Interview with the Vampire
~ Macdonald 1976 (UK)

This unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, loyalty and treachery, announces a literary imagination of the first order.

Interview with the Vampire ~ Macdonald 1976 (UK)

Interview with the Vampire
~ Knopf 1976 (US)

The time is now.

We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks - as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead...

He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently... carying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir - young, romantic, cultivated - to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless" life... learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings... to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detatchment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures.

He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him....

We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire - all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child - and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of sudden, stolen opulence: delicte Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court... night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death - a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below....

We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their future can be....

We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imaginings... to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them to the doors of the Théatre des Vampires, the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within... to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled....

In an unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, loyalty and treachery, as vampires are created, destroyed, avenged, and "remade," as vampire worlds are summoned up in all their evil and frightening enchantment - the sensuous power, the profound feeling, the wit and verisimilitude of Anne Rice's narrative announce a literary imagination of the first order.

Interview with the Vampire ~ Knopf 1976 (US)

Twenty Six Years with my Beloved Immortals ~ Interview with the Vampire

In 1974, when I finished the first full-length draft of Interview with the Vampire, I had no idea that in the year 2000, I would still be writing about Lestat and his cohorts, or that my tragic hero, Louis, would still be haunting me.

What I did know that night was that I had completed my first true professional effort at fiction, a book so strange and so exciting to me that I had no qualms about signing my name to it and beginning the long hard road to publication. Something had succeeded there, though what it was defied my analysis.

Almost two years would pass before the book hit the stores, and even then I don't think I understood that Louis was really myself, and the entire universe in which he moved was mad up of my own complexity of pedestrian guilt coupled with a heightened passion for living. Cliches about the first novel always being autobiographical meant nothing to me.

But there is no doubt in my mind now that when I yielded to the supernatural in my fiction, I discovered a way to touch my own reality. And that personal reality included my tragic speration from New Orleans when I was only sixteen, and my tragic loss of my Catholic faith only three years later. Of course, Claudia, my beloved child vampire, was inspired by my own daughter Michele, who died of a rare form of leukemia some two years before I wrote the book. But I was very stubborn in coming to that acknowledgment.

As for the rest of the mix, I leave it to the critics and the scholars, and those readers who have no ambition to be either, to tell me more about the text and what, if anything, I accomplished for them.

I almost never pick up Interview with the Vampire to read in it. It's simply too painful. And though I thought the motion picture so wondrously directed by Neil Jordan was a masterpiece, I can't watch it anymore because that also is too painful.

Interview is a dark book. It's language was intentionally lyrical, and its scope limited. It was meant to be difficult and at the same time enchanting. If it works for the reader, it usually works all the way or not at all. And that's as it should be.

Anne Rice

The title and story of the first Vampire Chronicle. IV details Louis¹s confession of his vampire experience to a boy reporter looking for interesting tales. The "interview" is set in a sparsely furnished room in a house on Divisadero Street in San Francisco; it unfolds as a moral quest on the part of a "monster" who is searching for integrity and redemption. "This book, " says Rice, "is about stepping out of life so you can better see life."

IV began as a short story that Rice wrote in the late sixties. "I wrote about vampires on a whim," she explains. "I was sitting at the typewriter wondering what it would be like if a vampire told you the truth about what is was like to be a vampire. I wanted to know what it really feels like. I wanted to see through the vampire¹s eyes and ask the questions I thought were inevitable for a vampire, who once had been human, to ask. What do you feel when you drink blood? Is it erotic? Is it glorious? Is it spiritual? I followed my imagination and my instinct.

The subject of vampires had interested Rice since childhood; stories and films about vampires had always grabbed her attention. In particular, she had enjoyed a story - Richard Matheson¹s "Dress of White Silk"- told from the point of view of a child vampire, and the film Dracula¹s Daughter, which depicted vampires as both tragic and sensual. Her own short story tried to capture a vampires perspective. "It was about thirty pages long," says Rice. "The vampire makes it plain that the room is not his room, but just a room. The tone was light, a little ironic, and intentionally witty. The vampire was not Louis, really, but an Oscar Wilde type of character. He talked very casually, very breezily, of the whole thing; he was very satisfied with himself and his immortality. At the conclusion of the interview, the vampire makes it plain to the boy that he, the vampire, will wait for the return of the room¹s occupant, implying that he will feed on the occupant. The boy then hurries away."

Rice rewrote the short story several times and by the last version, she had added a few elements. She finished it in August of 1973, one year after her five-year-old daughter Michele had died of leukemia. For the first ten pages, it bears similarities to the novel that Rice would eventually write, but then it veers off and describes quite a different set of circumstances.

The vampire (never named) meets the boy reporter in a San Francisco bar called the Pink Baby on Chestnut and Union streets. The boy wants interesting interviews to broadcast on an FM radio station, so they go to a room together to converse. The vampire himself owns a house (with a houseboy) and a suite of hotel rooms. But despite this he takes the boy to someone else¹s place which has ominous overtones. The vampire¹s attitude is less that of a depressed angst-ridden soul than of someone who has decided to make the best of his condition. He then claims he likes being immortal; it makes him laugh . He did not fight against becoming a vampire. As he did in the novel , and he has some adventurous personality traits later attributed to Lestat.

He explains that the mysterious death of his obsessive, saintlike brother drove him out of France with his mother and sister. He then bought a large Louisiana plantation and three town houses in New Orleans. The guilt and grief over his brother¹s death is glossed over, although the vampire¹s carelessness during his mourning made him vulnerable to attack.

Lestat is the vampire who makes him, but there is little description of Lestat other than the fact that he owned his own plantation, had slaves, was a theatrical prankster, did not exploit his powers for all they were worth. And was viewed by the narrator as a bore. Lestat took the narrator to the plantation where Lestat¹s blind brother, and old man, lived, and transformed him (described quickly without the perceptual detail of the swoon and the experience of acquiring "vampire eyes"). Lestat told the narrator all about the world the night he made him a vampire, and they lived together on the plantation for a while until Lestat went to Europe. The vampire never saw him again.

The vampire lived off swamp animals for a time, learning things from the various types of animals. One of his favourite experiences was sucking the blood from a panther in a zoo. Eventually he took human victims, and he describes his first memorable victim as a female poet who had known Keats. On the plantation, he lived off slaves, sometimes not killing them; one survived to become a local lunatic. Eventually the plantation went to ruin. By 1863, to avoid watching the South lose the war, the vampire decided to return to France.

When he finally came back to Louisiana, he met his own niece. Wanting to take care of her and disliking her good-for-nothing husband he killed him.

He then discovered that Lestat¹s plantation had been restored by a family from Brooklyn who had invented a fake history for the house. The vampire decided to kill them all and just as he began, other men came from Brooklyn. They were gangsters and they shot at the vampire, but it had no effect. As he killed them, one man asked him to become his partner in getting rich. The vampire could be his hitman and in return he would offer the vampire protection. The vampire refused so the gangster asked to be made into what he was. This enraged and disgusted the vampire. He would have nothing to do with a man who had watched his friends and family die yet thought only of his own fortune. The vampire killed him.

He tells the reporter that he now lives in San Francisco, frequenting bars and telling people he is a vampire. They take him home and become his victims. If he declines to kill them, he makes sure they cannot remember that he has fed on them. It is easy to find victims this way, he maintains, because no one really believes him. He plans to tell the boy a few more details, but the tape runs out. The vampire says that the owner of the room is about to return and he wants to wait there for him, so the boy leaves to go play his tapes back at the radio station.

Rice began to write again late in 1973. At this point, the short story evolved into a work of length and introduced an element of deep grief. When Rice began to describe Louis¹s feelings about his brother¹s death, she found that the fiction provided her with a means of touching old griefs of her own. The vampire¹s life then grew and acquired rich psychological dimensions that removed him from the flat caricature of genre fiction. His perspective and profound appreciation for mortal life transformed a cliché "monster story" into a complex and engaging tale. Louis became a sympathetic, even a moral, hero of sorts, rather than a creature simply to be shunned and destroyed.

Louis was the mouthpiece for many of Rice's own yearnings, questions, and fears. "I was Louis when I wrote it." She acknowledges. The theme of Louis's story - a fruitless quest for redemption through empty religious concepts - held great personal significance for her. When she finished with the writing, she found she had experienced a cathartic release that moved her away from her own passivity and helplessness.

"In any sort of contemporary novel I had worked on, I had not been able to touch the reality of growing up in New Orleans, the loss of my mother, and the loss of my daughter. Suddenly, in the guise of Louis, I was able to touch painful realities. Through Louis¹s eyes everything became accessible."

What is the story of Louis? He is first made a vampire in 1791 in the wake of grief over his brother¹s death, and he experiences the magic of the transformation with wonder and great guilt. For four years, he lives with Lestat, his maker, but becomes disillusioned with Lestat¹s crude ways. Louis decides to venture out on his own and confronts Lestat with his intention to leave. At this point, Lestat creates a child vampire, Claudia, to keep Louis there with him. Louis falls in love with Claudia, and the three of them live together for sixty-five years until Claudia, in a rage over being made a vampire when she was only a child, decides to kill Lestat, and set out with Louis for Europe to seek out other vampires. Lestat does not die, however, and Claudia and Louis end up leaving him behind in a burning town house as they flee to their ship. Although Louis dislikes Lestat, he feels guilty over the treatment of him and is frightened of Lestat¹s possible retaliation.

Louis and Claudia go first to Eastern Europe, which holds only horror for them, as they discover that the vampires there are merely animated, mindless corpses. They then go to Paris, where they find vampires more like themselves. The oldest vampire there, at the age of four hundred years, is Armand. Louis falls in love with him, and Claudia, fearing abandonment, pressures Louis to create Madeleine for her. Louis debates with himself over whether he should go with Armand or remain with his two fledglings, but soon Madeleine and Claudia are destroyed due to Lestat's untimely arrival. Lestat knows these Parisian vampires and he claims that Claudia has committed what they consider to be a capital offence: attempting to kill her maker. The coven members quickly dispense their form of justice and Louis retaliates by burning down their lair, the Theatre of the Vampires. He then falls into a state of gloomy indifference.

Years later, Louis sees Lestat again but dismisses him, and does the same with Armand and his pleas to get involved again with life. Louis winds up alone in San Francisco, where he tells his story to the reporter.

The first draft of IV was somewhat different from the version that was eventually published. The boy reporter guesses Louis¹s age to be around thirty-five, rather than twenty-one, and much of Louis¹s story remains the same - with the exception of his discovery that Lestat wrote poetry as a boy - until he and Claudia arrive in Eastern Europe.

Although Louis and Claudia made plans to go directly to Paris, they stay there only two days, for Claudia¹s reading of vampire lore urges them toward the superstitious lands of Hungary and beyond. The description of their travels is brief, but the vampiric discoveries are the same as in the published version; mindless, animated corpses. Louis realises that this is what Lestat became after he was resurrected from the swamp, and Lestat is never heard from again in this version.

They return to Paris, take a flat on the boulevard du Temple, frequent art galleries, and attend parties and balls. Soon they see a lone vampire on the banks of the Seine, then a pair walking, and another in a theatre. These vampires flee from them, so Louis and Claudia make themselves more conspicuous in the hope of inviting the vampires to approach them.

One night they return to their rooms to find one female and nine male vampires, all dressed in black. These vampires are rather inscrutable, but they invite Louis and Claudia to a house on the Faubourg St.Germain. The house is a musty old mansion that is staffed by elderly human servants who hope to be made vampires one day. Inside, Louis and Claudia see paintings similar to those described in the sub-terranean room in the Theatre of the Vampires. They are met by Armand, who invites them to a ball, where he ladles animal blood from an ornate cauldron into crystal goblets.

About twenty vampires enter the room and form an oval. They recite from Baudelaire¹s poem "Les Fleurs du Mal", which offers images of hell, degradation and death. Louis believes that the vampires must be connected to Satan in some fashion, which gives him some small comfort: he is about to uncover answers to his pressing theological questions.

Two servants then bring in a blond girl, and the scene is a repeat of that in the Theatre of the Vampires. She begs for her life, but succumbs to the death they offer, and is passed around. Louis drinks from her, although he is horrified at the orgy of feasting. Armand then takes Louis to a bedroom where another mortal woman is sleeping, and Louis crawls in with her and drinks from her as she sleeps.

Louis then engages with Armand in a theological discussion similar to that in the published version of IV. It becomes clear to Louis that Armand has no knowledge of God or Satan, for Armand describes himself as merely part of the natural rhythms of life and death.

Later Louis observes the coven¹s ceremonies and mannerisms: they prize conformity, abhor wasted opportunities, and delight in provoking one another with elaborate dares and challenges. Also, the making of a new vampire is for them a communal act, involving a democratic process. Louis remains aloof and detached from this coven. He does not like what he sees of their rigid rules. But Claudia quickly exchanges her lavender dresses for black and allows her hair to be dyed white so that she fits in with the coven. She befriends three brothers who teach her how to torment priests.

When the other vampires learn that Claudia killed Lestat, they decide that his death was just, and there are no punitive consequences; Claudia does not die in this version of the story. However, she does leave Louis for vampires who seem to her to be more her own kind.

Left on his own, Louis wanders around Paris alone. One night Armand catches up with him and asks why Louis has shunned him. Louis insists he is completely taken with Armand but does not feel kinship with the rest of the coven. Armand leaves them for Louis. He tells Louis how he was made a vampire in Venice at the age of twenty-five and how he lived with his vampire maker/lover for over a century. They leave Paris together and travel the world.

Louis convinces Armand that what they do is evil, and Armand agrees to go into the sun with Louis and destroy himself if that is what Louis wants. However, Louis does not really desire this, and he eventually gives in to pressure from Armand to go to New Orleans. There he learns how to use the cemeteries to find Armand¹s favourite victims: those who want to die. One poignant scene describes a mother one year after the death of her daughter. She has also lost her mother and cannot conceive of continuing with life without these two. Time has given her no reprieve, and she suspects that life is just not worth it. It is the expression of Rice¹s own despair at the time.

Louis admires Armand¹s ability to draw close to such victims, but he prefers those who struggle to hang on to life. He then also informs the boy reporter that New Orleans was the place of his greatest suffering as a vampire, for it was where he met his mortal love. As tantalising as this piece of information is, the tale ends here, and the identity of this character is not made known. The boy realises that dawn is approaching and backs out of the room, hoping Louis will not notice.

By the time he reaches his car, Louis is there, angry that the boy had kept him talking simply to keep his mortal body safe, and he wants the tapes back. Armand arrives and tells Louis that the boy will do with the tapes what Louis wants done; he will make them public. Louis and Armand get into a cab together, while the boy goes to the radio station to listen to what he has recorded.

"The ending wasn¹t right", says Rice of this version. "It just didn't reach its cathartic pitch. In fact, it didn't really have an ending, so I went back and rewrote it, and then it had a horrendously different ending."

By the time Rice revised her manuscript, she was ready to let go of her daughter, and the second and final ending evolved in which Claudia is killed in the Theatre of the Vampires. Louis, whom Rice considered the spokesperson of her feelings at the time, goes through an evolutionary process as well.

"There's a real change in tone in the published novel," Rice points out. "Louis who opens it is not the same Louis by the middle. I remember wondering if that was a problem, and then I realised that the tone at the beginning tied in perfectly with the tone at the end. This was an accident, but it worked out: the cynical, cold person had warmed up and them grown cold again."

The end of Louis¹s confession, however, is not the end of the story. When the boy reporter publishes Interview with the Vampire, his action spawns the second Chronicle, The Vampire Lestat. Lestat hears about Interview from a rock band, reads it, and decides to tell his own story, correcting Louis¹s "lies" in the process. He talks about how Louis was too passive and burdened by guilt to really understand and experience his vampire powers. As a result, he had resented Lestat for making him a vampire, and his resentment created a misperception of Lestat.

The third Chronicle, The Queen of the Damned, includes two other characters who are also affected by reading Interview, Daniel and Jesse. Daniel is the boy reporter who published the first Chronicle and who is haunted enough by it to seek out a vampire who might grant him immortal life . He comes to the attention of the Talamasca, who wonder at his motives for publishing it, and who use the book to guide their investigations into the Theatre of the Vampires. They assign Jesse to go to New Orleans to document other physical evidence mentioned in the "novel" Jesse reads Interview and is disturbed by the way it makes vampires attractive. She sets out to show the Talamasca that the story is false. Instead, however, she finds incontrovertible proof of the existence of the vampires.

Vampires enraged by the public revelation of vampire secrets try to find Louis to destroy him. He remains in the house on Divisadero Street, which he believes is an unlikely spot for them to look.

Khayman reads Interview and summarises its central theme as "Behold, the void."

In November 1994, after many false starts over the course of eighteen years, Interview with the Vampire finally made it to the big screen. In a swirl of controversy over the casting of Tom Cruise as Lestat, the film had first weekend earnings of nearly $40 million, proving it a hit. Although Rice had been sceptical, even apprehensive, about the film¹s casting and production, she was deeply moved and tremendously pleased when she saw the finished product: "I was knocked out by it. I completely forgot that I had written it. I was swept up". She took out a two-page ad in Variety to let fans know her position, and a month after the film was released, she wrote an eight-page supplement to express her views fully.

"The look of Interview with the Vampire for me was perfect," she wrote. "The art direction, costumes, lighting, cinematography, and craft of the film were sumptuous and thrillingly successful for me. I was grateful for the uncompromising lushness of the film, for its magnificent interiors and brutal exteriors, for its relentless attention to detail throughout in creating an immense and tantalising and utterly convincing world.... It caught the dimness, the filth, the fragile, handmade luxury and ornate aspirations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it caught the mud on the hem of the garment.

"Brad Pitt immediately infused the despairing Louis with understandable feeling... He got what guilt is all about, a guilt sometimes that is unattached to any one death or loss. He captured the despair of someone who has fallen from grace, lost his faith, seen what he cannot abide." Some of her favourite moments involving Pitt included when Louis said "no" to Lestat¹s suggestion to make Claudia a vampire, his last scene with Claudia, and his discovery of her ashes in the airshaft- "one of the most painful and exquisite moments in a film that I have ever watched. Magnificent."

For Tom Cruise, her praise was effusive. "From the moment he appeared (on screen),Tom was Lestat for me. He has the immense physical and moral presence; he was defiant and yet never without conscience; he was beautiful beyond description yet compelled to do cruel things. The sheer beauty of Tom was dazzling, but the polish of his acting, his flawless plunge into the Lestat persona, his ability to speak rather boldly poetic lines, and speak them with seeming ease and conviction, were exhilarating and uplifting. The guy is great." Her favourite moments involving Cruise included his attack on Louis, his frustration with Louis¹s inability to fully realise his vampire nature, his confusion after Claudia rejects his doll, and his horseback ride through the fires as he looks back at suspicious slaves. "That (Lestat) was and is my heroŠ. Lestat just won¹t be afraid of anybody. He won't stand for it."

Kirsten Dunst as Claudia reached deeply into Rice's heart. She felt the young actress was flawless and shocking. "The actor showed incredible cunning, and yet a child¹s tragic vulnerability and heartrending capacity to be disappointedŠ. That none of her gestures, words, or acts were prurient was a major achievement." Rice especially loved the transformation scene, the scene in which Claudia realises she will never grow up, and Claudia¹s final scene with Louis. "I feel a special love for her," said Rice, "because the role was so much beyond the imagination. She did a beautiful job of it."

When Rice watched the film for the first time in the theatre, she broke down afterward. "I was shaking more violently that I ever had in my life. It was a hysterical reaction. My body just gave out." So much had been at stake over the years, and the film had reminded her of many of the dark moments she had suffered when writing the novel and of difficult questions that remained unanswered. Yet she was thrilled beyond belief to see the novel finally made into film and she praised David Geffen¹s courageous vision: "David Geffen is my hero for getting this film made."

Although there were some digressions in Neil Jordan¹s script - his vampires were less elegant and more brutal than Rice had envisioned, and he had ignored essential aspects like blood tears and the full experience of the swoon - Rice felt that, overall, the film had been quite faithful to the book. She even appreciated the new ending. She was glad to have Lestat back, to see him pull the tattered lace out from under his sleeves. "All that worked for me. It was enough in keeping with the ending of my script and the book for me to be happy, for me to see the possibilities of a sequel."

To her mind, the novel and film together emphasised many important human questions: "How far we will go not to be alone; how much we will sacrifice morally in order to attain our definition of magnificence, greatness, or independence; the nature of dependency and love. The film isn¹t talking about mere survival. It¹s talking about the possibility of grand achievement as well as endurance - it¹s talking about reaching for the sublime.

"I think they did something larger with this film than they even know. They got the larger questions we all face, that we don¹t know if there¹s a God. It was all the feelings I had back in Berkeley writing the novel. I started with pain and just went deeper into it."

It is Rice¹s belief that "fantasy and horror can speak to the ordinary and the most eccentric; fantasy and horror can embody and reflect the most common and most dreaded pain we all shareŠ. The ambition and potential of these genres is limitless."

The film begins in San Francisco with the boy reporter (Christian Slater, who replaced the deceased River Phoenix). Brad Pitt as Louis begins to tell his tale, shifting the scene to a seedy, eighteenth-century New Orleans. Lestat (Tom Cruise) makes Louis a vampire, and director Jordan¹s script emphasised Louis¹s early predilection for animal blood. He sucks on poodles, rats, and chickens before he finally gives in to blood thirst. A few of the scenes involving female victims were bloodier than Rice had written them, earning the film an R rating.

Louis drinks from Claudia, portrayed as a girl a few years older than the Claudia in the novel, but still effective as a child. Lestat makes her a vampire, and she moves into new life with blood-chilling ardor. Several scenes involving Claudia¹s vampire education provide comic relief, another contribution of the film. However, as Claudia begins to realise that she will always remain a child, she grows angry. Finally she attacks Lestat for making her a vampire - much less brutally than in the novel - and after he returns from the swamps, she and Louis flee the burning town house and head to Europe.

In Paris, they encounter Antonio Banderas as Armand - much older than the seventeen-year-old boy vampire of the book, and with long black hair, but effective as the masterly and evil leader of the Theatre of the Vampires. Stephen Rea plays the cruel and suspicious Santiago. The performance of these vampires on stage is more harsh and less elegant toward the female victim than Rice had intended, but it is in keeping with the way the vampires treat the newcomers, Louis and Claudia. The film remains true to the novel from this point, although with less detail and less philosophical dialogue, until Claudia and Madeleine die in the airshaft. Contrary to the novel, Lestat is nowhere to be found. Louis burns down the theatre, rejects Armand and returns to New Orleans. In a decrepit mansion, he finds a pathetically weakened Lestat. Eventually he wanders to San Francisco, where he tells his story.

The boy reporter is stunned that Louis cannot see what a magnificent existence he has. Louis threatens him, then leaves, The reporter gets into his car and drives across the bridge. Lestat sits up in the backseat, pushes him to the passenger side, and takes over the wheel. He takes a drink, feels "better already," and dismisses Louis¹s eternal whining. The sequel is set up, to the tune of "Sympathy for the Devil," as he offers the reporter "the choice I never had."

The producer, David Geffen, was pleased with the way the film turned out. Ever since a friend had brought the novel to his attention. He had wanted to turn it into a film. "I read it when it first came out. I got completely engrossed in the characters, and I thought it was a lot of fun. After I read it, I thought what a great movie it would make. I called to find out who owned the movie rights and found out they were owned by John Travolta at Paramount. So I forgot about it. Periodically it would come up, and since no movie was made, I¹d check on it. I subsequently learned that it had been sold to Lorimar. When Warner bought Lorimar. I called the people at Warner Brothers and said, 'I love this project. Let me have it,' and so they gave it to me.

"The one thing I had said to Anne Rice from the beginning was that I was going to make a high-quality film of this and I wouldn¹t allow it to be made as an exploitation film. Unless I could do that, I wouldn¹t make the movie. I wanted it to be as compelling as The Godfather. By the way, I don¹t know that we succeeded at that. The Godfather is a pretty compelling movie, but we tried to model that experience, in the sense that it was epic, that it took place over long periods of time, that it was a first-class, high-quality film. Great sets, great actors. In that sense, I tried to model it after The Godfather.

"Anne told me that I was the only person who was willing to make the book (into a film) with Claudia being a child, without changing the essence of what the characters were. I was not afraid of it. You know, people were saying, ŒThese people are pederasts.¹ That stuff never occurred to me. I never got caught up in the things that troubled most people.

"I had a lot of input into the final movie in many ways - into the casting, into the choices, into the budget. I was very happy with the job that Neil did, with the job that everybody did, and frankly, I was very happy with the job that I did."

About his controversial casting of Tom Cruise, Geffen said, "He¹s a very good actor and he was completely taken with the script and completely willing to go on the ride that we were going to send him on. Contrary to all the rumours, he didn¹t try to change anything. It was a big risk for him, and I admire his willingness to take that risk. He¹s a very talented actor. He¹s a big star, and he made the movie better.

"I¹m very happy with the film. It was a really good movie. I think it was the most difficult of the books to do, and now that we¹ve done it, it will be easier to do the next one. We¹re going to do The Vampire Lestat as the next movie and take it from there. It will be more of an adventure, and of course you now know the characters so you don¹t have to establish them."

Tom Cruise found the role of Lestat to be quite challenging. He had already read The Vampire Lestat and had thought it exotic. When he read the script for Interview with the Vampire, he was eager to be involved. "To have a chance to make a movie like that was great. People I talk with go on about how evil he was, but I personally don¹t think that Lestat is truly an evil character. You can¹t approach him that way. You approach him from the point of view of understanding him. Having read The Vampire Lestat first, I knew more about Lestat¹s past. But just taking Interview with the Vampire as a movie and a book all on its own, there are about four or five sentences in the whole book that really tell about the depth of Lestat¹s isolation, and his compassion and love. For example, when he¹s holding Claudia¹s dress after she dies, he¹s devastated. There had to be love there in the first place. Why else would he weep when he¹s holding her dress? And how else can this child get Lestat to drink the blood from those two dead boys? He trusted her. That¹s the only way I could have played that scene. If he didn¹t trust her and he hated her, there was no way. He would be too suspicious of her. It¹s love that really brought him down."

Cruise felt that Lestat was deeply disappointed in Louis. "Lestat said, 'In the old world, Louis, they called it the Dark Gift, and I gave it to you.' You see, Lestat feels this is a gift he has given, and he has chosen Louis, and he¹s frustrated with his own miscalculation. Everyone understands giving someone a gift and having it be unappreciated - especially when you think you¹ve given them the ultimate gift. And Lestat tested Louis. He said, "Do you still want death or have you tasted it enough?" So he was very frustrated with that. I wanted people to understand him the way that I understood him. Not make him a linear kind of guy, because he¹s not that way in the book - the complexity is there. An the wonderful thing is that it¹s hidden from Louis¹s point of view, but even Louis himself, in telling his story about how bad Lestat is, makes the mistake of explaining how wonderful this guy was.

"Lestat certainly is special to me. I take a lot of time developing characters and fleshing them out and exploring them. But certainly for me, Lestat was a very special experience. It was an incredibly exotic movie and the role was like nothing that I had played before. You know, Anne Rice talked about his (Lestat¹s) wit and his humour, and that was what I really wanted him to have. But Louis didn¹t see it.

"One of my favourite scenes in the book was the scene with the two prostitutes. It¹s a horrific scene, but I went back and discussed it with Neil Jordan and said, 'Look, I want more of Othello in it.' I paraphrased more of Othello when he (Lestat) was killing this girl, because he¹s an actor and it was a performance for Louis. It was really built on the frustration of him wanting Louis to just be what he was. It was a seduction of these women and it was a seduction of Louis - kind of the last effort to have him realise how wonderful this gift is that he has given him.

"Lestat is an adventurer. He¹s the only vampire in New Orleans. He¹s the only one that left the Old World. Here¹s a guy that travels out among people and goes to the opera and studies music. I mean, he was a fascinating character. Hence the frustration with Louis. So I always saw him in that way. I mean, in the scene with the prostitutes, he¹s angry. He¹s frustrated. He¹s hurt. He would have been extreme in that scene. With this role, the fun was playing the humour and exploring the depth and trying to make Lestat come alive and be what I envisioned him to be. I gave it everything I had and I was very pleased with it."

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland