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Interview With The Vampire’s director Neil Jordan says.
The technology changes, yet you remain the same?
That, to me, was a great question."
This feature originally appeared in SFX magazine’s November edition.
Time moves on, yet film lives immortal.
It’s an alluring, unconventional approach to autobiography, that considers the slipperiness of one’s own memories.
Lestat can feel his sorrow.
One bite and Louis will be forever freed from the prison of mortality.
It’s an offer he comes to regret almost as soon as he accepts it.
Cruising along
Cruise, certainly, didnt match Rice’s description.
“First of all, he’s tall.
Secondly, he’s blond,” Jordan explains.
He was a Nordic kind of figure.
She admired Jeremy Irons.
Daniel Day-Lewis was the favourite when I came on board.
Daniel didnt want to do it."
The Cruise we know today was still in nascent form.
He didnt immediately read as otherworldly, ancient, beautiful or aristocratic.
Yet Jordan saw otherwise.
“When I met Tom, I saw the way into the character.
That’s the only way I can describe it,” he says.
But she was just as quick to relent when she finally saw what hed done with the role.
Cruises Lestat is the id made flesh, irresistibly seductive but with a charred and blackened heart.
Rice had a two-page ad published in Variety.
Others may play the role some day but no one will ever forget Toms version of it."
Thats why hes doing these Mission: Impossible movies, and hes jumping off enormous cliffs.
I do admire him for that."
Eventually, however, the project ended up in the hands of producer David Geffen, a gay man.
A new adaptation was written by Rice (with Louis once again a man) and sent to Jordan.
“The script was very theatrical,” the director says.
I reintroduced a lot of elements back into the movie.
I didnt get a credit for this, but thats fine.
It often happens if youre the director, youre in a different position."
Still, speculation was rife about how Louis and Lestats relationship would be portrayed on screen.
“Before I was making the movie, as I was making it,” Jordan says.
“All these articles and all these programmes on American television: ‘Are they normalising the relationship?’
‘Are they draining it of sexual content?’
The truth is, that wasn’t the case at all.
It’s not about sex.
I wish it was a bit more about sex, but it’s not really about that.
Louis, at first, is driven to torment by his new taste for blood.
He feeds from a young girl, Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), recently orphaned.
Here, Lestat sees an opportunity.
He turns Claudia and, by doing so, binds the two of them to Louis for eternity.
The men, in all practical definitions of the word, became her parents.
“Theyre like any couple in a way,” says Jordan.
“Like a couple thats about to split up and, suddenly, the girlfriend gets pregnant.”
Star turn
It was Dunst’s first substantial role, and ultimately her breakthrough.
They’re not actors.
But the minute I met Kirsten Dunst, I knew she was an actor.
So I didnt feel any hesitation whatsoever.
“She’s done remarkable things since,” he adds.
She can play things like Mary Jane in Spider-Man, but shes bigger than that.”
Pitt, meanwhile, would take a different path.
“Obviously, he wanted a far more muscular career,” Jordan says.
But that’s why he’s a great actor, too."
Production commenced under what Jordan would call “a paranoid sense of freedom”.
Geffen had promised him “no interference whatsoever”.
He was guided, primarily, by his love for Rice’s book.
But the echoes of childhood left their mark.
“I used to pass it every day when I went to the cinema.
I felt a fidelity to both [him and Rice] in a way.”
The priest connects the dots and starts to panic.
Louis slaughters him at the altar.
“Theres blood drenched everywhere,” he says.
“Its very dramatic.
Maybe Ill look at a longer version at some stage if they allow me.”
“Its not as horrific if shes older, in a way,” he says.
“I understand what they did.
But it’s weird how our kind of self-censorship changes, isn’t it?”
Thats the thing about time, Rices vampires would tell you.
Humanity moves forward, but the past keeps pace.
And Louis and Lestat have plenty of life left in them still.
Amnesiac is out now, published by Bloomsbury.
