14/09/2026
I can admit now that it's a good film, even if it's not the film I wanted at the time. That took about thirty years to not feel like a contradiction.
See, a few years before the movie, I was going through a phase that involved a lot of black clothes, hair dye and Doc Martens. So of course I'd read all of the Vampire Chronicles up to that point. That also means I went into this film with a fully formed version of it already living in my head. The melancholy of Louis' condition was fully rendered in the dark baroque register that my then-twenty-year-old brain borrowed from The Hunger and probably too much Sisters of Mercy.
I came out of the moving thinking it felt like a Merchant Ivory production with fangs. It was tasteful and beautifully lit, with Brad Pitt doing his doe eyed thing, and Tom Cruise. And I want to be careful here because this is less a criticism and more an observation, Tom Cruise doesn't disappear into roles. Roles disappear into him. He's one of the most watchable presences in the history of cinema and he's been that exact presence in every single film he's ever made, which means Interview with the Vampire is essentially a movie about a vampire who looks and acts like Tom Cruise. If he'd managed another register, that might have been more interesting for me back then. However in the Enlightenment era Louisiana of Anne Rice, it just felt like someone had brought schnapps to to a w**e tasting.
I filed it under: worthy mainstream product and moved on. Which is what you do at twenty when your taste is the most important thing about you.
Anne Rice herself had publicly campaigned against the Cruise casting before the film came out, she appeared at fan boycott events, and even took out an eight-page ad in Variety. She said Cruise as Lestat was like casting Edward G. Robinson as Rhett Butler. I mean, ouch, but ok. Then she saw the film, called Cruise personally to apologize, and published a lengthy piece describing his performance as dazzling. Rice's original dream casting had been Rutger Hauer, who was probably too old by then.
I still don't love the film, but I like it a lot, and I've made a kind of peace with it as a historical document of the times. You get prime Christian Slater doing his thing in a thankless framing role, Pitt as the up-and-comer who'd be untouchable within a couple of of years, Cruise as the seasoned professional delivering exactly what he always delivers, which is a performance of complete conviction that is unmistakably him. And it's grown on me over the years, There's no reason a vampire can't act like Ton Cruise. Kirsten Dunst, however, was twelve years old and terrifying. She walked away with this movie, even a few years later watching Bring It On, she still kind of scared me.
And even with the production design being genuinely gorgeous, director Neil Jordan made some deliberate choices that I disagreed with, and still do, but I can now see them as subjective choices rather than failures because it didn't live up to the version I'd already filmed in my head. With River Phoenix as Louis and Viggo Mortensen as Lestat.
The movie I wanted was more genuinely gothic, less interested in being pretty and accessible, something that pushed the melancholy over the melodrama. Jordan's film seemed intent on launching a franchise around Lestat while Louis' story kept insisting on being the actual subject, which is a tension that runs through the novel and probably explains why the book sequel took ten years and went in a completely different direction. The film too never decides on who the main character is. Mostly. And probably by design.
I've come around on it, in the way you come around on something when enough time passes that you can separate it from the person you were when you first saw it. He wanted Jim Jarmusch by way of Abel Ferrara. He wanted Nadja, The Addiction and Only Lovers Left Alive, and lucky him, he eventually got those films.
But my leather-jacket-and-Doc-Martens self was never going to appreciate this one, not back then. And that's fine. Every film is the right movie at the right time for somebody, somewhere.
This one just wasn't mine, and I held that against it a lot longer than was reasonable.
-Pop
