UNDEADS REFLECTIONS

NEIL JORDAN ON BRINGING ANNE RICE'S MODERN VAMPIRE CLASSIC TO SCREEN, 30 YEARS ON

- CLARISSE LOUGHREY

YOU ASK YOURSELF THE QUESTION: what would it be like, if you were stuck living forever?” Interview With The Vampire’s director Neil Jordan says. “What would it be like, if life were a passage of days that were the same, the same, the same, the same? The fashions change. The cities change. The technology changes, yet you remain the same? That, to me, was a great question.”

Time moves on, yet film lives immortal. And, as Jordan’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s genre-quake of a vampire novel reaches its thirtieth anniversary, he’s reflected back on his career’s work in a new memoir, titled Amnesiac. It’s an alluring, unconventional approach to autobiography, that considers the slipperiness of one’s own memories.

Jordan follows his childhood in north Dublin, surrounded by both faith and superstition, through to his work with John Boorman on Excalibur, and onto the films he both directed and frequently wrote. Several waltzed with the supernatural: his most famous, Interview With The Vampire (1994), alongside The Company Of Wolves (1984), High Spirits (1988) and Byzantium (2012).

Two chapters are dedicated to Interview With The Vampire, in which Jordan details the fraught but liberating experience of a film “made in an insane glare of publicity”. Chief among them is the casting of Tom Cruise as the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, who unexpectedly descends into the life of Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt), a wealthy widower in 1791 Louisiana. Lestat can feel his sorrow. One bite and Louis will be forever freed from the prison of mortality. It’s an offer he comes to regret almost as soon as he accepts it.