Interview with the Vampire

Neil Jordan's transition from novelist through small budget film-maker (Angel and The Company of Wolves) to potential Hollywood 'A' list director culminated in this big-money, big name production that neither did serious business at the box-office nor was a total critical flop. The general reaction seemed to be one which suggested Jordan 'could do better'.

Anne Rice's novel Interview With the Vampire was optioned for filming in 1975 and had been in development ever since. This perhaps suggests that the attractive aspects of Rice's fiction were matched by a number of difficuities which prevented a smooth transition between page and screen. One of these problems becomes apparent very early on: the time scale of the film must have been a nightmare to manage as Louis (Brad Pitt) recounts his two hundred year existence as a vampire in the course of a single evening to engrossed journalist Malloy (Christian Slater). The consequent enforced skimming through the centuries results in scenes that lack authenticity and wouldn't appear out of place in a low-budget TV movie: sets, period detail, and atmospherics all seem conspicuously artificial (I know, it's a movie).

Anyway, problems aside, Interview... is a different kind of vampire movie and all the more interesting because of it, dealing with the philosophical imbroglios that confront a creature which cannot die and has no choice other than to kill to satisfy its hunger. Nevertheless, gore-fans do not dismay - barely five minutes passes without bloodshed of some kind or other - especially memorable is Lestat (Tom Cruise)'s appetising trick of grabbing a rat as it scuttles beneath the dining table and draining its blood into a goblet like he's making a sodastream.

Tom Cruise is superb as a bloodsucker who enjoys his work, as is precocious little Kirsten Dunst as the insatiable child vampire Claudia. Brad Pitt is, well, Brad Pitt.

Review by Iain Harral
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96