Interview with the Vampire

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

Interview with the Vampire makes immortality something a man must explain rather than simply something he possesses. Louis meets an interviewer in twentieth-century San Francisco and recounts a life beginning in eighteenth-century Louisiana. The distance between those settings gives his story a scale beyond an ordinary lifetime, but his account remains intimate: grief, dependency, appetite and the people he cannot keep. Neil Jordan directs the 1994 film from Anne Rice's screenplay, adapting her novel into a conversation that opens onto an elaborate period world. Brad Pitt's Louis is the storyteller, while Tom Cruise's Lestat becomes the companion whose confidence in being a vampire Louis never entirely shares. Their disagreement concerns how to inhabit a condition neither can discuss with the humans around them.

Grieving his wife and unborn child, Louis accepts Lestat's offer of transformation in 1791. He resists killing people, then feeds on the orphan Claudia; Lestat makes her a vampire, forming a dependent household. Claudia's adult consciousness eventually becomes unbearable within her permanent child's body. She attacks Lestat, and she and Louis escape to Europe after his return forces another confrontation. In Paris they meet Armand's vampire circle. Louis transforms Madeleine as Claudia's companion, but the circle condemns Claudia for attacking Lestat. Claudia and Madeleine die in sunlight; Armand frees Louis, who destroys the vampires' theatre and rejects him. Louis later finds a weakened Lestat in New Orleans. Back in the interview, his listener asks for immortality despite everything he has heard. After Louis leaves, Lestat attacks the interviewer in his car, bringing the account's supposedly distant danger into the present.

Louis's early reluctance creates a divided relationship with his new existence. He gains endurance while finding the means of maintaining it abhorrent. Lestat treats feeding as a practical fact and expects Louis to stop confusing his former morality with the conditions of his survival. That difference does not make their household a simple arrangement between a wholly innocent victim and an uncomplicated villain. Louis is capable of violence even when he condemns it, and Lestat can offer companionship while using that companionship to keep him close. The film gives both aspects room in their shared domestic life. Wealth and refined surroundings do not resolve the question of who must die to sustain them. Their apparent freedom from ordinary mortality produces another routine organized around bodies, secrecy and the avoidance of daylight.

Claudia makes the cost of that routine visible in a different way. Her transformation preserves a child's appearance without preserving a child's mind. Kirsten Dunst's character must live through years of increasing understanding while remaining physically unable to occupy the adult life she wants. Clothing and dolls become part of a surrounding identity that cannot grow with her. What first looks like the formation of a family therefore develops into an argument over who had the right to create it. Lestat's decision answers his own need to bind Louis to the household, rather than a future Claudia could choose for herself. Her demand for Madeleine follows from that imbalance: she wants a companion suited to the existence she has been given, instead of remaining the dependent object around which two others have arranged their relationship.

Paris seems to promise an answer to isolation because it offers a community with customs, hierarchy and an established place of performance. The Théâtre des Vampires reverses the household's concealment by putting predation on a stage where human spectators interpret it as an act. They can watch an actual danger because they believe theatrical conventions guarantee its falseness. That setting extends the film's interest in appearances beyond beautiful clothing and ageless faces. An institution can present itself as a refuge while enforcing rules that expose newcomers to punishment. Armand's attraction for Louis depends partly on the possibility of being understood by somebody outside Lestat's orbit. The deaths of Claudia and Madeleine destroy that possibility of uncomplicated belonging, and Louis's rejection of Armand follows his recognition that rescue has been selective.

The period settings also change the rhythm of Louis's experience. The Louisiana household has rooms and streets in which the vampires attempt to make a shared daily existence, while Paris supplies a more public and organized form of concealment. By the time Louis encounters Lestat again in twentieth-century New Orleans, their long history has become something each carries differently. The city has changed around a relationship that remains unresolved. The film's elaborate interiors and clothes make those successive environments tangible, but they cannot give its characters the ordinary progression such environments usually imply. Moving from one place or century to another does not mean leaving an earlier attachment behind. Immortality permits escape across distance while allowing memories of a damaged household to remain present long after its destruction.

The interviewer tests how that story can be received. Louis has described suffering, losses and a continuing inability to reconcile himself to feeding, yet the listener still hears an opportunity worth acquiring. His response exposes a gap between understanding somebody's account and wanting the condition that made it possible. It also returns the film to the attraction it has been depicting throughout: endurance and beauty can distract from the price attached to them. Louis's anger does not resolve that misunderstanding, and Lestat's final appearance converts it into another encounter with a persuasive vampire. The film closes without turning Louis's testimony into a lesson everyone accepts. What he means as an explanation of enduring grief can still sound, to someone on the outside, like an invitation to escape an ordinary human life.