{"id":899592,"date":"2026-09-17T20:32:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T20:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/899592\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T20:32:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T20:32:12","slug":"interview-with-the-vampire-director-neil-jordan-looks-back-at-his-horror-classic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/899592\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Interview With the Vampire\u2019 Director Neil Jordan Looks Back at His Horror Classic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Decades before Anne Rice\u2019s Interview With the Vampire<\/a> became a TV show<\/a> with a rabidly invested fan base<\/a>, its best-known adaptation came from director Neil Jordan. His 1994 film came two years after he won an Oscar for scripting The Crying Game, and it boasted an A-list cast (Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, and Christian Slater) and lush production values\u2014as well as special effects by the legendary Stan Winston.<\/p>\n

Revisiting Interview With the Vampire is always entertaining. The costumes, lighting, and sets offer a gorgeous reminder of the last days before CGI began to dominate; the performances can be campy, but they\u2019re also stuffed full of longing and fury, with a preteen Kirsten Dunst stealing every scene she\u2019s in.<\/p>\n

Diving back into the torrid relationship between Lestat (Cruise) and Louis (Pitt) is about to get even more cinematic thanks to the film\u2019s arrival on 4K UHD next week. The release also contains some brand-new extras, with featurettes looking at the film\u2019s art direction and cinematography, as well as several deleted scenes, including a gruesome Louis moment Jordan has discussed in the past<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"NeilDunst and Jordan on the set. \u00a9 Courtesy of Warner Bros. <\/p>\n

Earlier this week, io9 got a chance to talk to Jordan about Interview With the Vampire\u2019s lasting legacy. As you might guess, he\u2019s thrilled about the 4K UHD version. \u201cFor a director it\u2019s great. You have people who are tech savvy enough to go back to the original print and do the restoration work and all that,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s brilliant \u2026 I think people are falling in love with cinema again.\u201d<\/p>\n

The experience of making Interview With the Vampire has stuck with him over the past three decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were given a unique opportunity by Warner Bros. to make this rather strange vampiric tale about two men for whom blood becomes almost the metaphor for sex, and they\u2019re stuck together,\u201d Jordan said. \u201cAnd when one wants to leave the other, the more dominant among them creates a child vampire, knowing that the other one will never be able to leave once he\u2019s created this family. So for me it was a metaphor for a strange family, kind of.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s glad audiences will soon be getting to see the movie in 4K to fully appreciate its visual aspects.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was asked to make the movie, vampire movies traditionally had been kind of tongue-in-cheek. Francis Ford Coppola expanded the perspectives when he made Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula, which is rather beautiful. He returned to kind of old-fashioned ways of doing things in the \u201820s and \u201830s. And when I was asked to make this, I thought, okay, I am going to make a real vampire epic with this story, because it goes from 18th-century New Orleans to Paris, back to New Orleans in the \u201820s, and all that sort of stuff. So it spans about 200 to 300 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I basically said, I\u2019m going to take the opportunity to do what some of these great period movies often do. Tell a vampire story with all the resources of a period movie, but with the added proviso that everything happens at night. So for me, it was a [journey] through these wonderful, gothic European landscapes, but all as if you were in an endless tomb that just kept unwinding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obviously, Jordan is aware of the Interview With the Vampire TV show, though he admits he\u2019s only watched a handful of episodes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s interesting,\u201d he says. \u201cIt takes much more freedoms with the novel than I did. When I made the movie, I was very anxious to reflect the book that Anne had written.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lestat\u00a9 Courtesy of Warner Bros. <\/p>\n

Rice\u2019s book has since \u201cbecome almost like a bible for vampire fans, [and] people should feel free to play with it whichever way they want. If the audience enjoys it, that\u2019s good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interview With the Vampire\u2018s queer themes are an overt part of the TV series in a way that\u2019s not seen in Jordan\u2019s movie. However, the director said he didn\u2019t get any studio pushback in that regard, despite the \u201890s being a more conservative time in Hollywood.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe movie that I shot is as homoerotic as the book that Anne wrote. She basically used blood as a metaphor for sex; the movie is as sexual as the book was\u2014let me put it that way. Maybe the TV series has gone further in that. I don\u2019t know because I haven\u2019t seen it all.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Cruise was first announced as Lestat, there was a certain amount of controversy\u2014with Rice herself denouncing the choice, though she later made a public declaration praising his performance. For his part, Jordan had nothing but good things to say about working with the movie star.<\/p>\n

\u201cTom is a great actor. Once he embraces a part, he takes it to himself in a way that very few actors do,\u201d Jordan said. \u201cI think a lot of the conversation and commentary on his choice of that role and my choice of him in that role made him determined to prove everybody wrong in a way. Maybe [that gave] him an edge that he wouldn\u2019t have had otherwise. But it was lovely working with Tom and with Brad, both of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The movie\u2019s dark heart, of course, is little Claudia. Dunst delivers a memorable performance as a character who becomes immortal as a young girl and faces a miserable, trapped-in-time life as a result.<\/p>\n

\"Louis\u00a9 Courtesy of Warner Bros. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve cast many children in movies,\u201d Jordan reflected. \u201cAnd I\u2019m always worried about casting a child in a film because it can come to define their lives in ways that they would not welcome. With regard to Claudia, we were just trying to find an actor who could actually deliver on the role. The thing about children\u2026 they kind of love ghoulishness, don\u2019t they? They love blood, they love gore, and they love seeing decay. It fascinates them, and we needed somebody who would bring the kind of angelic nature of a child to the role with that rather chilling sense that children have where they\u2019re in a slightly immoral zone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it wasn\u2019t a matter of finding a great actress to play this role; it was a matter of finding somebody who actually could play the role. When Kirsten came in and read, it just was totally obvious that she was two things. First, she could play the role\u2014and second, she would be acting for the rest of her life. Do you understand what I mean? So I didn\u2019t have the trepidation that I normally would have in casting a child.\u201d<\/p>\n

We couldn\u2019t resist telling Jordan our favorite part of the movie: when Claudia, newly transformed and flexing her powers, exits a toy shop cradling a coveted (and murderously obtained) new doll. The satisfied yet sinister smile on her face is just so hauntingly perfect.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the way kids are, aren\u2019t they? They\u2019re quite pitiless in a strange way,\u201d Jordan says. \u201cI love when the piano teacher whacks her hand and you know exactly what\u2019s going to happen to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interview With the Vampire was one of the big vampire movies of the \u201890s, a decade that had quite a few notable entries in the genre, including Coppola\u2019s Dracula and the more action-oriented Blade\u00a0and From Dusk Till Dawn. But vampires are popular in any era, with an enduring appeal that even Jordan can\u2019t quite explain.<\/p>\n

\"ArmandBanderas and Jordan on set. \u00a9 Courtesy of Warner Bros. <\/p>\n

\u201cI know that Anne Rice reinvented the Bram Stoker original and expanded its range and its emotional colors in ways that nobody would have thought possible,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I think Anne had a huge influence on Twilight and stuff like that. I know Stephen King has said that he wants vampires just to be monstrous and oozing blood. But she introduced a romanticism into the whole idea of a vampire, which I played with in the movie, which is one of the reasons I wanted to make it.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he\u2019s not exclusively a Lestat and Louis fan. Asked to name-check some other bloodsucking favorites, Jordan had a list at the ready.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe one I love best of all is Max Schreck in Nosferatu. And I love Werner Herzog\u2019s version of Nosferatu, where [the vampire] was played by Klaus Kinski. And of course I loved Let the Right One In\u2014that\u2019s a great, great movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles makes its 4K UHD debut on September 22.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows<\/a> to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books<\/a> that should be on your radar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Decades before Anne Rice\u2019s Interview With the Vampire became a TV show with a rabidly invested fan base,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":899593,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3491,49,48,75,23673,69206,337,311287,9588],"class_list":["post-899592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-brad-pitt","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-interview-with-the-vampire","tag-kirsten-dunst","tag-movies","tag-neil-jordan","tag-tom-cruise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899592\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/899593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}