Is there any way to satisfy audiences who've been waiting years for the movie version of Anne Rice's novel Interview With the Vampire? Writer-director Neil Jordan thinks so, and he has some surprises in store--like his notion that the vampires are just another "dysfunctional family."
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Neil Jordan is in pain. I think it's his neck. The Irish filmmaker pulls himself wearily from the couch and tries to get the kinks out, but it's a lost cause. After a year and a half of work on Interview With the Vampire, Jordan looks in need of a full body rubdown and a couple of weeks on some island--like, maybe, Ireland. Can you blame him? The director of small independent films like Mona Lisa and The Crying Game, Jordan is now playing in a very different league. Interview, based on Anne Rice's morbidly hip modern gothic novel, is a $50 million Warner Bros. production starring Tom Cruise, one of the most eagerly awaited and controversial films of the year--a fact not lost on the filmmaker. "It's all work over here, isn't it?" he sighs, padding across the carpet barefoot to find his smokes. If directing Interview has thrust this quiet movelist-turned-moviemaker deep into the machinery of the high-stakes Hollywood game, he's there by choice. Despite his low-key demeanor, Jordan is an ambitious savvy guy who knows very well the benefits a European filmmaker might gain by succeeding here.
Sure, a betting man might not might have picked Jordan for the job after looking at the stats, which say Jordan's two previous films for Hollywood studios-- We're No Angels and High Spirits--were both bombs. But Interview co-executive producer and major player David Geffen presumably saw more than just the numbers when he offered the job to Jordan, who, it turns out, not only knows all about the game, but has some definite ideas about how to play to win.
Having spent the last several days in Los Angeles screening the results for Geffen, Warners, et al., Jordan admits, "I'm exhausted." It must have been a nerve-racking week for him, I suggest sympathetically, but he's suddenly on guard, as though I've suggested that the film has somehow slipped out of his grasp. "No, not really nerve-racking," he says carefully. "Just tiring. The support we get from the studio is very good, and they obviously love the movie." Though nothing is obvious about this film, given its twisted 17-year path to the screen--during which time everyone from Sting to Cher was said to want the leading role--Jordan's too smart to be anything other than extremely upbeat on the record. He's clearly had enough, thank you, of the bad press that has dogged this film from the beginning of production, most of it centered around author Rice's claim that Tom Cruise was all wrong to play Lestat, the head vampire.
"I mean, people do like to make a fuss, don't they?" Jordan says about the intense media scrutiny. "We made the film, didn't say anything, and the fuss just grew and grew and grew." And how. Jordan and the producers decided to run a closed set--no journalists allowed--but that didn't thwart such cloak-and-dagger antics as TV tabloid video cameras poised on rooftops, seeking out Cruise in vampire drag. Meanwhile, Rice and her readers were screaming for a boycott of a film that hadn't even been shot yet. It's the latest movie to test that old Hollywood saw which goes, "Any publicity is good publicity."
Just how much of all this was a shock to Jordan? "I've never had to confront it before," he replies. "It was quite extraordinary." Though he remarks, "We were a bit removed, working down in New Orleans and then in London and Paris and San Francisco," he concedes that the effects of all the Cruise condemnation did filter through to the star himself. "It wasn't easy for him with all this public stuff. It was hurtful, very hurtful." From the melancholy tone of Jordan's reply, it seems clear that Rice has pushed this man too far. At one time, they were mutual fans. And now? "I haven't spoken to her since all that started," he says. "I don't think [what she did] was appropriate. It's an unkind thing to do, really. You're talking about hard-working people, human beings, aren't you? And it's not fair--you can say things to people's faces but not to the press ... I didn't consciously reject her. I just thought, well, I'll make the movie and [complete] it and see her when it's finished."
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.
Francis Coppola's 1992 Brain Stoker's Dracula, clearly influenced by Rice's vampiric writings, was a hit whose success had at least something to do with Geffen's own big-budget vampire movie finally getting launched. Interview will no doubt be compared with Dracula, but Jordan says he's not worried. "The attraction and I think the beauty of Anne's book is that it comes at the genre from a totally different point of view--the perspective of the vampires themselves."
Capturing that perspective on film turned out to be quite a challenge. "The film was on a huge scale. One of the principal problems was that the whole thing happened at night. We were down in New Orleans, building these massive sets and working at night for 16 to 20 weeks. To convey any of the largeness of the landscape at night was a nightmare in more senses than one." Special effects maestro Stan Winston created the vampire transformations and handled some of the other technical wizardry, but Jordan, with Hollywood cash to spend, was able to indulge himself with the kind of computer effects that didn't exist when he made his low-budget horror fantasy The Company of Wolves. "What would have once been old-fashioned blue screen and matting techniques are now all sorts of digital computer-generated images," he says. "We were designing shots a lot of which had never really been done before. Major portions of the screen are still waiting to be filled in. So we'll see ... My ambition was to take advantage of all the techniques that are available now. I found it quite fun."
If it's strange to hear Jordan talk like a graduate of the James Cameron School of Techno-filmmaking, perhaps that's only because he hasn't had the chance before to try his hand at this type of film. "I've always said that European filmmakers are constantly working in miniature. But you don't always want to be like that. You want to have big resources. One wants to be able to re-create Paris in the 1800s." He doesn't quite rub his hands gleefully as he says this, but I swear his eyes are shining. It looks like he has seen the light--and all this from a man who once said there was an inherent dignity in being a novelist that he didn't find in filmmaking. "I said that when I was making a few movies when there was an inherent lack of dignity about the whole process," he notes.
Speaking of lack of dignity, Jordan was only a "director-for-hire" on the two earlier Hollywood efforts he's doubtless referring to, High Spirits and We're No Angels. Both comedies were similar in that, in areas like casting, editing and writing, Jordan claims he didn't have final say on them. Just after the release of High Spirits, he noted that the studio never let him edit his own version of the film; now he's more interested in pleading mea culpa and letting the past stay where it is. "I tried to make comedy at one time," he muses, almost sentimentally. "Which was a moment of madness of mine. I shouldn't do comedy. I suppose I shouldn't have made that film."
The most important thing Jordan says he learned from those two films was that he couldn't-- make that won't--work that way again on someone else's movie. "If I'm not allowed to tell the story I want to tell, I want to kill myself, really. Or work on a building site or something. At least I'd be able to finish the building, you know?" On Interview, he insists, he has made the film he wanted to make. But surely he must have had initial fears that this massive project might somehow end up in someone else's hands? "A little bit, yeah. But I discussed this with David [Geffen] and he said, 'Just make the best possible film you can make. I'll protect you and you won't have to suffer interference from anybody.' And he was extraordinarily true to his word. The studio was great as well. When Hollywood works at its best, and you can make a film on a huge, muscular scale--I suppose it's the Holy Grail."
The Holy Grail? Does Jordan see Hollywood filmmaking as a deeply religious experience, despite the fact that he once had to direct De Niro, Demi Moore and Sean Penn in a David Mamet script? No, he's only kidding, having a bit of fun. In fact, Jordan's journey to Hollywood began as more of a fluke than any kind of passionate Holy Grail quest. He was a young novelist with some theater experience when he got a job as a creative consultant on John Boorman's 1981 epic Excalibur--about, yes, King Arthur's search for the Grail. "I was in Ireland. I hadn't gone to film school and hadn't much acquaintance with the medium. John had read my books. I'd written a script for him. He took me on as his assistant, which basically for me was like film school. Otherwise I would not have made films. It's as simple as that." I ask Jordan if he ever contemplates the fact that his career, at this point, has fairly eclipsed Boorman's. "I don't know if I have a career, even," he says, sidestepping my opinion. "I write books and I make films."
Jordan outgrew the Irish filmmaking scene almost immediately when, in 1982, he encountered opposition to his goal of directing his script Angel. Jordan prevailed--he did direct the piece--but he then moved on to England and made The Company of Wolves and Mona Lisa. As Jordan says now, "Ireland can be a very bitchy little place."
At the time of Mona Lisa's release in 1986, Jordan was optimistic about the European filmmaking scene. And why not? At the time, there actually was a European filmmaking scene. He had a close working relationship with Palace Pictures, co-founded by his producer Stephen Woolley, and he saw Hollywood as a land of cynical sequels aimed at teenage boys. But in the eight years since, the European film community has become a wasteland, and the talent is struggling to get out. "The gig is up, basically," Jordan says. "It's a terrible crisis. All the multiplex theaters were only being renovated by American companies. That was the only country that seemed to be investing in cinema-going. You travel in Europe and talk to filmmakers now--it's tragic. I don't think Fellini could get any projects going the last five years of his life."
Palace Pictures went bankrupt during the filming of The Crying Game, and Woolley ended up funding much of the film with his Visa card. So Jordan's current sojourn to Hollywood is as much a practical necessity as anything else. "I suppose I am making stronger relationships over here. In the past I always thought, okay, I'll make Mona Lisa with an English company, get the right distribution deal, make the movie I want to make. If it works in the United States, fine. If it doesn't, no big deal. But [Hollywood] has become the center of the world in terms of financing and all that. There's no escape from Hollywood now no matter where you are in the world."
Jordan is not about to relocate from Ireland permanently, but it seems clear he will be back. "The kind of films that once in a while come out of Hollywood cannot be made anywhere else. If I could work this way in Hollywood again, of course I'd do it. If I can have a relationship with a studio and do my own things, that'd be wonderful."
The ultimate success or failure of Interview will have a lot to do with how easily Jordan slips back and forth between Hollywood and Europe in the future. But the commute, he says, is beginning to make sense for more than just financial reasons. "Four years ago, the thought that a film like The Crying Game, about politics, the politics of sexuality and terrorism, would reach a large audience would have been unthinkable. Things change all the time. You're always surprised, aren't you?"
"I think things are getting a little better [in Hollywood]," he adds. "But I don't live there, so I'm no expert." Maybe not--and maybe he isn't entirely sure he wants to be one--but one day Jordan might be surprised to wake up with no jet lag and no kinks in his neck and find that he is.
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Joshua Mooney interviewed Quentin Tarantino for the August Movieline.