An Interview with Julie Plec
Sydney Fener - March 4, 2024
Julie Plec (Northwestern University ’94) is a writer, director, and producer. She created the hit CW program “The Vampire Diaries” along with Kevin Williamson, as well as the spin-off shows “The Originals” and “Legacies.” Plec has far-reaching experience in the entertainment industry, from her work on the “Scream” film franchise to her collaboration on many television projects. Her work focuses on the thrills and angst of adolescence heightened by gothic mythologies and literary traditions. This combination of horror, humor, and drama characterizes Plec’s unique voice. I sat down with Plec to discuss her career and her perspective as an artist and storyteller.
NAR: Why are vampires so sexy? What I mean by that is, why do you think we have such an enduring fascination with vampires and vampire mythology? What's so compelling about those stories?
Plec: You know, I think that there's two answers to that. The first is that everybody has a strange, aspirationally morbid attachment to the idea of immortality. Why, I don't know, but it seems like people love to engage in that thought of, like, “What if I could live forever?” This cult of supernatural permanence, I think, is something that people really respond to as a concept.
The second is that, no matter how progressive we get as people, we still all have a little piece of ourselves that finds the seduction culture of modern-day vampires really titillating, I think. The more pure the world gets, the more people love to indulge in that kind of gothic seduction fantasy.
NAR: What are your literary influences in vampire mythology, and how do you see “The Vampire Diaries” extrapolating from or adding to that mythology?
Plec: In the most lowbrow way to answer the question, funnily enough, most of our influences were other shows or movies. I mean, obviously I read Stephen King growing up religiously. I read Anne Rice, “Interview with the Vampire,” all the Lestat stories. I certainly had a little bit of a literary lexicon to pull from.
Kevin Williamson was a huge fan of this vampire soap opera back in the ’70s called “Dark Shadows.” I was a huge fan of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Between the two of us, I'd say we drew more from those two things than probably anything else.
NAR: How are modern vampire adaptations using these gothic themes and applying them to the contemporary world?
Plec: I think what you actually will find in this most contemporary of moments is that people are leaning back into the gothic packaging for it. They're telling it as a period piece, like “Interview,” or they're creating a stylized world for these vampires to move in. One thing that we came up against, by the time we got through “The Vampire Diaries” and “The Originals,” the world had changed with Time's Up and Me Too and really focusing on a heroine's agency and trying to avoid toxic rape culture and all those things.
NAR: What are your thoughts on the teen and YA genre in television? How have you seen that genre change over the course of your career?
Plec: That genre vexes me. Because, as is evidenced by the success of shows like “The Vampire Diaries,” and “Riverdale,” and “Dawson's Creek,” and “The O.C.,” and “Gossip Girl,” and “Pretty Little Liars,” et cetera, et cetera, there is such an audience, an enduring audience for those shows, and it is not just a young adult audience. It is a 12 year old, an 18 year old, their mother, their aunt, their grandma, their grandma's boyfriend, their uncle's boyfriend.
It's a universal audience, and yet in the business, people still call it YA and are constantly like, “Oh, we're not looking for YA material. We don't want to be in the YA business.” And so years will go by where all of the networks and the streamers will say, “Oh, we don't really want to do that much YA,” but then a show like “The Summer I Turned Pretty” will come along and suddenly is the biggest hit of the year.
I really get so excited about shows like “The O.C.,” shows like “13 Reasons Why,” shows like “The Summer I Turned Pretty” because they all hit in moments where everybody was certain that YA was dead. And they all became bigger hits than most shows on television. I wish that the business could remember the cycle and that YA does sustain so that they would approach that genre with a little bit more integrity and a little bit more money, right?
NAR: So do you find the genre label of YA or teen to be limiting or can it also be sort of empowering and give more space for certain types of stories?
Plec: I think you're probably right that it's a little bit of both. I think it's a little bit of a misnomer. Like I said, you know, it isn't just for young teens. It just isn't. In fact, most young teens don't really watch TV. And yet, you find the audience in the strangest of places. There is a comfort to a label of a genre that you know you love.
NAR: Did you feel something missing growing up watching TV or reading books? Do you feel that there was like a missing space in the culture for teen or YA stories, or did you just sort of gravitate to it creatively?
Plec: I think I just gravitated to it creatively. I always make the joke that I'm still emotionally 17. No matter how old I get, my emotional maturity is sort of stuck in amber. I really still love those stories about the first meet-cute and the best friendship that turns into romance. You just can't tell the stories in an adult context as well. People are too cynical. There's a hopefulness attached to first loves and first sex and first betrayal of a friend and those things that people just really enjoy.
I remember as a kid, I read so much and my generation was the first time where there was a book series where a new one would come out every month, like “Sweet Valley High.” That kind of thing was a big deal when I was a kid, when I was a teenager. I would go to the library and check out like 60 books. And I would read everything. I read every romance novel. I read every thriller. I read every ghost story. I read every mystery. Every Nancy Drew, who was already old when I was a kid, but those kinds of books too. And so I just always was drawn to that world and really wanted to tap into my love for it when I started doing it for a living.
NAR: You have a lot of background with genre blending or genre bending. With “The Vampire Diaries,” it's very horror-drama and you have such an extensive background with the “Scream” franchise, which is horror-comedy. How do these other genres interact with horror? Do you find that horror lends itself to that genre bending type of thing?
Plec: It really does. When horror is done well and at its best, it is a very, very powerful emotional drama that also happens to be deeply scary, or it is a very lighthearted, delightful satire that also happens to be cloaked in a non-satirical terror context.
I always say that genre, whether it be horror or sci-fi or fantasy, gives me the opportunity as a storyteller to tell the kind of stories I really want to tell, which are family stories, love stories, relationship stories. That without the trappings of the genre tend not to be as easy to get on the air and to keep on the air. So I call genre the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. I've noticed that people tend to like to buy things that have a big idea. They like to market things that have that big idea. And then they like to watch things that have the big idea attached to it.
NAR: You started in the world of film with “Scream” and then have very much moved into the world of television, and I wanted to ask, what do you see as the differences in your experience between film and television?
Plec: When I was working in the movies, there wasn't a lot of great television on. Pre- “Sopranos,” literally. So there's just not a ton of great TV, and movies were where everybody wanted to work. And then all of a sudden, it was like ’99, 2000, 2001, somewhere in there, I realized that I had not seen a movie that I had liked in like a year. All the big budget movies were stupid and all the art house movies were too artsy for my taste, and they weren't making a lot of the romantic comedies with the stuff that I used to love, and the action movies that used to be great, like “Die Hard” and “Speed” were now six iterations in and movies weren't delivering. Then all of a sudden you look on TV and there's “Sopranos,” “The West Wing,” “Buffy,” and this television was so entertaining. Every single night of the week you had a show that you could watch and you loved it. And if there was an episode that maybe wasn't great, you were like, “Okay, that wasn't great, but next week will be better.” You knew that there was this consistency of entertainment that the movies, for me, were not giving at the time.
I made my switch into television, and television had its first, what we'll call, big renaissance era, you know? And then just this explosion of the Golden Age of Television. And then suddenly the streamers got into it and started spending feature film dollars on television and making feature film quality television shows. And then you add the pandemic into that, and then everybody stops going to the movies. You realize that what we are doing in television right now is as good as, if not better than, what people have been doing in features. That became so thrilling. Because you finally felt like, “Oh, we finally have all the resources to do this right.”
Then the bottom fell out of the market– the entertainment market. Now nobody's figuring out how to make anything good. Everybody's out of money and terrified and crying and freaking out about how to find viewers. And so everyone's second guessing everything.
NAR: That episodic storytelling, how do you approach that? From a season arc to a show arc to just even episode arcs, what's that like to balance?
Plec: I am a big believer in looking at everything like a three-act movie. Actually, I wouldn't even say three-act movie so much as I would say beginning, middle, and end. So, I think every season should have a very clear beginning, middle, and an end, structurally speaking. Mythology should have a clear launch point, ship point, landing point, you know? Like, if you lose control of the arc of your mythology, you're toast.
I think characters should go on a journey. I think you should be able to say, “She started the season this way, ended the season that way.” And then I think that episodically, the characters should have a small– can be super subtle– but a small journey. A launch, a shift, and a landing where they end a little bit different than where they started. If you can start just with that simple structural approach, it can be really vexing because you're sometimes trying to squeeze a story that you like into those rules as opposed to building the story from those rules. It more often than not creates a more cohesive story than if you ignore those rules.
NAR: In your experience as a writer, producer, and director, how would you describe the way each role shapes your relationship with the story you're telling?
Plec: Writing is the hard part for me. Putting words on a page causes me a lot of grief. It's terrible and dramatic, and it's a very, very harrowing experience. I always find writing to be the most emotionally challenging because I just am second-guessing myself constantly and worried that no one's going to like it and suffering through the process of writing as you do. I don't have a good relationship with writing until I have written and once I have written then all of a sudden I'm like, “Oh, that wasn't that bad.” Getting to the act of writing it is so awful half the time. I'm like, “Why do I still do this for a living? This is madness.”
But the goal is to put a story on paper that I think people might react to. I already know the story works, and I already know that I think people will like it if I execute it well. Then the goal becomes about executing it in the way that whoever put it on the page, often myself, but often other people, meant for it to be seen. You can have a whole story in your head that is really successful, and then in the wrong hands, it can be translated to the screen not well. With all the intentions and all the contextualization all off. And then you're watching it and you're like, “I swear I wrote something better than this, and I don't really know what happened.”
So as a director, my goal is to capture that intention so that it shows up. And so that I'm telling the same story as the storyteller was when they wrote it. I love that. Because that to me is just about figuring out how to guide the story visually. As a producer, though, that's a whole different beast because then you're dealing with, “Well, we don't have the money for that. We don't have the time for that. We need, you know, to jump through all these hoops to get the story told. We can't tell the story the way that they wanted to tell it because it's just too ambitious and we don't have the means.” So then it becomes about how to wear both the hat of the person that has to say no but also the hat of the person that is still artist-friendly and wants to help find solutions.
NAR: You described your approach to being a producer as “artist-friendly.” What are the attributes of an artist-friendly producer?
Plec: As a producer, your job is always to answer to multiple people, because you're the one the studio's gonna look to if there's money problems. You're the one the talent looks to if they're unhappy. You're doing talent relations, you're doing ego management, you're doing money management, you're juggling a lot of opinions.
Where a lot of producers go wrong is they forget to nurture that relationship with the talent. They may as well go be a studio executive, because when you're in the trenches, you have to be on the same side. When you're at 3 o'clock in the morning shooting on a Friday, and everyone's exhausted, and it's raining, and it's cold, if you're not in it with them, in the fight as a peer, and as a partner, then then nobody's really going to really appreciate why you're there or what you're there to do and you're just going to seem like the money man that nobody really wants to hear from.
It's important to be able to defend the creative vision while also being responsible for the logistical and financial limitations. Not all producers are good at it, but the ones who are are good at both are incredible.
NAR: How have you seen the landscape of entertainment, especially television, change?
Plec: Greg [Berlanti] was just reminding me in a car ride on the way up here that pretty much all of his biggest hits, if he took a snapshot in their first year of that moment in time, they would all be considered failures. I realize that he's right because I remember when “Riverdale” premiered on the CW, it got very low ratings. And when “You” premiered on Lifetime, it got very low ratings.
Those shows– all American, in their first year got very low ratings, and then they came out on Netflix. Suddenly, a show that was getting less than a million viewers became a massive runaway hit. The problem is not everything can be on Netflix and everybody has their own streaming services, and they're trying to build an audience, and they're trying to get people to watch, and yet they're expecting these shows to drop and be instant successes, and they're just not. Almost nothing is an instant success anymore. You have to give it time to grow and to find its audience, and the only way to do that– sure, word of mouth is great, but you have to market these shows.
Patience, I think, is what is missing from today's environment. That needs to be instilled in executives realizing there are now some young adult viewers and even some adult viewers who refuse to watch a show until it's been ordered for a second season. They're so tired of falling in love with the show and having it canceled after one.
Please note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
