NEW YORK -- Kevin Williamson likes to call himself dumb, old, out-of-touch, emotionally immature and a real smartass.
This is the same 34-year-old North Carolina boy whom Miramax co-founder Bob Weinstein praises as "a genius."
This is the same son-of-a-fisherman who has every young movie and TV star in Hollywood queuing up to grab a role in one of his cutting-edge ensemble casts.
This is the same multi-talented, writer-director-producer who invented the Scream franchise, wrote I Know What You Did Last Summer, created the popular Dawson's Creek television series, wrote the sci-fi thriller The Faculty for Robert Rodriguez (his only flop) and plans to introduce Wasteland to TV this fall.
Oh yeah, this is the same former actor who just directed his first feature, a fiendishly witty and raucous high school comedy called Teaching Mrs. Tingle.
"Kevin is obviously such a unique talent and such a great voice for teenagers," enthuses raven-haired Katie Holmes, the young Ohio actress whom Williamson transformed into a star by casting her as Joey on Dawson's Creek. The two are close, non-dating friends and are sharing a house during the summer hiatus from Dawson's Creek.
In Teaching Mrs. Tingle, which opens Friday, Holmes plays one of three teens who fight back -- to extremes -- against the autocratic behaviour of their much-hated history teacher, Mrs. Tingle (played by Helen Mirren).
"He has such a wonderful way to tell his stories," continues Holmes, who would much rather talk about her mentor -- "He amazes me!" -- than about herself -- "Too boring!"
"He's got this great gift of creating these intelligent, witty characters, these characters whom people want to see, these characters whom people want to be."
Holmes, like most movie fans, is tired of high school film cliches. "They don't have all the clever jokes and the tight, tight scripts." In her eyes, Teaching Mrs. Tingle has the right stuff. "That's what I love about it."
Lay any of these compliments on Williamson himself and he'll blush, stammer and play the fool. Filmmaker Wes Craven, the horrormeister who directed the two Scream movies, once called Williamson "a gee-gosh-golly guy" who seems unaffected by his success, although he is rapidly maturing.
"I feel old now," Williamson reflects in an early-morning interview, "particularly in the morning. It's so weird, though. I don't feel like an adult. I feel very, sort of, immature, emotionally immature."
One of Williamson's most notable qualities is the acidic wit his key characters mouth in his movies. Don't call the screenwriter himself witty, though.
"Am I witty?" he asks rhetorically when the issue comes up in conversation. "I don't think so. But I've always been a smartass, yeah."
Even the Mrs. Tingle dialogue in Teaching Mrs. Tingle is not that special, says Williamson. It is Helen Mirren's performance that elevates the material, he claims. "She's amazing. She really did take those lines and make them sound like I never thought they could. She rocked my world."
What Williamson will lay claim to, however, is the world of Mrs. Tingle. This movie, his directorial debut, was also his screenwriting debut. He optioned it as a movie in 1994, a year before he wrote Scream. He wrote it soon after moving to Los Angeles from New York, where he had spent several years as an actor and theatre director. He wrote it after being in a writer's block nightmare for a decade after one of his high school teachers told him he had no talent.
Teaching Mrs. Tingle (which originally, and revealingly, was called Killing Mrs. Tingle) is Williamson's sweet revenge. The character Mirren plays was modeled on the teacher he hated.
"This was a very personal movie, so I have a hard time talking about it. I just know it came from a place inside.
"And I really wanted to do something different ... I wanted it to be slightly askew. My intention was to make it myself, make it for $2 and release it myself," he says, joking.
"Now things have changed. So I have the luxury that more people are going to see it. But I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing."
On a recent evening relaxing with Holmes, Williamson remembers telling her: "You know what? I don't know if I want the rest of the world to see this movie. It's scary. I'm sort of freaked out, actually."
Despite the riches of a $20-million Miramax contract, despite the perks which include flights on the Miramax jet, despite his standing as one of Hollywood's hottest commodities, Williamson is desperate to maintain his personal sanity, his personal vision.
"If you sit there in the bubble of Hollywood, it just doesn't work. I live in Hollywood but I live here, as well. I'm also from North Carolina and I'm pretty much a North Carolina boy. I don't see that changing too much!"
The KEVIN WILLIAMSON File
ON HIS SCRIPTS: "Certainly everything I've written has been autobiographical so I've had to be really, really careful about how I tell a story."
ON THE 'real' MRS. TINGLE: "Actually, she died many years ago. So she can't sue me. And I fictionalized it so much."
ON MOVING ON: "Now I'm 34 and I'm going to write about 34-year-old stuff." His next movie? A romantic comedy called Her Leading Man. Someone else is writing the Scream 3 script.
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