Interview with the Vampire (1994)

directed by Neil Jordan

Emma Riehle Bohmann

It began, as so many things do, with Brad Pitt.

It was July 4th, in the middle of yet another heat wave—temperatures pushing 80 degrees by 8 am, heat shimmering in waves off the sidewalk, sweat glistening on skin, not a cloud in the sky—at a backyard cookout. Amid the smoking grill and sizzling meat and incoherent conversation, a question. More of a challenge, really:

Top three Brad Pitt roles. Go.

That, of course, turned into an attempt to name, from memory and in chronological order, the entirety of Brad Pitt’s oeuvre. We started with A River Runs Through It, traveled through Se7en and Fight Club, when he seemed to burst into our consciousness, reminisced about the Ocean’s Eleven franchise, reveled in the greatness of Burn After Reading, shook our heads at World War Z—all the way until we reached Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood.

And then we pulled up IMDB to see what we’d missed. A lot, as it turned out. But the biggest omission, according to my friend Pete? Interview with the Vampire—a movie I’d never seen.

“It’s actually a really good movie,” he said. “You should watch it. It’s great.”

So I did.

*

We—as a culture, as a society—have a fascination with vampires. Despite the proliferation of such stories in pop culture, especially TV and movies, this is not a new fascination. If you dig into the folklore and history of vampirism, you’ll find tales of the blood-sucking undead dating back centuries, even millennia, in nearly every culture in the world, from Ancient Greece to Mesopotamia to Medieval Europe. The details may differ, but the overall picture is the same: vampire.

I’m not a vampire scholar, nor am I a historian or a psychologist or a philosopher or a religious scholar or in any way qualified to make any sort of inference or deduction as to why it is that these creatures captivate us so. But as someone who has read my fair share of vampire books [1] and who has watched more than my fair share of vampire shows, I would venture to say that it has to do with our fear of death. So much of our life is consumed with a search for answers, for knowledge. And yet despite all our research and experiments and quests, death—and what happens after we die—has remained a mystery. Sure, we know what happens to the body—but what of that piece of us, that spark, that essence that makes us each who we are? What of, if you will, our soul?

Entire religions have stemmed from this question, leading to wars and battles being fought over it. Where we don’t have answers, our minds turn to possibilities, to stories. To angels and demons and ghosts and, yes, vampires.

*

So I watched Interview with the Vampire. The next day. The heat wave was still in effect. My apartment has just a small window air conditioner unit, so I closed the blinds to keep the sun out in an effort to further cool the place, not entirely unlike a vampire myself. I settled in.

The cast of Interview with the Vampire is incredible. You have Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Kirsten Dunst, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater, Thandie Newton. With a lineup of such stars, how could you go wrong?

But here’s the thing: Interview with the Vampire is...not a good movie [2]. Brad Pitt looks like he’s chewing on rocks the whole time and doesn’t successfully convey “tortured vampire wracked with guilt.” It’s more “mopey teenager who’s bored all the time.” Antonio Banderas is expressionless. Tom Cruise is one-dimensional. Only Kirsten Dunst’s tantrums break up the monotony.

Brad Pitt knew, at the time, that the movie wasn’t his best. In fact, he’s said he was miserable making it and even contemplated buying out his contract. Most of the shooting took place at night. He was caked in pasty makeup to further enhance his skin’s pallor. And he disliked the portrayal of his character, Louis, having preferred the character in the book. A 2011 article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune quotes Pitt as saying, “In the movie, they took the sensational aspects of Lestat and made that the pulse of the film, and those things are very enjoyable and very good, but for me, there was just nothing to do—you just sit and watch.”

*

At the beginning of Interview with the Vampire, Brad Pitt’s character, Louis de Pointe du Lac, is a plantation owner in New Orleans in 1791. His wife has died in childbirth. The baby didn’t survive. Grieving and depressed, Louis wanders the city in a drunken stupor, picking fights and hoping someone will do him the favor of killing him. When he meets the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, played by Tom Cruise, Lestat offers Louis a choice: death or living forever as a vampire.

At its heart, Interview with the Vampire is a story about loneliness. About what it means to wander through a world that holds nothing for you. About the desperate search for companionship and how difficult such a thing is to find. Watching it, I got the sense that Louis’s anguish after becoming a vampire was less to do with his guilt at killing and drinking human blood and more to do with the fact that he is still, after all he’s been through, alone.

*

I wonder if that sense of aloneness, of always being on the outside, is part of what draws us to vampires. The desire to belong is very human, as is the fear that we don’t, that we never will. We seek out friends, partners, lovers. We form groups and cliques. We laugh at our inside jokes. And vampires? They are forever on the outside, asking to be let in.

It seems to me that vampirism is in some senses not all that different from celebrity, which strikes me as a rather lonely existence. Despite being surrounded by fans who know your name, who know pieces of trivia about you, both obscure and not-so-obscure [3], so many of your relationships are superficial at best. So many people want things from you. Money, introductions, their own name recognition. It must be difficult to trust people, to form deep connections. There’s a divide between them and the rest of us. Celebrities, like vampires, are on the outside. They need something from others to survive: attention, awe, acceptance. Their work eclipses their lifetimes, causing them, in a way, to live forever.

*

It's hard to determine exactly when Brad Pitt hit peak heartthrob status. Certainly he was quickly approaching it at the time of Interview with the Vampire. His breakout role is widely considered to be that of J.D. in Thelma & Louise (1991). In 1995, just a year after his portrayal of the brooding, moping Louis, he was named the “sexiest man alive” by People magazine. He received the title again in 2000, becoming the first man to be given that distinction twice. 

Though I’ve not seen more of Brad Pitt’s movies than I’ve seen, I wouldn’t place Interview with the Vampire among his top three roles. To be honest, it doesn’t even make the top 10. But there is something truly delightful about going back in his oeuvre to his earlier works, to tracing his trajectory through the years to where he’s landed today.

Today, Brad Pitt is still making movies. He’s also made a name for himself as a producer, leading the production company Plan B Entertainment. He’s involved in humanitarian and political causes, even narrating a campaign ad for Joe Biden in 2020 [4]. It may very well be that the peak of his career is yet to come.

*

Perhaps the most interesting part of Interview with the Vampire is its ending. In it (spoiler), Louis concludes telling his story to Christian Slater [5]. Slater, transfixed by the tale, asks Louis to make him a vampire too. Louis is furious, attacks Slater, and then disappears. The camera follows Slater for another scene, but Louis himself has vanished. You never find out what happens to him. 

It could be that Louis’s fate is addressed in the books. But I find that I like the mystery here. I like the not-knowing. Maybe Louis continues to move through the world at night, existing on the blood of rats and squirrels. Maybe he comes to accept human death as a necessity for his own survival and he feeds again on people. Maybe he finds other vampires, forms new attachments. Or maybe, relieved of the burden of his tale, he wanders the streets alone until daylight, going out in a blaze of sunshine. Maybe, for him, he is finally enough.

[1] Though not, I might add, Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, the first book in the series being, of course, Interview with the Vampire.

[2] I should note that it was at this point in writing this piece that I suddenly learned/realized that the title of the movie (and book) is Interview with the Vampire and not, as I had been saying/writing, Interview with a Vampire. Which seems strange to me. “The” implies a singularity, a specificity, as if everyone would know which vampire was being referred to, as if there has only ever been one.

[3]  Brad Pitt’s first name is actually William. He was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, home to Oklahoma’s only Egyptian mummy, Tutu. Young William grew up in Springfield, Missouri, in a Southern Baptist family. He majored in journalism at the University of Missouri, but left college two credits short of graduating to pursue a film career in California. Despite my best efforts, I could not determine when—or why—he began going by Brad.

[4]  He’s also in the midst of finalizing his divorce from Angelina Jolie, but to be honest, I prefer not to ruminate on his love life or how the half-decade-long custody battle for their children is progressing. There are instances in which people deserve privacy. 

[5]  I’m sure the character had a name in the movie, but I never caught it and now can’t be bothered to look it up.

Emma Riehle Bohmann reads, writes, and runs in Minneapolis. She is currently working on a novel.