Interview with the Vampire
Editor Hannah picked this movie. Let’s find out why...
Directed By: Neil Jordan
Other Notable Films From Jordan: The Crying Game
Starring: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, Kirsten Dunst, Christian Slater
Screenplay By: Anne Rice
Movie Synopsis: A vampire born in 18th-century Louisiana recounts the sordid story of his life to a journalist in 1990s San Francisco.
Signature Line: “I’m going to give you the choice I never had.”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
The introduction for this essay consists of two separate pieces: The first part is a behind-the-scenes story from the movie filming that I find to be incredibly funny, and the second is a behind-the-scenes story from us at GOOD MOVIE.
A BEHIND-THE-SCENES STORY FROM THE FILMING OF INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE: Last year at CinemaCon, Tom Cruise gave a speech as part of a Paramount Pictures presentation. During it, he mentioned how excited he was to watch Brad Pitt’s then-upcoming racecar movie F1, saying “He’s a very good driver. Believe me, I’ve raced against him. Yeah, when we were doing Interview with the Vampire we’d go and race go karts against each other. We’d literally finish [shooting] and then go drive go-karts all night.” He laughed while he told the story, and smiled that beautiful Tom Cruise smile, and it was a really wonderful moment. Which is why it’s so funny when you dig around in the archives a little bit and find that the only time Brad Pitt really ever talked about his experience shooting Interview with the Vampire was with Entertainment Weekly in 2011 when he said that he was “miserable” and that it was basically “six months in the fucking dark.” 😂
A BEHIND-THE-SCENES STORY FROM GOOD MOVIE: In the 16 or so months that Hannah and I have been working on GOOD MOVIE together, there have only been a handful of movies she’s mentioned she’d like to see covered. Of that bunch, though, there’s been one she’s brought up more than once: Interview with the Vampire. It’s a movie she likes, and a franchise she enjoys, and a world she has written about herself. So when I emailed her last week to tell her that it was next up, I asked if she’d be open to answering a few questions about her relationship to it. She said yes, so here’s that conversation:
How old were you the first time you watched Interview with the Vampire?
I wanna say… 13? It was sometime after the release of Queen of the Damned, which I had only wanted to watch for the Aaliyah of it all. But since Queen of the Damned is an adaptation of a later book in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, I figured I might as well watch its predecessor.
Queen of the Damned is like your version of how I support Romeo Must Die: It’s a terrible movie, but I’m always gonna lie and say that it’s good because I like Aaliyah and Jet Li and DMX.
Yeah, I’m under no delusions about Queen of the Damned. It’s one of the many shows or movies that prompt me to give a huge disclaimer when I recommend or even just talk about them: Just because I say I like it doesn’t mean I’m saying it’s good.
Are you interested in all vampire-related things, or specifically is it only the Interview with the Vampire universe?
So I’d say the absolute center of my interest is the show, then moving out from there it’s the broader Vampire Chronicles universe, and then after a long gap, vampire stuff more generally.
My hesitation regarding the wider genre mostly just boils down to me being a bit of a baby about blood and violence and gore onscreen. That said, I do really, really love a lot of the symbolism in vampire stories and Gothic horror overall, especially in relation to queerness. I loved this essay on that a few years back.
What is it that you like about Interview with the Vampire so much?
I have a lot more appreciation for (and complex feelings about!) the movie now that I’ve been so wholly enraptured by the TV show, but even on first viewing, I was incredibly moved by 11-year-old Kirsten Dunst’s performance as the child vampire Claudia.
Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire while grieving her daughter, who died of leukemia at 5, and in the novel, Claudia is made immortal at that same age. The movie aged her up to 11, and the show ages Claudia up to 14 at the time of her turning. All these years later, having seen two other amazing takes on Claudia from adult actors, I’m even more astounded by Dunst’s gravitas in the thorny, tragic role.
At just 11, she was a total scene-stealer in a movie literally headlined by two of the biggest movie stars of all time.
Claudia’s my favorite character, too. She’s a fucking maniac. There’s just something so funny to me about a little girl going around killing people and her vampire dad just, like, putting his fists on his hips and going, “Oh, Claudia.”
It’s so funny. Who do you even call for help at that point? It’s not like Louis could’ve brought her onto Maury for one of those segments about misbehaving kids, you know? My guy just had to suffer in beautiful, pale silence.
Talking to people about movies they care about is fun.
Let’s get to the rewatch.
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Interview With the Vampire
3:32: Christian Slater is here. He plays Daniel Molloy, a young journalist in San Francisco who decided to interview a random guy about his life because he looked interesting.1 It’s very interesting to me that Christian Slater was cast as the only major character in the movie who isn’t a vampire, given that he looks more like a vampire than any other human has ever looked. It’s him, 1987 Kiefer Sutherland, and Pharrell. Those are the top three people I’d be the least surprised to find out they were were real-life vampires.
