A young man sets up a tape recorder in a shabby San Francisco room, and across from him a pale, beautiful stranger begins to talk. What follows is not a horror story so much as a confession — two centuries of guilt, hunger and grief, recounted by a creature who has had far too long to think about all of it.

Interview with the Vampire is Neil Jordan‘s lavish, melancholy adaptation of Anne Rice‘s celebrated novel, and its great gamble is tone. Where the genre usually reaches for shock, Jordan reaches for sorrow. The vampire here is less a monster than a mirror — a figure who forces a simple, unsettling question: what would any of us become if consequence were removed and time refused to end?

A confession, not a horror story

The story belongs to Louis de Pointe du Lac, a Louisiana plantation owner ruined by grief and turned, almost on a whim, by the magnetic and remorseless Lestat de Lioncourt. Brad Pitt plays Louis as a study in paralysis — a vampire who cannot kill without anguish, who narrates his own damnation with the weariness of a man who has told this story many times before. Critics on release found him passive; they were not wrong, but they missed the point. Louis’s inability to enjoy what he is, is the film’s true subject.

Beside him, Tom Cruise’s Lestat is an act of controlled flamboyance — cruel, witty, possessive and strangely seductive. Cast against type and doubted loudly before release, Cruise understood that Lestat is above all a performer, a creature who has made an aesthetic project of his own cruelty, and commits to that reading without a flicker of doubt. Anne Rice, his fiercest early critic, recanted in print once she had seen the film.

Claudia, and the cruelty of stopped time

The film’s most daring stroke is Claudia, the child vampire played by an eleven-year-old Kirsten Dunst in a performance of disquieting maturity. Turned as a girl and forever denied the body of a woman, Claudia embodies the film’s darkest idea: that immortality is not a gift but a sentence, and that some sentences are crueller than others. Dunst is extraordinary — watchful, furious, heartbroken — and her scenes with Pitt carry an emotional charge the more operatic passages sometimes lack.

Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire (1994) — Interview with the Vampire (1994), directed by Neil Jordan.

Three cities, one guilty conscience

Jordan and cinematographer Philippe Rousselot render three centuries and two continents — plantation Louisiana, candlelit Paris, foggy modern San Francisco — with equal beauty and equal menace. The film is visually ravishing without ever turning merely decorative; Dante Ferretti’s interiors feel less like sets than like the physical shape of Louis’s guilt. Elliot Goldenthal’s score, by turns operatic and eerily delicate, is among the finest of its decade.

It is not flawless. The Paris sequences, where Antonio Banderas’s ancient Armand promises depths the film never quite plumbs, lose some momentum, and the final act struggles to end something this large and this mournful. But these are the problems of ambition, always preferable to the problems of mediocrity.

Why it still earns the score

What endures, three decades on, is the film’s refusal of easy horror. Jordan is not interested in the vampire as a thing that jumps out of the dark; he is interested in the vampire as a question we would rather not answer. The reply Interview with the Vampire arrives at is not reassuring — but then, the best of the genre never is. It remains the most beautiful, and the most genuinely sad, of all the screen adaptations of Anne Rice.

Interview with the Vampire premiered in November 1994, directed by Neil Jordan from Anne Rice’s own screenplay, adapted from her 1976 novel. Philippe Rousselot photographed it and Elliot Goldenthal scored it; Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater and Stephen Rea head the cast. It opened at number one in the United States and remains, thirty years later, the definitive Anne Rice film.

Tags: tom cruise, brad pitt, Antonio Banderas, Kirsten Dunst