Film Appreciation - The Choice I Never Had

Cody Hamman has Film Appreciation for the 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire.

I haven't read all of the novels in Anne Rice's series The Vampire Chronicles, during my last attempt at reading through them in order of publication I believe I was just getting into the sixth of her fifteen vampire books (and there weren't fifteen of them at the time) when something distracted me away from the endeavor. But the early novels in the series, I loved, and the first one - Interview with the Vampire - I have read multiple times. I'm pretty sure my first read-through of that book took place during a Super Bowl event in the 1990s. I didn't care about football, but I always put on the Super Bowl back then because it was a big deal with big, expensive commercials and movie trailers being shown between the sports stuff. When football was on the screen, I was reading Interview with the Vampire, only looking up for the commercials and the trailers.

But that reading happened after the release of the 1994 film adaptation, which was directed by Neil Jordan from a screenplay Rice wrote herself. The film was my first exposure to The Vampire Chronicles, and to anything Rice. Even though I wasn't familiar with the story, I was still interested in checking out the movie - mainly because I was a "monster kid", so I was sold as soon as they put Vampire in the title, but also because this movie was presented as being something of a big deal, a prestigious horror release starring that rising star Brad Pitt and the already iconic Tom Cruise. Cruise's casting as Rice's most popular character, the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, got a lot of press, especially since Rice herself was very open about the fact that she didn't think he was right for the role. It was the sort of thing you see on the internet all the time, people reacting to casting announcements of known characters by saying this was the worst casting decision ever. The actors who are doubted in that way usually prove their critics wrong. Sometimes they even win Oscars for the roles people said they shouldn't get. In this case, Cruise proved Rice wrong, and the author admitted that he was a great Lestat.

Lestat is not the vampire of the title. The story begins with reporter named Daniel Molloy sitting down for an interview with the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Pitt), who was made a vampire by Lestat back in 1791. Daniel is played by Christian Slater, a last minute replacement for River Phoenix, who tragically died four weeks before production began. Slater made the noble decision to donate his entire salary to charities that Phoenix had supported. Sitting in a room in San Francisco, Louis tells Daniel the story of... well, not his life. His afterlife, I guess you could say. In 1791, Louis was a wealthy 24-year-old plantation owner in Louisiana, grieving the recent loss of his wife and child and longing for death. Until death arrives, in the form of Lestat. Lestat feeds on Louis, nearly killing him, but then he gives Louis a choice. A choice Lestat says he was never given: he can either die, as he has wanted to, or he can become a vampire as well. Louis chose to become a vampire. To receive the "dark gift".

Louis quickly comes to regret that choice, comparing his existence as a vampire to being in Hell. It's especially hellish because he's stuck with Lestat, who enjoys feeding on and killing people, while Louis tries to avoid it, feeding on animals instead. At first. Louis tells Daniel the facts about being a vampire. Crucifixes are not a threat to him, the stories of vampires dying from a stake through the heart are nonsense. One of the worst things a vampire can do is drink from a body that was already dead. There are no vampires in Transylvania. Sleeping in coffins is a necessity. And while Louis has been miserable for most of the time, the story of his 200 years as a vampire is rather epic, taking him around the world and allowing him to witness some major events in history. It also allowed him to become a father, in a twisted way.

When Louis is unable to control himself and feeds on a child named Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), his remorse is so great that he allows Lestat to turn Claudia into a vampire (the process requires drinking a vampire's blood, a simple bite from a vampire won't do it) just to keep the kid from dying. As decades go by, Claudia comes to resent Lestat and Louis for making her a vampire. Not because she has to kill people, she doesn't mind doing that at all, but because she is trapped being a child for eternity. Homer, the vampire in a child's body from Near Dark, would have loved to meet her.

There may not be any vampires in Dracula's homeland, but there certainly were some in Paris near the end of the 1800s, and meeting up with them - played by the likes of Stephen Rea (as a vampire with some degree of psychic ability) and Antonio Banderas (who, at 400, may be the oldest living vampire) -  doesn't turn out to be a very good idea. There is some serious backstabbing in the vampire community. But Louis and Claudia already know that, after what they do to Lestat...

Interview with the Vampire is a great movie, and reasonably faithful to Rice's source material - as you would expect, given that she wrote the script herself. Cruise, as Rice saw, does a terrific job in the role of Lestat, and Pitt is quite good in the role of Louis. I was very critical of Pitt's acting when he was gaining popularity back in the mid-'90s, but I have nothing to nitpick about the way he plays Louis. Dunst is great, and occasionally creepy, as little Claudia.

Jordan and his crew brought Rice's story to the screen with great style, and a tone that is often unnerving, despite the fact that most of the scenes in the film are straightforward drama scenes and the vampires are our lead characters, not monsters that we're afraid are going to emerge from the darkness. They're right there in front of us the whole time. But they're frequently doing some awful things, to regular people and to each other. The film deals with heavy, twisted subject matter, and that's how it puts the viewer on edge.

Even though I've never completed the series, The Vampire Chronicles are important to me because they served as the jumping off point for a brief but unforgettable friendship that I had. A friendship formed on the internet in the second half of 1998, right after I gained access to the internet for the first time in August of that year. During my early months online, I would frequent Yahoo chat rooms, sending out my additions to the conversations in all caps, colored red, because I wanted attention. Nobody even called me out for the caps and red text at the time. Somehow, one night in the chat rooms ended with someone who had the username Lady Lestat offering me to turn me into a vampire. I accepted, I became her "fledgling", in a joking way. But Lady Lestat, whose real name was Crystal, stayed in contact with me after that night. Behind the vampire act in the chat room, she was a teenager, as I was at the time. I believe she was 17 when we started talking, and I was 14, about to turn 15. Our frequent conversations continued through my birthday, and eventually went beyond chats and emails. Not only did we exchange handwritten letters and pictures, but she also started calling me on the telephone. Long distance; I was in Ohio and she was in North Carolina. These phone calls happened quite often - up until the point when her mom got the phone bill, which was somewhere around $200 or $400, I can't remember which. There weren't many phone calls after that.

The interactions between Crystal and I were entirely platonic, there was no flirtation or anything like that. We would just talk about whatever happened to be on our minds at the time. Since I just recently had a traumatic experience based on the fact that I didn't talk enough in a situation, it was good to have these conversations that somehow worked, with someone who wanted to talk to me. A lot. Sadly, Crystal and I drifted out of contact by mid-1999. Nearly ten years went by before we re-connected on MySpace. We talked a bit there, updated each other on our lives. I hadn't done much since we last spoke, but she was married and had gotten into the medical profession, and said that Eli Roth's Hostel still grossed out her out despite all the things she had seen at work. We abruptly lost contact again soon after. 

I can't watch Interview with the Vampire or even hear about Anne Rice without thinking back to the conversations I had with Crystal in the last days of 1998. I will always have an appreciation for Rice and her vampire works for paving the way for us to have that connection. I haven't spoken to Crystal in nearly fifteen years now, but I hope she's somewhere out there, doing well.