In 1976, Anne Rice published Interview with the vampire and, with it, marked the path that an entire genre would follow. With his stories – the series of novels The Vampire Diaries had 13 installments, the last one in 2018—, changed the paradigm of those monsters that they had in the Dracula Bram Stoker’s great literary reference to bring the reader closer to his desires and passions, that is, to bring us closer to what unites us to vampires. The story of the bloodsucker Lestat de Lioncourt and his victim, adventure partner and lover Louis de Pointe du Lac is set in New Orleans (the writer’s hometown) at the beginning of the 18th century, in a gothic and decadent atmosphere. These elements are recovered, with some touches, in the television series Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice, which premieres this Thursday the 12th on AMC+.
The title, which includes the name of the writer, gives a clue about one of the keys to the television adaptation: the goal is to recover the essence of the books and break away from the 1994 film version directed by Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise (the vampire) and Brad Pitt (his victim). Rolin Jones, head of the television version, sees the film as a time capsule that reflects the moment in which it was released. “The film is as 1994 as you can get. One of the things AMC asked for was that they didn’t want a remakethey didn’t want a six-hour film. We wanted to go back to the books, and that led us to do something very different,” he explained to EL PAÍS in a video call interview in mid-December.
In the series, Louis de Pointe du Lac tells his story, for the second time (after a failed first interview in the 1970s), to a journalist in the post-pandemic United States of 2022. “The easy metaphor is that we were all locked up in our houses as if we were in our coffins, all thinking about mortality more than usual because we lost a lot of people on the planet… But we didn’t want to give too much weight to that, we just wanted that, if someone sees the series in 20 years, they will find something in the plot about what surrounds us. But it does add something related to the tone, more reflective. Louis and Daniel (the journalist) begin to think about what went wrong in that first interview, in the 1970s, and they come back older and wiser, as has happened to all of us after the pandemic,” explains the scriptwriter and producer of the series.
Any audiovisual adaptation of literary material involves changes as it moves from one medium to another. But to remain as faithful as possible to the books, the scriptwriters tried to respect the literary style in which the characters express themselves, with grandiloquent and elevated language. Then, explains Jones, they needed actors who could say the dialogues without sounding strange. The chosen ones were Jacob Anderson (Game of Thrones) and Sam Reid (The Newsreader).
As for the changes, one of them was to set the main story at the beginning of the 20th century. Another is in the character of Lestat, for whom they took traits that appear in books other than the first one. “If you read the novels, in the first one he is not charming at all, he is quite detestable, but that is not where Anne (Rice) wants to go. The good thing is that we can have all the material on the character and not just his first novel,” says the scriptwriter, whose previous television work was another adaptation of literary material that already had an audiovisual version, Perry Mason (HBO Max).
Louis of Pointe du Lac hasn’t been spared from the original, either. “To be honest, it’s 2023, and no one wants to watch the story of a grieving plantation owner,” Jones explains. His protagonist is looking to escape a tedious existence and accepts the seductive offer of a man he meets in the New Orleans nightclubs and is hopelessly attracted to. The fact that Louis is now black adds another difference from the original. “That decision is really purely for practical reasons. AMC wants to do ten seasons, and at the center of it is this couple who, at that point, are wildly attracted to each other but are not made for a long-term relationship. So what we do is introduce as much conflict and internal tension as we can so we have enough to play with. Lestat doesn’t understand that turning someone into a vampire in the early 20th century, especially a black man, is going to change everything. But for us that added dramatic possibilities. Plus, it’s Louisiana, there are a lot of black people.”
The setting of the story remains unchanged, even though they have jumped back in time from the original 18th century. To differentiate themselves from the film, they looked for the next historical moment that would appeal to them within New Orleans. And, as Jones says, “the biggest feast for the senses is when jazz comes.” That, at the beginning of the 20th century, is where he places the main plot. “In a country as puritanical as this, that was a brief period when we had a red light district,” he adds. The city also allowed them to delve into Creole culture and maintain an aesthetic in keeping with the Gothic style of the novel that would envelop the love story between the two immortal protagonists.
Attraction to vampires
It has been almost half a century since the publication of Interview with the vampirebut its characters, its aesthetic and its universe still resonate in the present. What is it about Anne Rice’s novels that makes their story still appealing today? “I don’t know, ask the people who make a new Spider-Man every seven years. Or you go to the British theatre and you have a King Lear “Every season. I think AMC is trying to say with this production that there are a number of books that have a huge fan base but maybe have been left behind. They think they really have literary stature and weight. And why vampires? They are the sexiest monsters, the ones that can most easily move into our world and live among us. They are violent, a predatory species, and they have this primal urge that we all have and do our best to repress, but they can live freely. There is something recognizable about them.”
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