Neil Jordan On Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt

By the time “Interview With the Vampire” hit theaters in 1994, the film had been in development for almost 20 years, seemingly with an obstacle or controversy for almost every one of them. Aided by producer David Geffen, only director Neil Jordan — riding high after the critical and commercial success of “The Crying Game” — was able to overcome those hurdles and deliver an adaptation of Anne Rice’s 1976 novel that merged the operatic scale of “Gone With the Wind” and theatrical bloodletting of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Although Rice originally balked at Tom Cruise playing the vampire Lestat, it didn’t hurt that the film starred one of the biggest actors in Hollywood, as well as Brad Pitt, himself on the precipice of superstardom, alongside Kirsten Dunst as their scene-stealing pre-teen companion.

Marking the film’s 30th anniversary, Jordan recently spoke with Variety about the many challenges he faced to get “Interview With the Vampire” made. In addition to discussing its controversial casting choices — including one that happened because of the tragic death of River Phoenix — he reflected on the tone of his adaptation, the impact of that tone on star Brad Pitt, the sexual underpinnings of its story about same-sex companionship, and some of the scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor.

“Interview with the Vampire” is an adaptation that had, for many years, languished in development hell. What greased the wheels to make it when you started on it?

I was sent a script by David Geffen at Warner Brothers that Anne had written. I found it intriguing, [but] there were elements in the book that had been excised and slightly neutered. So I just said, “Look, why don’t I try my own draft of the script?” which I did, and they quite rapidly put it into production. Brad Pitt was attached at the time, and they were searching for Lestat. Because of the exigencies of the writer’s guild and all that, I didn’t end up getting a credit, but I reintroduced elements of Anne’s book that had somehow gotten waylaid a little bit.

What were those elements?

Some of the eroticism had gone missing, I think. The wonderful issue of Claudia as a child. The attempt of these two men, who were in this eternal relationship, to construct a family for themselves. And I suppose the broader sense of making a vampire movie into a substantial epic, introducing elements that normally you don’t see in these kind of movies. And the time transition from New Orleans, right up to the present day. Basically, I just wanted to make it more faithful to Anne’s book.

What kind of juice did you have after “The Crying Game”?

I wasn’t aware of what kind of juice I had at all, really. I was just aware that I’d been sent a big Hollywood movie. I did say to the producer, David Geffen, “I function best in an independent context.” And David said, “I’ll keep the studio off your back.” Which he did. So we ended up making a very personal movie with a substantial budget with two major stars. There was an operatic element to the novel, and I suppose I remembered Francis Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” which had expanded the palette of a vampire film.

You said that Brad Pitt was attached, and you’ve said that Daniel Day-Lewis was one of the people that you had first considered for Lestat.

Daniel was mentioned by the studio, but I never felt he would do it. I did sent him the script, and unsurprisingly, he said he didn’t want to do a vampire film. So there were reams of people that were mentioned. Anne’s particular favorites were great people like Rutger Hauer and Jeremy Irons, but we went through the normal casting process, and then Tom Cruise was suggested. I went and met Tom twice, and then thought I could get something really great going here. I’d always admired Tom as an actor, but apart from the fact that he was the biggest star around at the time.

How much did his star wattage give him an edge?

I just saw that I liked him as an actor, it’s as simple as that. I mean, Lestat is described as tall, rangy, and blonde haired and all that sort of stuff. Tom was none of those things. But he had a conviction and a kind of a chilling centrality to him, that I thought he’d be great in this role. It struck me that a huge Hollywood star was forced into a life not unlike the life that Lestat led. They have to avoid publicity, avoid crowds, keep their legend intact, keep a certain unknowability about them. And I thought those things were part and parcel of Tom’s life, and maybe they would make him a great Lestat. And it turned out to be the case.

Anne Rice initially campaigned against Cruise, but she famously reversed course after she saw his performance. Looking at the film’s production history, were obstacles and pushbacks like that constantly in your field of vision while you were making it, or were you able to block all of that out once shooting got underway?

It was like the entire of the United States was out for me, really. It created a little paranoid world for us, basically. We were shooting large scenes in San Francisco, New Orleans, London and Paris. And in each case, we had to shield ourselves off from paparazzi, from any glimpses of what we were doing. It was like we were making the movie like vampires, in a strange way. It helped me in the process, it concentrated the mind. I’m not sure how it helped the actors, but it made the production rather special.

After he was cast as Daniel Malloy, the interviewer, River Phoenix passed away a month before filming was supposed to start. How difficult for you was it to reset with Christian in that role as production got underway?

River Phoenix’s death was horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. It would’ve been wonderful if he played that part, but he just wasn’t there. So it was something we had to get over, really.

Brad Pitt has talked openly about his unhappiness during filming. How much were you aware of it at the time?

Brad was great in the role. I think the problem that he suffered from was the fact that the role suffers. It was the passive role, and it was the central role … often the narrative central character can be the most passive element in the whole equation. We were shooting at night constantly, we never saw the daylight for months and months, and I think it affected him, but it was part of the character as well. I mean, Louis is somebody who is punished through a 300-year period by this creature. So the way the role affected Brad was not unlike the journey Louis himself had to go through.

Did you try to create an atmosphere on set that would alleviate the heaviness of what maybe he might’ve been going through?

No, I don’t think I did. I just tried to work with him as an actor. But for one thing, Brad was there for far longer than Tom Cruise was, so he had to endure the entire production, so maybe that — and the passivity of the role, perhaps — took a toll on him a little bit. But I thought he was really good in the part. Any faults of what people perceive to be the performance are faults of the actual character itself, and of the novel itself. I mean, Louis suffers in the novel from the moment he’s turned into a vampire to the very end of the book. So I’m sure it was a tough journey for Brad, but it was also a tough journey for the character, too.

Kirsten comes in and just absolutely takes over the movie as Claudia. How did you elicit such a complex performance from her, while also protecting her, if necessary, from the darkness of the subject matter?

Well, I’ve done many movies where I’ve cast children. But the minute I saw Kirsten, it was amazingly apparent to me that her life would be acting, from start to finish. I’m normally terrified of casting a kid because they’re so young, and it can affect their lives really horribly in many ways. But this girl had a blazing talent, and an extraordinary beauty, and we were as protective as we should be in terms of a child being on the set. Her mother was there quite a bit. And I think in a strange way, the story comes alive when Claudia enters. However warped the family is, it becomes a story of a family. And she was extraordinary. I didn’t have to do that much to draw that performance out of her. It was all there.

Were there any sequences where you had to be creative to shoot something that might be more intense, or more violent, than she could handle?

Nothing like that. The interesting thing about it was, because with Claudia’s position in the drama, it’s not about sexuality. But kids love biting. They love blood. They’re not terrified of death and violence, they’re terrified of rather more unspoken things, in a way. And for me, it was just a lot of fun seeing a child feeding on adults. I don’t think there were any disturbing scenes that she had to witness.

She did have to cut Tom Cruise’s throat.

Yeah, but that was fine. There was a huge prosthetic in Tom’s throat and the blood spilled out. But the shooting of it wasn’t disturbing, it was practical. And it was delightful to see her take that demonic energy and make it her own. But sometimes kids are like that, aren’t they?

I read a quote from somebody a few years ago about how vampire movies lend themselves, perhaps understandably, to a lot of “teeth acting.” Was there an approach that you tried to employ to facilitate good performances from the actors?

We didn’t want theatricality in terms of the characters themselves … to be doing Hammer horror moves or anything like that. With Stan Winston, we did an enormous amount of research, and sketching with where the teeth should be. And I didn’t want Tom to always be using his teeth, so I invented “Tom’s thumb thing,” a little thumb prick that he had that was elaborately designed in silver and etched with a blade on it that he could use when he didn’t want to go to the trouble of biting somebody. So, we tried to make it real and inventive in that way. But if you look at F. W. Murnau’s [“Nosferatu”], they use the two front teeth. And that’s what Klaus Kinski did in the Werner Herzog remake of that, which is very demonic but slightly comical at the same time. So if you make the vampire teeth the eye teeth, it gives a different reality to it.

A movie like this potentially could lend itself to camp. Did you have a barometer for making sure that this did not go over the top into campiness?

Well, there are some quite camp moments in it, aren’t there? Like when they eat the rats, that’s a thing I introduced to the script myself. Let’s say there are enjoyable ironies through the whole thing, but camp, I didn’t want to go there, really.

This is a movie where a lot of the stuff that’s done digitally predates what we think of as invisible effects. What challenges did that present for you as a filmmaker?

I used Rob Legato who set up Digital Domain with James Cameron, and Rob was our digital effects supervisor and a second unit director for certain moments. But we just went through it very carefully. Claudia’s hair was a huge technical challenge at the time, when she cuts her hair off and it grows back. But when the teeth grow when she’s turned into a vampire, now, you could do those just by saying, “Siri, make their teeth grow.” But at the time, it was very complex. It was a combination of real physical prosthetics and really discrete digital enhancement of things. The trick was to blend them so you’re not sure what is digital, and what is not.

I understand that your initial cut was about 20 minutes longer than it would end up being. Was there ever a director’s cut in mind?

We had a version that was longer, where Brad actually goes to confession, and the priest is so horrified by what he’s telling him he retreats towards the altar, and Brad drains his blood underneath this enormous Dali-esque crucifix. I was sad not to see that there. There could be a director’s cut of the movie. I would happily do it. But the the problem in turning the novel into a movie was that it was a picaresque narrative — “and then, and then, and then, and then.” It’s not like this set up tension between characters that’s resolved in the third act. So when I had cut the movie, I was saying, “I really think it’s too long.” And we showed it to a paid preview audience, and they said, “It’s too long.” So I came back in a week, and now it’s shorter. I don’t know if there are enough fans of the movie to warrant [the release of a longer version], but I would like to do it, if possible.

When Tom Cruise went on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to promote the film, an audience member drew laughter when he brought up the homoerotic undertones of this story. How explicit, or implicit, you did you want those themes to be in the film?

I just wanted to be accurate to Anne’s book. Once Louis is turned into a vampire, he’s stuck with this companion who is half a lover, half a manipulator. And any of the sexual undertones that are there are expressed through blood, and through the desire for blood. So I would say there is exactly the amount of eroticism, homoeroticism or otherwise, that there was in Anne’s novel. And in fact, when I did my draft I had to reintroduce as much as I could of those elements. So I thought it was an apt reflection of what Anne had written, of the whole tragedy of vampirism — once you embrace this thing, you’re outside sexuality, you’re outside being able to have a child, even. That’s why Lestat makes Claudia — so Louis will not leave him. I thought it was the perfect metaphor for the whole thing.

Between Louis and Armand (Antonio Banderas), Claudia observes, “he wants you as you want him,” which hints at romantic love even if it isn’t sexual. But in the context of Hollywood history where sexuality is projected onto same-sex companions, were there lines or scenes that anyone suggested might cross a line?

Nobody said anything like that to me. I suppose the only thing they were a bit fearful of was, is it scary enough? That was a problem for me because this is the first time you’ve made a movie from the actual vampire’s point of view. These characters cannot be harmed. So you cannot put them in the kind of jeopardy that creates real terror, but you’re more in a world that is creating the terror yourself, so that was slightly a problem. But nobody said, “Don’t do this,” or “Don’t do that.”

What sort of validation did the film’s commercial and critical success provide after navigating all of those minefields?

Well, if you make a film with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, it has to open big, doesn’t it? It has to be some kind of success. And the fact I had been allowed to make it so particularly in a way, and yet it became a commercial success, that to me, was really gratifying.

Given its success, was there a particular reason that you and the cast did not reunite to make a sequel?

I was asked to write a script of “The Vampire Lestat,” which I did. And quite simply, Tom didn’t want to reprise the role. It was as simple as that. And it would’ve been quite a different animal. If Mr. Cruise had said he would do it, I’m sure they would’ve done it. But at the time he wasn’t doing sequels.

30 years later, what place does this film occupy in your body of work?

The second movie I made was called “The Company of Wolves.” “Interview With the Vampire” was of a piece with that kind of fantasy aspect of the work I had done. And I made another vampire movie called “Byzantium.” I think there’s too many vampire movies going around. There’s great fun to be had with the genre, but they have become deeply, doubly ironic and meta. The great thing about “Interview with the Vampire” was I was able to take the characters seriously.

“Interview With the Vampire” is available to own on Blu-ray & digital platforms now.