First look at The School For Good and Evil adaptation introduces fairytale world with edgy twist

Paul Feig never thought he'd create something in the fantasy genre. But as soon as he read the script for The School For Good and Evil, he knew he couldn't pass up the opportunity to bring the dark fairytale adaptation to life.

Based on the bestselling book series by Soman Chainani, The School For Good and Evil tells the story of two best friends Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) and Agatha (Sofia Wylie) who find themselves suddenly thrown into opposing sides at an enchanted school that trains heroes and villains to protect the balance of good vs. evil. The villains are taught by Lady Lesso (Charlize Theron) and the heroes taught by Professor Dovey (Kerry Washington), with The School Master (Laurence Fishburne) watching over them all.

Over three years ago, Feig was first brought the script for Netflix's film adaptation of the popular series. Despite being a bit intimidated by directing something set in such a complex and intricately built world, he couldn't get the story out of his head. Feig tells EW he "just fell in love" with the story because of the relationship between the two young women. "I'm always looking for female friendship stories — those are my favorite movies to make — and I've also always wanted to create a world, and I've never really had a chance to do that," he says. "I got to scratch the surface of it with Ghostbusters, but that was still our world. So this just had everything I wanted. It was only after I read the script that I started reading the books, and I fell in love with everything in them. They're very dense books, very inventive and fun, like Alice in Wonderland."

Feig worked closely with author Chainani to make sure fans of the books would be satisfied with the adaptation while also creating something that new fans could enjoy as well. But he knew he had a big task ahead of him to build a new world from the ground up visually. "I was really jonesing to get to work with visual artists to create something new," he says. "If you look at all my movies, you'll notice I always take on a different genre every time. I want to work my way through all the genres, but fantasy was never a genre that I thought I would end up doing. It is a hard genre to do, and is a very specific genre. But once I read this and could visualize the world of it, it was really fun."

The goal was to make sure the world of The School For Good and Evil looked like nothing else that had come before. "Everybody knows Harry Potter, everybody knows Frozen, all those things, so my thought was, what if we make it based on Art Nouveau?" Feig remembers. "Then suddenly all these designs start making me feel like a kid in a candy shop."

The director remembers being inspired by the Art Nouveau architecture from his time spent in Budapest, Hungary while filming Spy and realizing he should base this world off that particular visual style "because that will take it out of a classic Harry Potter world, out of the totally gothic world, and make it our own where it's both garish and over the top, but at the same time, we wanted to make sure that while it's extreme characters, it's not a cartoon."

Once the style for the costumes and sets were developed, what really excited him about bringing the story to life is how the author explores stereotypical ideas of good vs. evil and then turns that on its head. "I think it so speaks to the way that the world is right now," Feig says. "Somehow we've gotten into this very divided place where you're either on my side or you're against me, and you're terrible and I'm good. It was really inspiring and I won't say easy, but we fed off the creativity of what's happening in this world, and with the hopes that we can, through the world of fantasy, make our statement on that."

While Feig doesn't normally like to make overt political statements in his movies, he felt that the message at the heart of The School For Good and Evil is something that everyone can get behind. "[I]t's really just saying, 'Look, we're all people, we're all human,'" Feig says. "Agatha even says it in the movie, 'You're not evil, you're just human.' I think it's a really important lesson to get across in a very stylized, entertaining way. It's all relatable to our lives — even though it's set in a very fanciful world. There are heroes, and there's bullies, and there's good people, and there's bad people, and there's insecurity, and vulnerabilities, and pressure, and bad decision-making, and love, and not giving up on people you love even when they go through a really difficult period."

And — if all goes according to plan — he hopes to explore that further with sequels. "The goal is definitely for this to be a franchise," he says. "I mean, this cast is just stellar. I have to pinch myself every time I watch the movie. From Charlize, and Kerry, and Laurence, to Michelle [Yeoh], and Cate Blanchett as the voice of the [Storian], to this amazing new young cast who are just so deep and wonderful, inventive and charismatic, it was really a thrill."

The School For Good and Evil premieres Oct. 19 on Netflix. Check out an exclusive first look at the movie in more photos below:

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