1994 [interview with the vampire]

juliezhou · Guru

1994 [interview with the vampire]

juliezhou · Guru

Review:

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What made Tom Cruise such a great Vampire.

October 09, 2022

The '90s as it pertains to film was a very interesting time for me. By this time a teenager, my taste in film overall was beginning to grow as I started to find the ocean wherein the small rivers and brooks of my taste flowed from. Independent cinema invited me to start listening to the sounds of a conversation that was much deeper, larger, and much more vast than the types of movies I talked with up and unto that point. My tastes for acting were developing as well and beginning to crystallize and harden. A lot of my admittedly bro heavy favorite films, actors, and performances were somewhat born in this era. Goodfellas, Heat, Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, Don Cheadle in Devil in a Blue Dress, Morgan Freeman in Seven, Tupac Shakur in Juice, Gary Oldman (and just about everyone else) in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Kristen Dunst and our man of the hour; Tom Cruise in Interview with a Vampire.

I'm old enough to not just know of, but remember exactly what it felt like when Tom Cruise was cast as Lestat, to remember that sort of silent but emotionally audible collective ”Huh?”. Not having read the book (at that point) I could not take the position from a knowledgeable place of text in the source material. Mines came from the level of emotional repellence I felt the moment I heard Tom Cruise was playing a vampire of any sort. At the time of the release of Interview with a vampire I hadn't yet truly made peace with just how much I enjoyed Tom Cruise and I damn sure didn’t really regard him as any type of great actor. Having been raised on a pretty steady diet of performances from actors like Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones, Lawrence Olivier, and Denzel Washington, (you know.. theater) Tom Cruise was more like his movies, an escape artist, a novelty act to me. Interview with a Vampire was the birthplace of my own conversion to Tom Cruise fandom as an actor. The movie was the first seed of what has become a fully grown philosophy about Cruise’s defining quality as…The Fanatic, as The Believer.

Tom Cruise is a fanatic, he is an obsessive believer. It's his defining trait. It fuels his willingness to put himself and his body on the line for the medium. It's why he aligns himself so purely with a religion so built on the fringe, and why he works in so many of his roles where he sits there wide eyed eating up every word, or preaching the gospel of can do with a frost like rigid insistence on the purity of righteousness in every vowel that emerges from his mouth. It’s also why conversely he’s so effective as a purveyor of utter nonsense (TJ Mackey in PTA’s Magnolia). His is a work so steely and surgical, so concise, so precise that it rarely truly feels as if it penetrates which makes him available enough to be received by so many, distant enough to project onto, and also leaves him open to the dubious belief that he's not giving the work. That he's actually not already in your head. He can be your best defendant (A Few Good Men), your most loyal soldier (Minority Report), your most ardent disciple. and when he does it it’s always with that uncanny laser eyed-focus, or the unjaded innocence of the person who doesn't know enough yet not to know.

Look at Tom Cruise's eyes in that scene. They dote on Tom Berengers every word. They find him wherever he goes, and yet they barely go anywhere. They sit there underneath his arrow brows like hung men. The decision has been made and they are dead set. That intensity, that focus, that delicate balance of child like naivety and curiosity, these are the traits of the believer. Believable as the person looking to follow, or the person you want to follow, opposite sides of the same spectrum of faith- and that's what Cruise brings to just about each and every one of his roles. In “The Outsiders” he works as a believer in the cult of brotherhood. “Risky Business” and Born on the Fourth of July” as a believer in the cult of America via capitalism or the military industrial complex . “A Few Good Men” and “The Firm”- of the law. Search through his filmography you can find this almost throughout with very few detours. It’s what makes the detours (Eyes Wide Shut, The second half of Born on the Fourth of July, War of the Worlds) so interesting; that they explore what Tom Cruise is like when he isn't unflappable, when he doesn't know where he stands, when he is unsure of his belief system and his fleet footing. When it doesn't work or what level it works to - has to do with whether or not Cruise conquers the other aspects of the role, accent (The Outsiders), physical attributes (Jack Reacher). What Cruise brings to the role of Lestat is something in between both and that's what makes the role far more effective and brilliant than detractors have ever been willing to give it credit. There's two ways to look at the character Lestat, two approaches to be reckoned with; one is the Lestat Louie sees, (Interview) the other is how Lestat sees himself (The Vampire Lestat). Lestat through all the other books (and certain narrative tells in Interview) makes it clear Louie is not a completely reliable narrator himself . The recent AMC show starring Sam Reid is in my opinion is more like the latter, Neil Jordan’s 1994 film the former, but Cruise's performance is both. To be even more specific 1994s seems to honor most what would later become part of Lestat’s lore which is the idea that he is a bit of a rock star, a bit of a movie star, by honoring the quality, and the way most the way people saw Lestat including Anne Rice. The film loses a lot of the richness of the character Lestat. It loses some of those beautiful intricacies that the TV show so wonderfully picks up and adds to its text, which then adds to Sam Reid's wonderfully empathetic performance that is in turn more sympathetic to Lestat. The 94 film comes down firmly on Brad Pitt's “Louie’s” side, now whatever you may think of that decision that decision in and of itself is not Tom Cruise's . That was Neil Jordan's and it becomes Tom Cruise's job to act in the character of the person that Neil Jordan and the writers envision, and to whatever extent what he can grab from the source material. Our job begins then to ascertain how well Cruise brings this vision across and the answer is exceptionally. Lestat in Louie's eyes is superficial, vicious, certain, arrogant, and passionate and ultimately while he knows there's much more to him, Lestat in many ways is a disappointment to Louie. Tom Cruise plays the vision, his limits are the limits of Louie's insight and of his own inner turmoil as refracted through the lens of his own desire to pretend it doesn't exist. In a promo interview for the film Anne Rice states that she saw Lestat as a very “strident” character. The word stuck with me because it is so accurate and it's precisely what Cruise seems to have zeroed in on. Watching AMC's version; as complex and nuanced as the notes of Reid's performance is I really don't see much of that particular quality and what is done again in a very nuanced way but there's nothing really nuanced or subtle about being strident. It is what it is, you steamroll, you bowl forward over people's feelings, it's very on the nose, very right there for anyone to see usually because you're so convinced of the nature of your own righteousness. This is where Tom Cruise lives. He's got that “It's true because I said so” thing down pat. Think about the way he delivers the line “Any attempt to prove otherwise is futile 'cause it just ain't true.” in A Few Good Men. He's also got that sense of faux everything, a faux existence. There's a feeling watching Cruise (especially off screen) of an alien figuring out the traits of humanity, an endless curiosity with everything around him, a search for experiences, and a clear objective that makes him seem android like. These traits breathe in service of this role to brilliant, fun, and flat out hilarious results. Wouldn’t an immortal seem alien and android like? What happens when you've tried everything, seen everything, or at least you feel like you have? What would a person originally in search of answers much like Louie look like when they discovered it's all a cruel cosmic joke and yet they live? When your desire to live, to survive, to exist surpasses your actual love for it? Unwilling to die, you might find yourself performing as if you're still alive when in reality and in the case of vampires, both in the physical and the metaphysical sense you are dead. It’s a fascinating approach that Cruise conveys intelligently. There's no sense of that quality yet in the performance given by Sam Reid (and that is in no way to say that it is a lacking but to state the difference) whether the idea is that being young there was still a certain verve and a certain lust for life in him even as he struggles with some of his own philosophical questions, or just something entirely different- there's no deadness in him, he's too an emotive actor for that, so he plays something more suited to what he brings. When Reid utters the line “You are a killer Louie” it is a deeply impassioned plea to understand him from a teacher who wants his prized pupil to embrace themselves, when Cruise says “you are a killer Louie” it's a callous dead but forceful command half meant to convince himself and re-cert his own faith in his lack of religion as well as to convince Louie to embrace his own new existence. It means “get over the bull**** because I'm not about to step back into doubting my existence for you”. Cruise imbues Lestat with the same qualities that he imbued his character in the Fourth of July, with the same quality that he imbued his character in “A few Good Men”, with the same quality he imbues his character in “Top Gun”, and in “The Firm”; the quality of the unwavering, unmovable, person who has found a quality of life in giving themselves over to a larger idea, concept, institution. Believers believe because they need something to believe in. For Lestat it's in vampirism, in order to continue going one has to convince himself of the need to exist as he exists. So his rationalization of killing follows. Cruise's delivery of it is that of a person who's rehearsed it for years, centuries maybe, in order to believe it and now that belief is as sturdy as time. It is said matter of fact with no determinable emotion behind it as a lot of lines by Cruise are in this film. The great tragedy of the story is that Lestat cannot convince the man he loves of the value of the gift or even if it being a gift the way he has convinced himself and yet Louie's melancholy rejection barely grazes him overall even while the rejection itself deeply affects Lestat. Cruise's feels a lot more low decadent a performance than Reid's high version. It's a lot more ornate, the flourishes in comedic tone far surpass anything done on the latest iteration, it's much more fun an interpretation than is the more sober version we get now where Lestat feels nearly as melancholy as Louie. You don't see their complete opposite nature as much because they feel a lot more connected to their passions to their ambitions or their lack of and for the show it seems far more interested in the deeper text and world around it as well as the romantic dynamics between the two the writing and the performances …well the cup overfloweth.

But when it comes to honoring Lestat’s overbearing grandiosity. His ornate arrogance, and amusing cruelty, that's all Cruise's version. It could be argued that as good as he is at being strident and cruel, the best parts of Cruise's performance are the moments of humor, especially when he's being mean spirited. A recent video comparison of Cruise's performance to Reid's has garnered plenty of discourse regarding how much better Reid performs the scene where Lestat admonishes Louie for not accepting who he is. Criminally, no one brings up that the context actually changes not only (as I stated earlier) in what the actors are going for but also in what the scene itself is saying and also some of the things that lead up to Lestat admonishing Louie are different. Criminally, no one notices that the way that the video is edited takes out the power or undercuts Cruises performance by cutting the before and after of it, and maybe most criminal, is that in losing both of these things they missed the best part of Cruises performance in that scene and it's not the “You are a killer” it's the whole “why yes it is a coffin” bit that leads up to it and punctuated it after.

It's the brush across the actresses face in tenderness as he says “You're tired” that transitions so smoothly to viciousness as he says “You want to SLEEP” while he violently kicks the coffin top off. Reid's flourish is the way he holds his hand before the line delivery, Cruise's is in the amusing way in which he flips the coffin top (watch his hands ) and the sarcastic bemusement at the fact that he put her in the coffin. The Woman: “ITS A COFFIN!” …Lestat: ”Well so it is, you must be dead!”. Cruise absolutely nails this. It adds layers to the ways in which Lestat has calcified himself against the pain of this world. The dance with Claudias dead mother is another example of this whimsical cruelty Cruise gets so right, but in general when Claudia enters the picture Cruise finds some of his most profound moments in the performance. The dynamic between Claudia and Lestat is the place where the original mined most of its power. Lestat’s deep desire for love and acceptance is revealed here in a collection of smart choices from Cruise that allow us to see the petit flaws and cracks in Lestat’s armor. He paints Lestat as a man who wants so badly to be accepted on the terms he has accepted himself. He does so through dozens of tiny moments and larger ones where he plays and performs cruelty to stave off deep attachment. It's in the way he admonishes her at the piano. It's his response to her rejection of his doll, and in how he responds to her mea culpa both in the beginning of the scene and to his very “end” when Claudia murders him. It's not in the video below but the last turn to Claudia before he bites into those boys to ask if they are on good terms is extremely revealing as to a part of Lestat he likes to pretend doesn't exist….

In the 1994 version there was not anywhere near as much of an interest in that surrounding world of New Orleans. It's politics, it's culture, nor the queer Dynamics between the two characters. As such that film spends a lot more time on the angle of the master and apprentice, the acolyte and the deacon. Cruise's Lestat is giving the same kind of performance a preacher might to convince his audience of the reality of hell to convince his audience of the reality of there being nothing else and no answers, so that this is as good as it gets - and in that role Cruise is as convincing as it gets because Cruise is always as convincing as it gets when it comes to conviction. In the beginning of the film Louie remarks to a man who threatens him with death and then reneges- “You lack the courage of your convictions”. It's very fitting to have an actor as visibly committed and convicted to whatever ideological beliefs he holds to be in a role opposite this character who is in search of someone or something that seems to understand this world. The pull of Interview lies in this minor faustian tragedy, that Louie so hungry for some rhyme or reason to life gives himself over to something he couldn't possibly fathom to find a man who seems as though he has them because he's so sure of himself and everything it seems, because he doesn't lack for conviction and still ends up finding nothing. Cruises performance in its moments of fiery assuredness and fragile unsureity provides much of the tragedy and the melancholy even while being its relief as well. It is Cruise’s fanaticism; that vehement belief in whatever he is doing that sells Lestats self satisfaction, his self indulgence, his indirect self destruction. It sees Lestat as he is to Louie but also how Lestat sees himself, A shrewd manipulator, a philosopher, a man of refinement and luxury, and yes quite matter-of-fact a killer. Much of the critique of Cruise’s performance is really not about whether or not he effectively got Jordans vision across but whether or not he got their vision of Lestat right and this is a common mistake amongst criticism of acting, because many times the two are in alignment and because others its rendered moot by an objective truth (biopics) but it is in the very nature of our jobs as actors that we give ourselves over in service to the script and in service to the directors vision; the director's vision, not our own and if we don't align with that director's vision then we should rightfully be called out for it, but for Neil Jordan’s vision of Lestat in “Interview with a Vampire” Tom Cruise executed it and did it with a certain panache so far missing from any other version of Lestat. Maybe not in complete keeping with what is in the book, or the source material, maybe not in keeping with what others see or found in that material as it pertains to Lestat, but it is clearly in alignment with what Jordan wanted and within the context of what is being asked you can doubt anything and everything else but do not doubt that Cruise was a killer, giving a gleefully killer performance. What Cruise brought was a wild ostentatious sense of grandeur to Lestat, rather than a grounded sense of self that emanates from the latest iteration. He felt like someone who wants to and does stand out in the crowd, someone distanced from humanity, but also still amused by it. Like someone who understand the power of the shadow, but can’t help but to seek out the lights, like a larger than life avatar of other people’s dreams which serves the script well when Christian Slater after hearing all this asks for it anyway, the lure is not vampirism , but Lestat. In short what Tom Cruise brought to Lestat was movie stardom and we haven’t seen the like yet and aren’t likely to.

https://www.departuresblog.com/actors-pov/2022/10/5/lgynhvipeipj4gu52n828zbxcr2lpd

juliezhou · Guru

Interview with the Vampire, his 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s gothic novel, left Jordan with enduring respect for Tom Cruise. “It must have been very difficult for him. The entire world said, ‘You are miscast.’” But the actor’s turn as the cruel, sensualist vampire Lestat eventually won over critics, and the performance was hailed anew upon a rerelease for the film’s 30th anniversary. “He’s a great actor,” says Jordan. “If he says he can do something, he will do it in a way that people will be shocked by. Tom has become the last remaining film star. It’s kind of strange.”

Brad Pitt, who played the sad, soulful vampire Louis, faced different hurdles. Arriving straight after finishing Legends of the Fall, he was exhausted and became more so because filming was at night. “It simply wore him out,” says Jordan. So did the nature of Louis. “Brad’s a very active guy, that was the direction he wanted to go in. The passivity of the character got him down.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jun/13/neil-jordan-tom-cruise-ghost-harvey-weinstein-mona-lisa?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1718251843

juliezhou · Guru

The bite stuff: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and the making of ‘Interview with the Vampire’

As it turns 25, Ed Power looks at how the gothic bonkbuster defied the negative press to become a huge hit that lead stars Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt should be more proud of

Monday 11 November 2019 08:51

It was a dreary November in London and Brad Pitt was tired of hanging upside down. So he called his friend and, later, employer C studio mogul David Geffen. How much would it cost to step away from his commitments and take the next flight home? Geffen smiled like an affable shark. “Forty million,” he replied. This would include the lawsuit that would inevitably come the actor’s way when he walked out on the job. Pitt groaned. But he stayed.

Interview with the Vampire, with a budget of $60m (47m), was one of the biggest productions the then 30-year-old heartthrob had ever taken on. However, the Neil Jordan adaptation of Anne Rice’s bloody bonkbuster, which turns 25 today, was to prove more challenging than Pitt had ever suspected. For the first and last time in his career, he was on the brink of quitting.

Rice and Jordan had collaborated on the script and were determined to do justice to this sprawling tale of a glum bloodsucker (Pitt) unburdening himself to a curious reporter (Christian Slater, a last-minute replacement for the late River Phoenix). And yes, it’s true: to ensure Pitt and his co-star Tom Cruise looked as if they’d been reposing in coffins, they were required to hang upside down for 30 minutes at a time. That was the length required for the blood to drain from their faces and a vampiric pallor to seep through.

It wasn’t just the ridiculous contortions that were getting to Pitt. As vampires cannot abide sunlight, the entire film was assembled at night. During the New Orleans segment of the production, this wasn’t a deal breaker. Sad Brad had zipped around the French Quarter during the day on his motorbike, soaking up the swampy Louisiana rays. Then came winter in London and endless wee hours shoots at Pinewood Studios.

“Six months in the f***ing dark,” Pitt later lamented to Entertainment Weekly. “We got to London, and London was f***ing dark. London was dead of winter. We’re shooting in Pinewood (Studios), which is an old institution C all the James Bond films.

“There are no windows in there. It hasn’t been refabbed in decades. You leave for work in the dark C you go into this cauldron, this mausoleum C and then you come out and it’s dark. I’m telling you, one day it broke me. It was like, ‘Life’s too short for this quality of life’.”

But, while Pitt languished in despair, for Tom Cruise things were looking up. The world’s biggest movie star was delighted to discover that making Interview with the Vampire was considerably more straightforward than the hype that had preceded it. It is easily forgotten today just how much of a phenomenon the Rice novels were through the Eighties and Nineties. She was a sort of sexually overheated JK Rowling, with Cruise’s degenerate character of Lestat de Lioncourt fulfilling the Harry Potter role (Louis was more a Hermione and Ron Weasley rolled into one).

Lestat ostensibly had a supporting part in the film as the vampire whose bite bestows immortality on the perpetually crestfallen Louis. But he was the true rock star in Rice’s universe: a swish European monster modelled on the Dutch actor Rutger Hauer.

Nobody would confuse Tom Cruise for a degenerate Riviera sophisticate C not even on a dimly lit sound-stage outside Slough. And there had been outrage when the all-American flyboy was unveiled in the role.

Front and centre of the backlash was Rice herself. In the months before filming, she undertook a public campaign distancing herself from Cruise. Bad enough that her first preference, Daniel Day-Lewis, had turned down the part, reportedly because he’d had enough of costume drama. The real insult lay in the studio’s refusal to entertain her suggestion of Jeremy Irons and to instead go straight to the star of such baroque epics as Top Gun and ****tail.

Day-Lewis wasn’t the only one to give a polite “fangs but no fangs” to Interview with the Vampire. Ridley Scott and David Cronenberg were approached with view to directing but politely declined. And so Geffen came knocking on the door of third choice Neil Jordan, whose mastery of the sexually fluid Crying Game was seen as the perfect qualification for wrangling randy vampires.

All of this was breathlessly reported in the press, leading to mutterings that the project was doomed before it even began. So by the time Cruise and Pitt got to London, the former was simply glad to be working. In the isolation of Pinewood, he no longer had to deal with pitch-fork wielding fans demanding he be replaced.

The outcry had stunned him, without question. Cruise has rarely deviated from his public persona of chipper A-type. Yet the pushback to his Lestat casting came as a jolt, as he openly admitted at the time.

“When it first hit, it really hurt my feelings, to be candid about it,” he told Esquire. “Her [Rice’s] venom hurt… You don’t usually start a movie with someone not wanting you to do it. That’s unusual.”

David Geffen, who had campaigned for years to bring the novel to the screen, had led the counter-offensive against Rice. “Anne is a difficult woman at best, and what her motives are remains somewhat beyond me,” he said. “But for her to attack this movie for her own self-importance, when she has been paid $2m (1.5m) [in rights] and stands to make a lot more money selling her books, is just capricious. It lacks kindness. It lacks discretion. And it lacks professionalism.”

In Rice’s defence, Tom Cruise playing a decadent Euro-trash vampire was at the time generally received as one of the mis-castings of the century. How wrong she and we all were. Twenty-five years on, Interview with the Vampire is an indisputable hoot.

Yes, the plot is all over the place. We join Pitt’s miserable Louis as he recounts to Slater’s interviewer his tragic progress from the realm of the living to the undead in 18th-century Louisiana, and the endless decades he since spent wandering the earth. It isn’t much of a story, more a sequence of loosely interconnected set-pieces.

Louis is bitten by Lestat, who asks whether he wishes to die or become a vampire. In a pathetic attempt to bring meaning to their hollow lives, they “adopt” 11-year -old-vampire Claudia (Kirsten Dunst in her first screen performance). Later, the unhappy family is split violently apart and there is a run-in in Paris with Antonio Banderas’s A-typer vamp, Armand.

Louis stumbles through it all passively and glumly. You can see genuine horror in Pitt’s eyes as he is forced to deliver his lines in a cadaverous monotone, so that he sounds like a Sisters Of Mercy fan desperately needing a decent night’s sleep.

Yet Interview with the Vampire is also gloriously barking and that’s largely due to Cruise’s wild performance. You truly would have to be as dead inside as Louis is to not enjoy a film that culminates with Tom Cruise in a vampire wig ripping Christian Slater’s throat out and driving into the night to the strains of Guns N’ Roses covering “Sympathy for the Devil”. It is one of the ultimate Cruise moments.

Rice was the first to recognise the error of her ways. The instant she clapped eyes on Cruise as Lestat she saw the light. Later, she even took out ads in the Hollywood trade magazines acknowledging her error. But if she had taken the film incredibly personally, it was for understandable reasons. Rice had started the novel in 1973 from the bottom of an ocean of grief following the death of her five-year-old daughter from leukaemia.

It would spawn endless fan fiction, which is appropriate as, in a way, Rice was writing a fan fiction version of her own life. Louis and Claudia were her and her daughter. In truth, though, the popularity of the book owed less to its autobiographical ache than to the homo-erotic pulsations between Louis and Lestat.

Vampirism has long been served as metaphor for all sorts of forbidden passions. Rice amped the subtext all the way up. This carried through to the movie: there’s a weird charge as Cruise, as Lestat, begins nibbling on Pitt’s neck and offers to either end his suffering or sweep Louis away to life everlasting. He does so both tenderly and ravenously.

Rice was, however, a canny business person as well as heartbroken author. The novel was optioned before publication, but languished for decades. Her suspicion was that the erotic tingle between Lestat and Louis was putting producers off. So she suggested gender-flipping either or both characters.

Cher and Anjelica Houston were her suggestions for the Louis part. But when Geffen asked her to write the screenplay, she instead settled on giving Louis a wife, to make clear his heterosexuality.

Oddly, her radical changes were met with resistance. Geffen and Jordan wanted to be more, not less, faithful to the novel. In the end, Jordan re-wrote Rice’s re-write, putting back in chunks of the book (and was miffed subsequently not to receive a screenwriting credit). He had restored, he said, “the little girl, and the blood, and the sex”.

He wasn’t the only one who seemed to understand, almost better than Rice, where the appeal of Interview with the Vampire lay. It was Cruise who understood that although Lestat was in many ways the villain of the piece C unlike the guilt-ridden Louis, he preys with impunity on humans C the character did not perceive his actions in those terms. Asked how it felt to play a bad guy for the first time, Cruise would shake his head. Lestat saw himself as the hero C saviour to Louis and protector of their “daughter” Claudia. It’s one of his smartest performances.

“I used the book as a reference for me,” Cruise said. “You have to read [it]... very carefully to find the clues to who Lestat is… his loneliness and his personal struggle. He recognises that Louis is a unique being. Lestat gives him the choice: that’s something I felt very strongly about. He’s really asking Louis, ‘Do you still want to die.. ?’”

Outside Rice’s considerable fanbase, nobody quite knew what to make of Interview with the Vampire when it flapped its way to cinemas on 11 November 1994 (it would reach the UK the following January). The era of the all-conquering franchises was still decades away. So the film was received as a curio, albeit a sumptuous one starring Hollywood’s two biggest male leads.

Still, the murmurings were generally positive. It was bonkers C but it felt like the right sort of bonkers. “Interview with the Vampire promises a constantly surprising vampire story, and it keeps that promise,” said The New York Times. Rice loved it too. “I was lucky I had Neil Jordan, and the movie was incredibly faithful to the book.”

It was a decent-sized hit, to boot. The film grossed $224m (175m) globally on its $60m (47m) budget. Still, the lingering perception was that everyone involved was slumming it slightly. Pitt, as fast as his little A-lister legs would carry him, fled London to make Seven with David Fincher. Tom Cruise sought reinvention as an action hero in the original Mission: Impossible. By unspoken agreement, neither ever mentioned Interview with the Vampire again. Figuratively, they tossed it in a coffin and bunged it in a hole.

And yet, a quarter of a century on, it glitters gaudily in both their CVs. The film is ridiculous but such a blast. It furthermore functions as ghostly foreshadowing of the superhero craze. Here are two of the great idols of the age giving themselves utterly, without irony, to a tale of caped weirdos defying the laws of the universe. They should be prouder of it and of the splash it created.

“Vampires are metaphors for all the uneasiness we have about other things,” Jordan pondered later. “The week this movie opened there were about 40 people across the United States who cut somebody else and drank their blood. They seem to believe in them.”

“Cruise gave Lestat life,” says Erin Chapman, of the Vampire Studies Association, which has at its mission to “establish vampire studies as a multidisciplinary field by promoting, disseminating and publishing contributions to vampire scholarship”.

“Lestat comes across as evil, but you get small glimpses of humanity, protruding from his dark soul. He seeks companionship and who wouldn’t after centuries of existence?… The movie encompasses general themes of the book such as good versus evil, love and immortality, and intertwines it all with a supernatural world. Despite the main characters being vampires, they just want what humans want C to be loved.“

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/interview-with-the-vampire-25-tom-cruise-brad-pitt-ann-rice-kirsten-dunst-interview-a9192186.html