30 years on, Interview with the Vampire director says casting Tom Cruise as Lestat was a big risk, but he was won over from their first meeting

Nov. 9, 2024

Interview with the Vampire director Neil Jordan talks to SFX about bringing Anne Rice’s modern vampire classic to the screen, 30 years on

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“You ask yourself the question: what would it be like, if you were stuck living forever?” Interview With The Vampire’s director Neil Jordan says. “What would it be like, if life were a passage of days that were the same, the same, the same, the same? The fashions change. The cities change. 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. Subscribe so you never miss an issue here.

Time moves on, yet film lives immortal. And, as Jordan’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s genre-quake of a vampire novel reaches its thirtieth anniversary, he’s reflected back on his career’s work in a new memoir, titled Amnesiac. It’s an alluring, unconventional approach to autobiography, that considers the slipperiness of one’s own memories.

Two chapters are dedicated to Interview With The Vampire, in which Jordan details the fraught but liberating experience of a film “made in an insane glare of publicity”. Chief among them is the casting of Tom Cruise as the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, who unexpectedly descends into the life of Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt), a wealthy widower in 1791 Louisiana. 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

He didn’t 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. “I saw the way into this character who had to live outside of the public gaze in a way.” Rice had made her objections to Cruise public (she exclaimed that he was “no more my Vampire Lestat than Edward G Robinson is Rhett Butler”). But she was just as quick to relent when she finally saw what he’d done with the role. Cruise’s Lestat is the id made flesh, irresistibly seductive but with a charred and blackened heart.

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Rice had a two-page ad published in Variety. In it, she set the record straight, by writing: “I like to believe Tom’s Lestat will be remembered the way Olivier’s Hamlet is remembered. Others may play the role some day but no one will ever forget Tom’s version of it.” Jordan reflects: “With regard to Tom, he’s the kind of guy that if you give him a challenge and you say, ‘Hey, you’re not going to be able to do that’, he will do it. That’s why he’s doing these Mission: Impossible movies, and he’s jumping off enormous cliffs. I do admire him for that.”

Still, speculation was rife about how Louis and Lestat’s 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.

“I think the best thing we did in that movie was actually that we created a family,” he continues. 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. “They’re like any couple in a way,” says Jordan. “Like a couple that’s about to split up and, suddenly, the girlfriend gets pregnant.”

It was Dunst’s first substantial role, and ultimately her breakthrough. “I’ve cast many kids in my movies and I always feel very guilty doing it because you know that this will define them in some way,” he says. “It’s a thing they will never escape from, like when I cast Sarah Patterson in The Company Of Wolves or Eamonn Owens in The Butcher Boy. They’re not actors. But the minute I met Kirsten Dunst, I knew she was an actor. So I didn’t feel any hesitation whatsoever.

“She’s done remarkable things since,” he adds. “I think she’s gained an enormous amount of sadness – in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, she’s remarkable. She’s great. She can play things like Mary Jane in Spider-Man, but she’s bigger than that.” Pitt, meanwhile, would take a different path.

“Obviously, he wanted a far more muscular career,” Jordan says. “I think he felt the passivity of the character, and the fact that we were shooting at night – it kind of wore him down, really. The Brad Pitt that was in Fight Club, that muscular guy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, it’s not the Brad Pitt that was in Interview With The Vampire. 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”. But the books had an enormous audience, bolstered by Rice’s own affection for her characters (she continued Lestat’s story in 12 subsequent sequels, known collectively as The Vampire Chronicles).

“Every time we went to a location, whether it be San Francisco or New Orleans or London or Paris, there were journalists everywhere trying to take pictures,” says the director. “It was kind of a weird situation where you were under examination, every step you took, yet you have the studio behind you and the freedom to do what you want.”

He was guided, primarily, by his love for Rice’s book. But the echoes of childhood left their mark. “I grew up under the shadow of Bram Stoker’s house, in Marino in Dublin,” he says. “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.”

His Irish Catholic background, too, contributed to what he considered “this strange sense of guilt” that pervaded Rice’s story. There’s a sequence cut from the film in which Louis confesses to a priest, alluding to his vampiric ways. The priest connects the dots and starts to panic. Louis slaughters him at the altar. “There’s blood drenched everywhere,” he says. “It’s very dramatic. Maybe I’ll look at a longer version at some stage if they allow me.”

Jordan has watched the first season, though he disagrees with the decision to age up Claudia – she’s five in the book, around 10 in the film, and 14 in the series. “It’s not as horrific if she’s 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?” That’s the thing about time, Rice’s 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. For more scares, check out our guide to all theupcoming horror movieson the way and our breakdown of thebest horror moviesof all time.

Clarisse is a freelance film journalist, and is a film critic for The Independent. She also writes in a freelance capacity for a number of publications such as GamesRadar and Total Film, and is the co-host for the Fade to Black Podcast. She also runs her own YouTube channel focused on film reviews.

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