Найруулагч Нил Жордан “Interview With the Vampire” киноны 4K UHD хувилбарын талаар сэтгэгдлээ хуваалцлаа

Decades before Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire became a TV show with a rabidly invested fan base, 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—as well as special effects by the legendary Stan Winston.

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’re also stuffed full of longing and fury, with a preteen Kirsten Dunst stealing every scene she’s in.

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

Earlier this week, io9 got a chance to talk to Jordan about Interview With the Vampire’s lasting legacy. As you might guess, he’s thrilled about the 4K UHD version. “For a director it’s great. You have people who are tech savvy enough to go back to the original print and do the restoration work and all that,” he said. “It’s brilliant … I think people are falling in love with cinema again.”

The experience of making Interview With the Vampire has stuck with him over the past three decades.

“We 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’re stuck together,” Jordan said. “And 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’s created this family. So for me it was a metaphor for a strange family, kind of.”

He’s glad audiences will soon be getting to see the movie in 4K to fully appreciate its visual aspects.

“When 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’s Dracula, which is rather beautiful. He returned to kind of old-fashioned ways of doing things in the ‘20s and ‘30s. 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 ‘20s, and all that sort of stuff. So it spans about 200 to 300 years.”

“So I basically said, I’m 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.”

Obviously, Jordan is aware of the Interview With the Vampire TV show, though he admits he’s only watched a handful of episodes.

“It’s interesting,” he says. “It 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.”

Rice’s book has since “become 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’s good.”

Interview With the Vampire‘s queer themes are an overt part of the TV series in a way that’s not seen in Jordan’s movie. However, the director said he didn’t get any studio pushback in that regard, despite the ‘90s being a more conservative time in Hollywood.

“The 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—let me put it that way. Maybe the TV series has gone further in that. I don’t know because I haven’t seen it all.”

When Cruise was first announced as Lestat, there was a certain amount of controversy—with 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.

“Tom is a great actor. Once he embraces a part, he takes it to himself in a way that very few actors do,” Jordan said. “I 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’t have had otherwise. But it was lovely working with Tom and with Brad, both of them.”

The movie’s 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.

“I’ve cast many children in movies,” Jordan reflected. “And I’m 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… they kind of love ghoulishness, don’t 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’re in a slightly immoral zone.”

“So it wasn’t 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—and second, she would be acting for the rest of her life. Do you understand what I mean? So I didn’t have the trepidation that I normally would have in casting a child.”

We couldn’t 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.

“That’s the way kids are, aren’t they? They’re quite pitiless in a strange way,” Jordan says. “I love when the piano teacher whacks her hand and you know exactly what’s going to happen to him.”

Interview With the Vampire was one of the big vampire movies of the ‘90s, a decade that had quite a few notable entries in the genre, including Coppola’s Dracula and the more action-oriented Bladeand From Dusk Till Dawn. But vampires are popular in any era, with an enduring appeal that even Jordan can’t quite explain.

“I 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,” he says. “And 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.”

And he’s not exclusively a Lestat and Louis fan. Asked to name-check some other bloodsucking favorites, Jordan had a list at the ready.

“The one I love best of all is Max Schreck in Nosferatu. And I love Werner Herzog’s version of Nosferatu, where [the vampire] was played by Klaus Kinski. And of course I loved Let the Right One In—that’s a great, great movie.”

Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles makes its 4K UHD debut on September 22.

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