“Drink from me and live forever.” That is the tagline Warner Bros. put on Interview with the Vampire in 1994, and it is a fair summary of what the film offers: a bargain, a warning, and a promise that curdles. Neil Jordan directed it. Anne Rice wrote the screenplay from her own 1976 novel. Tom Cruise plays Lestat, Brad Pitt plays Louis, and the whole thing runs 123 minutes. It is a horror film, a drama, and a fantasy at once, and it is very good at two of those three.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
Louis de Pointe du Lac and the 1791 Bargain
The story opens in 1991 San Francisco, where a reporter named Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater) sits down with a man who says he is a vampire. Louis de Pointe du Lac tells his life story, and the film stays inside that frame: a modern interview wrapping a period narrative that begins in 1791 Louisiana.
Louis is a wealthy plantation owner, despondent after the death of his pregnant wife and their future child. Drunk, he wanders the New Orleans waterfront and is attacked by Lestat de Lioncourt. Lestat senses the man’s dissatisfaction and offers him a choice. Louis accepts the transformation, then regrets it almost immediately.
That regret is the engine of the film. Lestat revels in the hunt. Louis refuses to kill, drinking animal blood instead, to Lestat’s open annoyance. Two vampires sharing a house and disagreeing about what a vampire is: that is the first act, and it is the strongest thing Jordan has.
Claudia, and the Plague in New Orleans
Then comes Claudia. Amid a plague outbreak in New Orleans, Louis feeds on a little girl whose mother has just died. To keep Louis with him, Lestat turns the dying child. Kirsten Dunst plays her, and the film hands its hardest material to a performer who was a child herself.
They raise Claudia as a daughter. Louis loves her. Lestat spoils her and trains her as a pupil, shaping her into a merciless killer. After thirty years she matures psychologically but stays a little girl in appearance. When she understands she will never grow older, she is furious — at Lestat, and at the arrangement.
She tricks Lestat into drinking the dead blood of twin boys she killed with a laudanum overdose. When he weakens, she slits his throat. Louis is shocked, then helps her dump the body in a swamp. They spend weeks planning a voyage to Europe to find other vampires. Lestat returns on the night of their departure, having survived on swamp creatures. Louis sets him on fire. The fire spreads through the French Quarter. They escape to their ship.
Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and a Casting Fight
The casting is its own story, and it is worth telling because it explains part of what the film is. Rice wrote the screenplay with Alain Delon in mind for Louis. When the film entered casting, Rice and fans of the novel pushed for Julian Sands as Lestat. He was rejected as not a well-known name — he was known mainly for A Room with a View — and the role went to Cruise.
Before Cruise was cast, Rice and the studio wanted Daniel Day-Lewis for Lestat after Pitt was set as Louis. Day-Lewis turned it down; he did not want to play a vampire. Cruise took a record $10 million salary plus a percentage of the profits.
Rice was blunt about it at the time. Cruise was “no more my vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler,” she said, calling the casting “so bizarre; it’s almost impossible to imagine how it’s going to work.” She recommended John Malkovich, Peter Weller, Jeremy Irons, Rutger Hauer, and Alexander Godunov. She even suggested swapping the leads: “I tried for a long time to tell them that they should just reverse these roles—have Brad Pitt play Lestat and have Tom Cruise play Louis. Of course, they don’t listen to me.”
After seeing the finished film, she changed her mind. “From the moment he appeared, Tom was Lestat for me,” she said, and “that Tom did make Lestat work was something I could not see in a crystal ball.” She called Cruise to apologize and admit she was wrong.
What Holds Up and What Does Not
So here is the verdict, and it is mixed.
- Cruise as Lestat is the best decision in the film — the performance Rice fought and then endorsed.
- Dunst as Claudia carries the film’s cruelest turn, and the thirty-year arc lands because she sells it.
- The 1991 interview frame is the weakest structure in the film. It interrupts the period story to remind you it is a story.
- Antonio Banderas and Stephen Rea are in the supporting cast, and the film does not give either enough to do.
- The French Quarter fire is spectacle. Claudia’s throat-cutting is horror. Only one of them stays with you.
The film grossed $223.7 million against a $60 million budget, drew generally positive reviews, and took two Academy Award nominations, for Best Art Direction and Best Original Score. Dunst was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. A stand-alone sequel, Queen of the Damned, followed in 2002, with Stuart Townsend and Matthew Newton replacing Cruise and Banderas.
The box office and the nominations tell you the film worked for its moment. The casting fight tells you why it still gets argued about. Rice’s reversal is the most interesting fact here, not because it flatters Cruise, but because it admits the obvious: the author of the book is not always the best judge of the film.
What actually matters is narrower. Interview with the Vampire is a handsome, well-acted adaptation that never quite solves its own frame. The period half is a real film about appetite and refusal. The modern half is a device. That split is why it lands at 6.2 of 10 — a good film with a structural problem it never fixes, carried by two performances that were argued over before anyone saw them.
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