Neil Jordan Bites the Big One

That's a pretty gentlemanly response to someone who's been going for your jugular for reasons that seem to be mostly about ego. Screw the garlic and crucifixes--I'd have gone looking for Rice with a big wooden stake. But according to Jordan, he had a much more effective weapon at his disposal: Cruise, he says, has given "the performance of a lifetime." Is this just hype? Hard to say, but Jordan seems sincerely enthusiastic. If Cruise's roles suggest a limited range, Jordan says, "That's the system--it's not Tom. He can take on any number of roles. He's only limited by the fact that he's a star. I've never worked with a better or more willing actor. He gives every possible thing to a role." Jordan's praise is, in fact, backed up by early word that Cruise has delivered the goods as Lestat, which prompts Jordan to let fly with another press-release-worthy gem: "It was alarming at the time, but the scrutiny has created an expectation for the film, and I'm thrilled that it's so eagerly awaited."

Jordan got the thrilling opportunity because of a cardinal rule of the Hollywood game: you're as big as your last picture. His last, The Crying Game, was one of the largest moneymaking European imports ever. Stateside, it was also a critical and industry hit, bringing him an Oscar nomination for Best Director and a win for Best Screenplay. If you're a foreign filmmaker and the Academy starts voting for you, it means one of two things: either you're near death, or they're inviting you to come and play. By the time Jordan picked up his statue, the offers were pouring in. He chose David Geffen and his vampires, even though he hadn't read Rice's book. "I knew it by reputation. Then [Geffen] rang me. I read it on a plane to France and was totally fascinated. I could see very clearly how to do it." Geffen was reportedly a big fan of The Crying Game, and Jordan says, "He just said, 'I like your work. Do you want to make the book?' I said, 'Yeah, as long as I can write my own draft of the screenplay.' He said, 'Go ahead and do it.' I said, 'Look, I'll have a script to you in six weeks.' I just sat down and didn't get up until it was finished, really."

What Jordan wanted was to head off in a very different direction from Rice, who had written her own drafts of the script. Although Rice has said that the power of vampire literature lies in "the fathomless well of metaphor," Jordan opines that good movies aren't found at the bottom of fathomless wells. "I think the reason [writing the script] defeated so many people is that they tried to treat it as a metaphor for A, B, C and D, and they avoided the center of it. The most interesting thing to me was just to tell the story.

"The central theme of [the story]," explains Jordan, "is Louis [played in the film by Brad Pitt], who makes this Faustian choice--he decides to give up his mortal life for some other kind of survival, but realizes he's beyond the realm of human feeling. It's a very old theme--_Paradise Lost_, which I read as a kid. The whole position of Lucifer in that story, the way he was thrown out of heaven and denied any contact with the face of God, that's what happens to Louis. It's a common kind of metaphor in literature." The mysterious power of love, sex and death--but not necessarily in that order--is an ongoing theme in Rice's writing, but Jordan says that he got hooked on the family angle of Interview. "They're a very dysfunctional family, on an extreme scale. Lestat's kind of the abusive father. Claudia's the suffering sibling." Indeed, this family bickers and battles through the centuries, like some kind of eternal after-dark soap opera.

Despite Jordan's focus on the piece's family values, as it were, he has by no means backed away from the tale's heat. "The eroticism of the book was of tremendous interest to me. The combination of cruelty and eroticism and the whole idea of giving up your soul--giving up your life. It's a very pleasurable kind of experience."

This kind of stuff, after all, is prime Jordan territory. Consider the warped relationships, sexual tension and weird twists that drive his other films. In the freaky Freudian fairy tale The Company of Wolves, a Polanskibait nymphet falls in love with a man who turns out to be a wolf. In The Miracle, a teenage boy lusts after a mystery woman who turns out to be his mum. In Mona Lisa, a cockney chauffeur loves a dark, sexy prostitute who loves a young girl. In The Crying Game, Jordan's hero falls for another tall, dark sexy thing who is nothing like she seems. Interview, Jordan says, is a worthy successor. "They're all of the same genre, the same world in a way. It's hard to say more, really. I suppose I like to eroticize things I look at. I like to photograph things in a very sensual way and see the world in a sensual light."

Given that, I'm not surprised to hear him refute the persistent rumor that he neutered Interview's eroticism, particularly the sexual longing between Brad Pitt's character Louis, and Cruise's character, Lestat, to suit Cruise's all-American hero image. "I think Anne's script was more afraid of her book in many ways than the script I wrote," he counters.

"Maybe she felt that in order to get the movie made she had to eliminate certain aspects or tone them down. But I just wrote it plain and simple as I saw the book.That's the thing--" he continues, getting a bit riled. "Everyone's saying they're taking out the homo-erotic aspects, this and that. You know, it's not a matter of homoeroticism. These vampires don't have sex, pure and simple. And once you eliminate the sexual act, everything becomes erotic. Every desire for another human being--every contact--becomes an erotic possibility. Every life to them is desirable, whether it's male or female or whatever." In other words, there were no elements of the story that he, Geffen, Cruise or the studio were afraid of? "No," he says flatly.

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