Interview with the Vampire, the big-screen adaptation of Anne Rice’s celebrated first novel, turns 30 this year. The film starred Tom Cruise as the Vampire Lestat, and Brad Pitt as his undead eighteenth-century companion Louis, and introduced the world to a young Kirsten Dunst as the eternal child vampire Claudia. Despite Rice’s novel being one of the most important vampire books of all time, it took nearly two decades for the transition from book to screen. So just what the heck took so long? Here, we unpack just why it took 18 years for one of the most successful fantasy/horror books of the past century to make it to cinemas. We also unpack the truly wild behind-the-scenes drama that went into making this now-iconic vampire film, whose success led to the current AMC series of the same name.
Danny Zuko as the Interviewer? Mr. Spock as Lestat?
Upon the novel’s release in 1976, Paramount immediately optioned the rights to it. Apparently, they intended this as a star vehicle for John Travolta, amid his Saturday Night Fever/Grease supremacy. But the part they wanted Travolta to play wasn’t that of a vampire. Instead, he would have played the novel’s nameless interviewer, who would have had an expanded role. At the same time, none other than Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy, was lobbying publicly to get the role of Lestat. For unknown reasons, this version never happened. Possibly without Travolta attached, the project languished for years and years in what they call development hell.
The property then changed hands multiple times, but it seems no one would pull the trigger on actually making the movie. All this despite the ’80s being a Renaissance of sorts for vampire films, with movies like Fright Night and The Lost Boys cleaning up at the box office, and films like The Hunger tapping into the same queer themes that Rice’s vampires did on the page. And yet, Interview with the Vampire was not among them. Different script iterations of Interview with the Vampire sat on the shelf, gathering dust.
While no one can say exactly why no studio in the ’80s would attempt to adapt Interview, it’s easy to make an educated guess. The ’80s were a rabidly homophobic time, with said sentiment associated in large part with fear of AIDS, and Interview is a novel with heavy queer subtext. In the book Conversations with Anne Rice, the author, famously a queer ally, recalls how, back in the day, Paramount executive Dawn Steel told her flat out, “This movie is politically impossible to make right now… no one is going to make this movie.” And for a long time, no one did.
Cher Almost Played the Vampire Louis
After years of going nowhere, in an apparent last-ditch effort to get the film made, Rice herself took a crack at the script. She made one major change to the story—the character of Louis was now going to be a woman (still called Louis). In her revised version, Louis was married to a Louisiana plantation owner. When her husband and child died on the journey to America, she assumed his identity and passed herself off as a man as a way of retaining his property. It’s unknown if this version of Louis was merely a woman in disguise as a male, or a genuine trans character.
By having a woman play the part, and thus canceling out the homoerotic subtext between Louis and Lestat, the belief was that it would allow the movie to be greenlit. Interestingly, producers envisioned none other than Cher in the role of the gender-bending Louis, which would have certainly been fascinating to watch. Given the fact that in real life Cher doesn’t seem to age, Rice might have been onto something. Even after the film went in a different direction, Cher still retained some involvement. She recorded a song for the film, “Lovers Forever,” which David Geffen ultimately didn’t use. But it turned up on her 2013 album Closer to the Truth, and it’s very clearly a song about Interview. So Cher’s involvement lived on, sort of.
For one reason or the other, that version ultimately didn’t get made either. During the ’80s, Rice continued to write her novels. What was once one book expanded to two more: The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned. These two were instant bestsellers and the series was now referred to as The Vampire Chronicles. The Chronicles were must-read books for every goth-inclined and queer-identifying kid in America, and lots of others too. What was once a single novel with a dedicated cult following was now a mainstream blockbuster series. And thus, Hollywood took more notice.
David Geffen to the Rescue
The Vampire Chronicles rights continued to change hands, going from production company to production company. One of those companies ended up bought by Warner Bros. Realizing that Rice’s books were now a huge cultural phenomenon by the early ’90s, Warners fast-tracked the film’s production. They brought on producer David Geffen—himself an out gay man and a powerful mogul—who was hell bent on doing a book-accurate version of Interview. So he asked Anne Rice herself to write the script once again in 1992. This was after several attempts by other writers had failed in the interceding 15 years.
Rice agreed and wrote a script that came in at a whopping 181 pages. She made certain changes to her own novel’s narrative. For starters, Louis was now a grieving widower instead of a man mourning his lost brother. Characters like Lestat’s human father, and plantation owner Babette Freniere were excised out of the story. However, Rice also included many references and characters from her second novel, The Vampire Lestat. (For fans who want to see what that version of the script looks like, you can read it here.)
Director Neil Jordan came on board after his success with The Crying Game, a film that dealt with LGBTQ issues and found mainstream success. As soon as he did, he cut almost all the references to the other novels from the script. This was probably just so the movie could come in at a two-hour runtime. In the ’90s, two-and-a-half or three-hour blockbuster movies were not common, and that had to be on the studio’s mind when making this picture. Nevertheless, the subtitle of Interview with the Vampire was still The Vampire Chronicles, meaning that Warner Bros. had to be thinking ahead at least somewhat that this could be a franchise. They scheduled cameras to roll in the fall of 1993, for a fall 1994 release.
All the Bloody Drama: Anne Rice Speaks Out Against Tom Cruise’s Casting
Everything finally seemed to be going smoothly for this long-awaited production. And then the casting began. For the part of Louis, Jordan cast then-up-and-coming “It Boy” Brad Pitt. For Lestat, Jordan enlisted the world’s biggest movie star, Tom Cruise. Fans of the books flat-out revolted at the Cruise casting. For a little historical perspective as to why, at the time of his casting, Tom Cruise was THE All-American guy archetype. Between Top Gun and A Few Good Men, no one saw him as anything but that kind of character. Sure, he’d already received critical acclaim for movies like Born on the Fourth of July, but not a single person saw him as the tall, blonde erudite French vampire. It seemed like a casting decision made in hell.
To say author Anne Rice was upset over the casting of Cruise is underselling it. Aside from Stephen King with Kubrick’s The Shining, this is one of few instances of famous authors hating on an adaptation before the film ever came out. Every interview Rice did in 1993-1994 had her bad-mouthing the casting. Whether it was movie magazines or tabloid TV news, Rice made her displeasure known. The media went into a frenzy as Rice spoke her mind to the press without studio approval. That’s the ultimate no-no from Hollywood’s perspective. All of this threatened to derail the film once again. But with a $60 million dollar investment, the studio simply had to move forward and hope for the best. Production began in New Orleans in 1993, under a cloud of bad press. This is the kind of drama that the internet would have a field day with today.
Losing River Phoenix
We should also mention that the production was struck by tragedy early on. Actor River Phoenix was cast early on as the human interviewer, Daniel Molloy. Sadly, a week before the shooting was to commence, Phoenix died of a drug overdose on Halloween, 1993. Christian Slater replaced him at the last minute, donating his entire salary to River Phoenix’s favorite charity. Director Neil Jordan ultimately dedicated the film to Phoenix’s memory.
In an unusual show of faith in the project, producer David Geffen sent Rice a tape of the film in advance. He hoped she’d change her mind when she saw the film. By her own admission, Rice watched the film, and started sobbing with relief when she finished it. She realized the filmmakers had done justice to her story. Rice decided to counter all her earlier bad press by doing the opposite. She took out a two-page ad in Variety praising the film, in particular, Tom Cruise. She said “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.” After the film’s release, Rice took out another 8-page ad gushing even more. But even with Rice now on board, more controversy was to come.
The Oprah Winfrey Controversy
In the ‘90s, the most powerful promotional tool for your film was a dedicated hour on The Oprah Winfrey Show. It was common for a major blockbuster film to get a promotional push on her show, especially if it involved a major star. It was usually a love fest. It didn’t matter if the movie was bad or good. Well, when Tom Cruise appeared on Oprah’s show to promote Interview in October 1994, it…was not a love fest. Ten minutes into the film, Oprah and several attendees walked out of the screening, disturbed by what they’d seen.
What’s interesting is that Oprah walked out after only ten minutes. There are indeed disturbing moments of vampires feeding on plantation slaves in the film. One brutal scene in particular showed Brad Pitt killing a terrified Thandie Newton in an early role for her. That right there is a legitimate reason for Oprah to not want to sit through the whole movie. However, none of that happens in the first ten minutes of the film. So we think just Tom Cruise biting Brad Pitt was enough to freak out the talk show queen.
Ultimately, Oprah gave Cruise the option to cancel the show, but to his credit, he pressed forward. The next hour of the show is a wild time capsule of where we were as a culture at the time. Angry suburban women in the audience were furious with the megastar for making something “so demonic.” Meanwhile, the audience (and Oprah) snickered at a gay audience member for commenting on the story’s (very obvious) homoerotic subtext. It’s wild to see just how over the heads of the audience that all was at the time. In the end, none of that hurt the final film. It just created more hype for it.
Interview with the Vampire’s Continuing Eternal Life
The film opened on November 11, 1994, to decent reviews and fantastic box office. And none of the previous year’s worth of controversy seemed to have made a dent in its prospects. It made $105 million domestically in ’94, which is around $277 million in inflation-adjusted numbers today. Not bad for an R-Rated horror period piece with queer subtext. But despite its success, a proper sequel never saw the light of day. Rice and the producers had made peace, and the movie made money. So what happened?
Basically, Hollywood produced movies based on existing franchises very differently in the ’90s. No one thought to sign actors for more than one movie at a time back then. Meaning that if they greenlit a sequel, the original star wasn’t guaranteed to return. It wasn’t really until Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the X-Men movies in the early 2000s that studios started to think ahead to potential sequels well in advance. Without Cruise guaranteed as Lestat, the adaptation Neil Jordan was planning for The Vampire Lestat died on the vine.
Another factor was probably that the follow-up novels are very dense, and come with multiple points of view from different characters. Those books would be far more difficult to make into a two-hour movie. When attempting to combine books two and three into the movie The Queen of the Damned eight years later, the result was cheap and sloppy, despite the late Aaliyah looking fierce throughout as Queen Akasha. None of the original actors came back; the film was essentially made just so the studio could keep a hold of the copyright. The resulting film left no one happy. And it effectively killed this franchise for the next two decades.
Interview with the Vampire Rises from the Grave
After Queen of the Damned tanked at the box office, there was a Lestat musical by Elton John. But that was also a flop. The vampire craze of the late 2000s, begun with Twilight and True Blood, seemingly had no room for Rice’s vampires. This is despite Interview with the Vampire being an obvious influence on them all. After many failed attempts at getting a TV series going, Anne Rice sold the rights to her entire Vampire Chronicles series to AMC. In 2022, just months after Rice’s passing, Interview with the Vampire the series debuted to much critical acclaim, and a rabid fandom was born. But there’s a reason the series is called Interview with the Vampire, despite moving on from that novel’s story for season three. And that reason is the incredible brand recognition the film brought to the title 30 years ago. Its undead legacy truly lives on.
Originally published on November 11, 2019.
