GAY PEOPLE'S Chronicle

NOVEMBER 25, 1994

Evenings Out

'De-gayed' vampire tale is still hot

Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as the vampire Lestat and his protégé, Louis.

Interview With the Vampire

directed by Neil Jordan

Reviewed by Doreen Cudnik

Interview With The Vampire, the highly anticipated film based on Anne Rice's best-selling novel of the same name, the first volume of her celebrated "Vampire Chronicles," opened November 11 in theaters. Starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, Stephen Rea, Kirsten Dunst and Christian Slater, Interview is a story of desire, love, yearning, grief, terror and ecstasy; filmed on location in New Orleans, San Francisco, Paris and England.

Tom Cruise (Risky Business, Top Gun, Rain Man), whose fame has been built portraying heroic, decent men, plays the vampire Lestat with wicked savoir-faire. Director Neil Jordan recalls, “When we discovered that Tom Cruise was interested in the script, we knew that casting him as Lestat would surprise many people. What struck us after meeting with him was how passionate he was about playing someone as evil as this."

“Anne Rice describes these vampires as eternally young, with a preternatural beauty about them and an icy kind of control, particularly Lestat,” Jordan continued. "There were obvious routes we could have gone with the part of Lestat, but we preferred to take someone against type, like Tom, who can take and has taken very difficult roles and not only make them successful, but unforgettable." Anne Rice herself was displeased with the casting of Cruise to portray Lestat, but changed her mind upon witnessing his performance.

Lestat flows through the years on a river of blood, which sustains his existence. When he so desires, he awards his victims with immortality-whether they want it or not. Enter Louis, played by Brad Pitt (Thelma and Louise, A River Runs Through It,) a young, beautiful master of a New Orleans plantation who, devastated by the death of his beloved wife and infant daughter, invites death on himself. Lestat, instinctively knowing Louis' dark desire, gives him the "vampire's kiss," but allows Louis to choose between death and immortal life. "Have you tasted death enough," Lestat asks after drinking Louis' blood for the first time, "or do you want more?” Louis answers “enough,” and is dropped to the waters below.

When Louis is eventually fully made a vampire, he is filled with awe at his new-found powers, but this wonder soon turns to disgust as he cannot reconcile his mortal concept of good and evil with the fact that he has become a predator, needing to kill in order to survive.

Lestat proves to be an inadequate teacher, slowly making Louis despise him. Lestat is all manipulation and devious charm, whereas Louis is haunted by his very nature. Louis is disgusted by the sadistic pleasure Lestat receives by toying with his victims prior to killing

them.

Louis, determined to leave Lestat, happens upon a young girl in a plague-ravaged New Orleans slum. The girl, trying to revive her badly decomposing mother, is crying out for her to "wake up." Louis attempts to comfort her, but is overcome with desire and weakly submits to his thirst for blood. Lestat interrupts this scene, and proceeds to torment Louis that he would drain this young child to the point of death, yet continue to believe that there was any moral difference between them. He mocks Louis' self-loathing and dances around the room with the dead woman's body, in a macabre celebration of the victory of Louis' vampire nature over his mortal goodness.

Lestat brings the child to their home, where, much to Louis' horror, he makes her a vampire rather than let her succumb to mortal death. Creating the ultimate dysfunctional family, Claudia becomes their daughter, and Louis and Lestat the loving fathers. This provides the film with some of its more comic moments, as Claudia, the child-vampire, has a seemingly insatiable appetite. She kills her dressmaker and the owner of a doll shop. After the piano teacher becomes her latest victim, Lestat scolds her, "Claudia, what have we told you!" "Never in the house," she responds.

Actress Kirsten Dunst portrays Claudia with extraordinary understanding. Producer Stephen Wooley said, "We started to look at six-year-olds, which is about Claudia's age in the book. But the role is infinitely too demanding for any six-year-old in the world. It became clear that it would be necessary to cast someone older, someone who could better understand the range of feeling necessary as the character develops emotionally, becoming essentially a woman in a child's body."

The film is at its homoerotic best when Claudia and Louis, having rid themselves of Lestat, travel to Europe to find others of their kind. Armand, played by Antonio Banderas (Philadelphia) is the oldest living vampire and the leader of an underground community of vampires that live beneath the "Theatre des Vampires." This underground catacomb-like setting is one of the most visually breathtaking in the film.

Louis knows that he has found in Armand the teacher that Lestat never was. He struggles Continued on next page