Director spins fantasy while dealing with reality

Mark Waters had just finished the acclaimed Lindsay Lohan high school comedy “Mean Girls” when he was asked to direct the fantasy adventure “The Spiderwick Chronicles.”

“I was looking to have a movie where I don’t have locker doors slamming every time you called ‘background action,’ ” recalled Waters, who also directed Lohan in the high school hit “Freaky Friday.”

“The Spiderwick Chronicles,” which opens Thursday, is based on the first five books in the popular children’s series by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. It immediately caught Waters’ fancy -- not only because there wasn’t a high school in sight but also because the books “were kind of a good level of scary,” he said.

“When I met with Tony and Holly, we had this idea that you could make a fantasy movie that had a kind of relatability with modern kids and a modern family -- a context that everybody could understand. And you use modern CGI [computer-generated imagery] to make a great adventure.”

The film revolves around three children in the Grace family -- Jared and his twin brother, Simon (both played by Freddie Highmore), their older sister, Mallory (Sarah Bolger) -- and their recently separated mother (Mary-Louise Parker). The Graces have left New York to live in the crumbling, isolated estate of their great-great uncle, Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn), and his daughter (Joan Plowright).

Strange things begin happening after Jared discovers his great-great uncle’s book, “Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You.”

Waters enjoyed working with the teenage British actor Highmore (“Finding Neverland,” “August Rush”), who had special challenges, first to speak with an American accent and then to differentiate the vocal cadences of the twin brothers. And that was just for starters, it turned out.

“We retailored some of his outfits -- he grew two 2 inches during the production,” Waters says. And when the time came for Highmore to re-dub some of his lines a year after he shot the live-action footage, his voice had changed.

“In a way, he was doing an imitation of himself from a different time era,” Waters says.

-- Susan King