Interview with the Vampire, 1994.
Directed by Neil Jordan.
Starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas, Kirsten Dunst, Thandiwe Newton, Stephen Rea, and Roger Lloyd Pack.
SYNOPSIS:
A vampire tells his epic life story: love, betrayal, loneliness, and hunger.
Given that the basic principle of 4K UHD is blacker blacks and whiter whites there are certain movies that feel ready-made for the format, and Neil Jordan’s 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s Gothic novel Interview with the Vampire is one such movie that, thankfully, Warner Bros. have now seen fit to resurrect, but was the wait worth it?
The movie begins in (then) present day San Francisco where journalist Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater) is listening to Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt) tell the story of his life. Why is this significant? Because Louis claims he is a vampire, and after an initial dismissal by Molloy he starts to tell a story that begins in New Orleans in 1791, when Louis was human and owned a plantation but had recently lost his wife and child to disease. Getting into drunken disputes due to his grief, Louis welcomes death and when it arrives it arrives in the form of Lestat de Lioncourt (Tom Cruise), a vampire who offers Louis the choice of permanent death or a rebirth as an immortal. Obviously, he takes the latter option.
However, Louis is not quite as taken with the vampire lifestyle as Lestat, who revels in being a monster, albeit one with a taste for the finer things. Louis refuses to kill humans, instead getting his blood supply from rats and other animals, which amuses Lestat at first but as the years go on it wears away at him and so he turns Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), a young child who lost her mother to the plague and was left for dead by Louis, into a vampire as a companion for Louis and a student for himself. The trouble is, as Claudia matures psychologically, she is still trapped in the body of a pre-teen girl and this causes further friction between them all, resulting in Claudia and Louis attacking Lestat in a bid to escape his influence.
Believing Lestat to be dead, Louis and Claudia leave America and travel to Europe in search of other vampires in order to try and make sense of their nocturnal existence, and when in Paris they meet Armand (Antonio Banderas), the leader of a vampire coven disguised as theatre performers and the oldest living vampire, but things take a sinister turn when their past actions threaten to destroy them.
By 1994 the Gothic vampire movie had been in limbo for quite some time, and more contemporary hits like The Lost Boys and Fright Night were nearly a decade old, so resurrecting the style was a bit of a gamble in a decade that was in the throes of rejecting a lot of pop culture seen as old-fashioned and out of step with modern audiences. That said, Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles series – of which Interview with the Vampire was the first book – had proved to be popular so why not bring the style back with a modern 1990s sheen to it?
And that is exactly what they did, but there were a few controversies about casting, the main gripe being Tom Cruise in the role of Lestat. At the time Cruise was two years away from the first Mission: Impossible movie and was a star but not really considered an actor’s actor. Rice herself had wanted Julian Sands to play the vampire, and it isn’t hard to imagine given how the character was written and Sands’ screen persona, but he wasn’t a big enough name to have on the poster so Cruise it was, and when paired up with Brad Pitt as Louis there seemed to be a more than a smidgeon of snobbery about who the movie was aimed at, given both actors’ pin-up status at the time – just imagine if social media had been a thing then!
But the proof was in the final product, and once audiences had seen the movie it changed a few minds, with Anne Rice going so far as to contact Tom Cruise personally to congratulate him on his performance. So, back in 1994 Interview with the Vampire was a critical and commercial hit, the lush Gothic set dressings and depictions of vampires as dandies flouncing their way through the centuries mixed with eroticism and high-end special effects putting a full stop on Gothic vampire movies and also pointing the way for where vampire cinema would go, but over 30 years later does it still hold up?
That would be a resounding yes, as Interview with the Vampire hits 4K UHD like it owns the format. It is often said that a 4K movie will only look as good as the materials it was shot on, and you can tell that this movie was made with passion and quality. Director Neil Jordan had impressed audiences back in 1985 with his fairy tale werewolf fantasy The Company of Wolves, so he was clearly the right man for the job of bringing Anne Rice’s night time world to life on film and this 4K presentation is faultless in how it mixes light and dark with razor-sharp detail.
In the special features there is a new interview with Neil Jordan and editor Mick Audsley talking about the cinematography and how they and director of photography Philippe Rousselot captured the Gothic atmosphere throughout the film, and once you hear them talk about the nuances and how they achieved certain things you notice it in the movie a lot more. Small details such as there only being a couple of daylight shots with the rest of the film being shot at night, which offered up challenges on how to light characters and sets, are more obvious once they are pointed out and this new remaster manages to recreate what they saw through their camera lenses without any obvious crushing or noise compression, creating an image that is as black as can be whilst still allowing the immaculate set dressings, costumes and makeup to be visible, and when Louis and Claudia get to Paris the visuals step up a gear as the costumes are finer and everything is lit by fire, all looking completely natural and without any tinkering. Truly, this new remaster is like watching the movie with fresh eyes.
Obviously, mainstream Hollywood wasn’t quite ready for the homosexual subtexts and themes in Anne Rice’s original writing in 1994 – let alone having two men played by A-list actors in love with each other and raising a daughter, which is what the imagery represents, even if the script does not always acknowledge it with full confidence – but given how relatively permissive society has become on these issues the movie feels more relevant if you want to view it that way, but if you don’t you can take it at face value and still appreciate a masterful adaptation of a book that was not that easy of a story to put on the screen with a sensible running time.
Interview with the Vampire has risen from the grave with gorgeous visuals, a rich Dolby Atmos audio track and all the old extras ported over with a couple of new featurettes, making this an essential purchase for fans and anyone looking to show off what a decent 4K upgrade can do for an older movie.
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Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
