for the first movie, the monster world is vertical. It's very tall and kind of thin. Think of the castle, with all its columns, and lighting-wise, lighting is very colorful in the castle and some- times comes from under-lighting. It's really dynamic. "The contrast to that is, if the mon- ster world is vertical, the human world is horizontal and flat. If the lighting in the monster world is dynamic and colorful, why don't we make ours kind of even and drab? And that helps support certain story ideas we were trying to get across." The characters add contrast too. Can you point to certain scenes that demonstrate that contrast? "In the 7-11, Mavis stands out a little bit — this dark silhouette in this evenly neutral colored sort of grays and tans, and sub- tle colors. She is the most dynamic and contrasty thing there. Even Johnny too — his outfit is so colorful. He's the weird bird in the family. Everyone else is super straight laced. They are wearing tans and neutral colors, and his hair is the wildest. That's why he fits in so well in the mon- ster world and why he married Mavis. He's more on the monster side of things. The human world is a little blander and more even. These two elements should look out of place in it." Is there a scene that you are particularly proud of? "The wedding is one. It was really im- portant because I have a 14-year-old daughter, and when I told her that Mavis was getting married, you could see — it got real! 'Dad, make it beautiful and don't mess up her dress.' So I was responsible to make sure we got it right. I put my best people on getting that dress right and I personally handled the look of the wedding. That was for my daughter." The "vampire camp" is also new? "It's a brand new monster location in the world of Hotel Transylvania 2. That was re- ally fun. It wasn't exactly what we've seen before — it wasn't in the castle. When I read the script, it was described as 'mon- ster camp out in the woods or wilderness.' That's a pretty broad description. "What I like to do when I am creating something, even if it's not used in the script or story, I give myself a backstory for something to grab on to. We know from the trailer that it's the camp that Drac went to, so it's at least 1,000 years old. I started thinking: It's a vampire camp on Earth. It's been there for 1,000 years, but monsters have only been out since the last movie — say a year — so how has it remained hidden for a 1,000 years? "I started thinking about Yosemite. When you are on the canyon floor and you have those rock walls and grand monoliths sticking up — those are 3,000 feet high. I thought, what if they were 30,000 feet high? What if you could hide something? It would be a natural wall. We made these mountains that were all rock and they surround this camp area, and keeps it completely hidden. In doing my research for this, I came across a town in Norway that they built so deep in a crevasse that during their winter months, they don't get any natural sun- light. They built a mirror up on the moun- tain to bounce sunlight into the town square. If you had 30,000-foot walls all the way around this camp, vampires could go out all day long. None of this is ever said, but gave me something tangi- ble. So I knew the geography and I could start populating that geography. Giving myself that backstory really helped." But you still had to get the moon in there? "In the trailer sequence, whenever I read that part in the script, I always saw that tower they were standing on, backed by a giant moon. There's no skyline. those cliffs are so high you never see the sky. So I cut one V-shaped trench just so the tower is right in front if it, and it's the only place you can see the sky. That way I could get my moon where I wanted it." Tell us about the camp's design? "The fun part was populating inside that camp, and what a monster camp would look like. There are half and half [build- ings] — log cabin meets gothic haunted house. Everything came from that. I started with the main house — the bottom half is very bunk house and top has the gables and fireplaces, and feels more like a haunted house. It's a combi- nation of goth meets woodsy."