[Computer clicks, beeps]
[Down-tempo music plays]
♪
This is Daniel Molloy.
It's 10:08 in the morning on June 14, 2022.
♪
So...Mr. Du Lac...
...how long have you been dead?
♪
[jazz music plays]
[Louis] The year was 1910 in New Orleans.
[indistinct chatter]
I was being hunted.
And I was completely unaware it was happening.
Please help me!
Anne Rice's vampires are the most
human monsters in literature.
I'm such a fan of Anne Rice's work,
of this world that she created.
So I put a lot of pressure on myself
to fill Lestat's shoes, which are mighty.
This is not a life!
That's 'cause you took my life!
There's one thing I really want to do,
which is play a vampire.
They go, "No, you're not gonna be a vampire.
They're talking about you being the interviewer."
Do over.
The action, the period piece. Be prepared to be wowed.
-[man] Let her go! -[grunting]
This is the show that finally says vampires are real.
♪♪
[blows]
♪♪
-[grunting, snarling] -[screams]
[Molloy] So, du Lac... How long have you been dead?
[Louis chuckles]
[ominous music]
[man] On your mark.
[Mark] We're making this show for AMC
based on Anne Rice's books,
starting, of course, with Interview with the Vampire.
I've probably read it for the first time about 20 years ago.
She satisfies on so many levels.
She's just damn exciting to read.
She's scary as hell, but the books
all deal with grand themes.
This show is a confluence of Anne Rice and Rolin Jones,
which I think is a really happy marriage.
I was doing an overall with AMC.
You come in and you have, like, a nice meeting
with all the executives.
And on the way out, one of them goes,
"And you know, we're probably not gonna
be interested in this.
So, we bought all the Anne Rice books,"
And I was, "Uh-uh-uh..."
Like, right at the door. And then I came back
and I said, "I really want to do this."
I'd always loved the book.
And I got a call to meet with Rolin
and with Mark Johnson, where we just talked about...
Anne Rice and vampires.
And we seemed to all be on the same...
page about what we were excited about.
[Louis] Help me!
[knocking on door]
Help me please!
He's in my head, Father!
[Alan] My excitement about the original novel is still there.
The key thing for me was that Anne Rice
managed to make you feel that
whatever else you'd heard about vampires,
you were finally getting the truth,
Finally hearing the real story about vampirism.
I think she's really less interested in the vam-powers
and more about the idea,
the burden of existence and enduring.
And, um, what the accumulation of loss and regret does to you.
And how do you pick yourself up?
There was a death of her daughter that occurred
and, um, I think she wrote this out of, uh, response to that.
And you can feel it in all the pages,
woven in a depth of feeling and loss and mourning.
That was the last sunrise I ever saw.
Perhaps the kindest thing the Dark Gift has given me.
Interview with the Vampire starts with a mysterious man
explaining to a journalist the story of his life.
[Adam] This is Louis de Pointe du Lac
who's being interviewed by Daniel Molloy.
And Louis tells the tale of how a vampire named Lestat
came to New Orleans, and turned him into a vampire.
They were your brothers and sisters once,
but now they're your savory inferiors.
I don't read this as just the vampire novel,
and I didn't sell it as a horror show.
[Alan] Lestat has very powerful feelings for Louis.
Their relationship is the key to the whole thing,
and for better or worse, because their relationship
is beautiful and ghastly.
So why are we reimagining this story?
Well, I think like any great piece of art, every generation
or every few generations,
uh, wants to reckon with it in a new way.
This is a rigorous and honest engagement
with the source material.
And the one thing you have to know is you have to get down to
what is at the core of these books,
and you cannot disrupt that.
I-- I need to go home.
I've tried to always put Anne in the room with us,
and the idea when we would pivot,
we would just try to go,
well, try to imagine ourselves in 1973 writing this book,
and now put that same writer into 2020,
and you have a network that says,
"Hey, make this a television show."
The novel is out there. Fans will always have the novel.
That movie in 1994, very popular,
with a lot of people always there.
AMC tasked me with trying to make this third thing.
[Louis] The year was 1910.
If you're gonna have all this gothic romance
from the 18's, you're going to move that out--
What's another sexy, exciting time period for New Orleans?
It seemed very clear to me that the next
really hot moment was when jazz was coming up.
It's New Orleans. It wasn't really hard to say,
"Why don't we make Louis a Black Creole?"
We've kept all the plot. It's all there.
But how we get to these big plot points
are changed and are altered
by those two changes that we fundamentally made.
[Alan] Louis is the one that takes you over the threshold
of telling you the story of what it's like to--
to be human,
to have the feelings that we all have about being human,
which was one of the main stories
I wanted to be able to tell
was sort of the initial stages by which
Louis is brought into this new...
vampire life.
We take a little bit more time with that because, you know,
the first episode is a lot about
what you give up to become a vampire?
[Mark] There's questions of-- of good and evil
dealing with alienation and even loneliness,
even when you're with somebody.
And the more you know the characters,
the more you feel for their triumphs or their failures.
[Rolin] You think you know who you are
and coming out the other way and go, "Who was I?"
That's what this show is about, picking away at that.
Stay with us, stick with us.
You're going to see that this is the show
that finally says vampires are real.
It's a great Goddamn yarn, is what it is.
[screaming]
[Molloy] First question:
You weren't always a vampire, were you?
[Louis] No.
I executive produced a number of things for AMC
from Breaking Bad
toBetter Call Saul toRectify
andHalt and Catch Fire.
And if there's something in common about all of them,
It's characters and AMC embraces characters.
And that's what Anne Rice has in spades.
We went out really wide on all of these roles
and I kind of knew as I was writing it,
that there might be an advantage to London theater training.
It was particularly difficult and compounded
because we were casting in the age of, uh, the pandemic.
Where we were doing chemistry reads on Zoom.
We're literally the opposite sides of the world.
There's lots of different time zones.
It was usually like three o'clock in the morning
for me in Australia.
Some things you don't get about America, Lestat!
Yes, let's have this conversation again.
Rolin and I were in LA
in our office at six in the morn-- whatever it was,
[laughs] just a very bizarre way to go about things,
but it worked.
We got our guys.
Gentlemen, well, you all know Louis du Lac.
[man coughs]
Louis, let me introduce you to Mr. Lestat de Lioncourt.
Lestat's come from Europe. He's arrived in America
to try and live out a full human life.
So he's come to New Orleans
to basically set up his own kingdom.
He's here to live the way he wants to live,
with music and sex and partying.
Freedom.
He's very arrogant, he's very vain, he's brash.
He knows how to behave in certain situations.
He knows how to purposely
-misbehave in certain situations. -[gasps]
I mean, Lestat is charming as hell, man.
Just somebody you kind of want to
hang out with, you know what I mean?
♪ Tired of this And in the army ♪
♪ As a fighting man♪
One thing I think that was very important to everyone
was that this version of Lestat
isn't necessarily just the version from the first book.
The Lestat in this book
is very different than the Lestat in this book
and all the rest of the books that go forward after that.
The idea of the charming vampire,
uh, the brat prince,
does not exist in this book.
And, you know, Anne, I think, had nine years
in between that book and this book,
and it's very clear that
she sort of fell in love with Lestat.
♪♪
He is hotheaded and violent.
How can you humiliate yourself like this?!
[grunts]
Excited about the challenge, but also...
[laughs] Terrified of what an undertaking
this was gonna be, to...
to live up to Louis de Pointe du Lac.
♪♪
[Rolin] Why we ended up with Jacob
was there was this sort of seething humanity.
He was really kind. You instantly liked him
because he's gonna make a series of questionable
decisions along the way.
And so Louis comes from money from the plantation
that was in this book.
His great grandfather had that plantation
and it moved down, third or fourth generation.
And this time period, it was very difficult
to, um, be in the sugar business if you were a Black man.
So he actually makes this savvy move to go,
"Where can I make money at this time?"
And what was good about this,
that there was still sort of a gray area,
there was a moral grayness to his work
that I think, um, he has to confront.
[Lestat] You're a pimp.
[Louis] The product was desired
and it came in as many forms
as there were ways to move.
[Jacob] I think Louis is very confused about his identity.
He's somebody that wears...
many different hats.
And, you know, he's trying to juggle
a family life, a business.
He's got his siblings, his sexuality,
his race, his family history.
These things are all kind of contributing to him
having a bit of an identity crisis.
Go home. Yes, I'll bleed you like a [indistinct], bro.
Louis is quite progressive for his time.
[laughter]
The way that he dresses, the way that he presents himself.
The way that he thinks about the world around him
is kind of steps ahead.
♪♪
He just doesn't quite belong in his time.
And I think that would be
a really attractive thing for a vampire
because vampires don't either.
And I think that Lestat sees that Louis
is almost like running away from his humanity.
[Lestat] The first time I laid eyes on you,
I saw that sorrow.
I can take away that sorrow, Louis.
The irony being, I think actually,
when he becomes a vampire is when he starts
to reconnect to his humanity.
Claudia, she is brought in to our story as she was in the novel,
as a kind of gift from Lestat to Louis.
Louis has made that heartbreaking realization
that he's going to lose his family
because they're gonna age and die and... and go away,
and he's never going to have a family of his own.
And so Lestat make an effort to create one for him.
[Louis] Where's your mama?
The best thing in this book...
is Claudia.
♪♪
[Bailey] Claudia is a 14-year-old girl,
and she gets turned into a vampire
and then has to deal with being stuck
for the rest of her life
as her mind matures and she becomes a woman.
As Anne Rice wrote her, she was a young child,
a five or six-year-old child.
I think aging Claudia up is a super-smart decision.
For her being stuck at that age,
there's a lot of turmoil and--
how is she going to find companionship
and how is she gonna grow?
You're stuck between being an adolescent
and a child and adulthood.
She can never have a family. She can never have babies.
So it's just absolutely heartbreaking.
The beauty of Claudia, she's a teenage girl,
but she also is a vampire.
That she still has crushes and wants to stay out late.
[Bailey] When Claudia first becomes a vampire,
everything's new to her and exciting.
When she's going for her first kill,
she's feeling everything, and it's so euphoric.
[man screaming]
She's not thinking of what she's doing.
She's just like, "I need to eat,"
because everything is heightened for her
because she is 14.
I'm so hungry!
I think I'm gonna die!
They're essentially they're just-- a family of murderers.
So I think there's something a little bit
uncomfortable about...
[laughing] the whole situation, obviously,
but then I think there is a real love.
What is funny, I suppose, is the domestic nature
of three monsters trying to live what they assume to be
a sort of normal existence.
-No running, young lady. -[laughs]
The dynamic between them is great. It's, uh...
Some of my favorite material in this series
is the family and both the loving moments
between them and the, uh, hateful moments between them.
It's a way to look at human behavior,
family behavior, and just blow the lid off it.
When it came to who is a journalist that has
the capability to push a character
who's far more powerful than him,
we couldn't be prouder that is Eric Begozian,
who, uh, I think Rolin would say was
who we always had in mind for it.
The day before they called me for this role,
I was thinking...
there's one thing that I've yet to do
that's in my bucket list, which is play a vampire.
So the next day, I get the call, and I'm like, "Whoa, okay."
And I call them up, they go, "No, that's--
You're not gonna be a vampire.
They're talking about you being the interviewer."
I got to call you back.
We wanted to put a meatier, more aggressive journalist
in the room to ask some questions,
but we also, first and foremost,
wanted to revere what Anne had made.
So we were like, "Oh, well, what if it's the same guy?"
[Eric] Now it's over 40 years later,
and Daniel has been invited to interview again.
You've grown old, Daniel.
Yeah, well, mortality beats a heavy drum.
He's got some mileage on his treads.
And he's also not well.
You have Parkinson's disease, Daniel?
Yeah.
This interview allows him to go back
and maybe grab the brass ring one last time.
Do over.
-♪ -[beeps]
I have to keep in mind that this guy almost killed me
40-something years ago.
He takes that fear and he turns it into anger.
So the more scared he is, the more angry he can get.
I'm not that kid that you talked to
40-something years ago.
It's best we start when our boy's had a rest.
I'm not your fucking boy.
I'm an old man with all the triggers that come with it.
And I'm ready.
They met in San Francisco in 1973.
I think they had...
This interview.
And I think 50 years later,
They're having this interview.
♪
-[indistinct chatter] -[jazz music plays]
One of the delights about doing this show
is that it's a love letter to New Orleans
as much as to vampires.
And I think Anne Rice's, um, affection for the city,
you know, informed her take on the whole thing.
The interesting thing about Anne Rice is...
not only was she this huge literary figure,
but in the city of New Orleans,
she actually did a lot for preservation,
just to maintain as much...
historical texture in the city as she possibly could.
Often, Anne would go to these places
and just spend time just immersing herself
in these historic homes and museums.
And it's in there. Like, it's in the pages.
It's in the words.
We're shooting at Gallier house.
It's what Anne Rice wrote as Lestat's house in the novels.
And so it's really exciting to be able to
keep that connection to the books.
This world, this universe, and this character that Anne
created speaks directly to the heart of this city.
We shot a scene the other day
where-- it's actually a direct quote of Anne Rice,
where Lestat is talking about New Orleans,
and he says, "There's not an inch of this city
that wasn't built from the fierce wilderness
that surrounds it.
New Orleans is very much a part of
the romanticism of Anne Rice's books.
It really serves that kind of magical,
fantastical storytelling.
And it does feel like a place where vampires live.
♪♪
[rumbling]
[indistinct chatter]
[Mark] I produced a number of big movies.
This is as big as any of those.
[Keith] The production design, it's breathtaking.
It is thorough, all the way down to the very last detail.
♪♪
We set it in a part of
New Orleans that doesn't exist anymore.
Storyville was the section that was
next to the French Quarter. That was...
Uh, a wi-- the wild section.
It was really one of the first times in American history
where we had a really-- sort of a red light district,
And it was a rip-roaring time.
Storyville was a crazy social experiment in New Orleans.
It started right at the turn of the century,
and it was over by 1917.
And they allowed prostitution
in a very small 40-block square of the city.
When you walk onto these sets,
it's-- it's as if you're going into 1920's New Orleans.
Oh, it's much bigger than I imagined it to be.
This is big in terms of sets and our backlot,
which is a true backlot.
It's almost like the ones they used to have in the studio lots
in the heyday of Hollywood.
♪♪
There's a couple buildings here that are exact replicas
of buildings that used to exist on Basin Street in Storyville.
This is the exterior of our Fairplay.
We had our great sculptor Brent
build the entablature with a woman above,
and that's actually a detail from a building in Storyville
that we found and reproduced.
We're actually standing outside of
the stage set of Lestat's townhouse.
It is an exact match for our location
at 1132 Royal.
We replicated the fluted columns
with the Corinthian capitals,
and we had our sculptors recreate the iconic iron doors
that are the entryway to the vestibule.
So we're in Lestat's townhouse,
and we really wanted to avoid
some of the design cliche of vampire
and get away from the burgundies and the blacks
and the things that we kind of historically
associate with vampires.
For me, it was really important to have, like,
a vampire design aesthetic and what it means to live in
a space that's been curated by a vampire,
especially someone who is as vivacious as Lestat is.
So this is the dining room.
Nothing good ever happens in here,
Nothing-- nothing positive happens.
This has gotta be one of my favorite rooms, actually.
And we wanted to pay an homage to
vampire lore and filmmaking.
And so the candlestick that gets pulled
and the-- the bookcase opening.
So we wanted to have secret panels for the coffin room.
So we needed a way to open those secret panels.
And we designed that into the mantle, the fireplace,
so that you activate this little push button.
And then the built-in wood panels of the bedroom,
which also have our Art Nouveau embellishment
swing open and, um, it reveals the coffin room inside.
[mechanical creaking]
Claudia's room, we actually do the gag with the lamp,
where you twist the lamp.
In her bed is actually a Lazy Susan
that turns around and there is a coffin inside.
Trying to use vampire logic of what I'd want
in my secret coffin room and that would be...
"How do you know if it's daylight outside?"
And so we added these beautiful...
uh, reproduction nouveau peephole so that we could
open them and see if it was sunny out or not.
She's so considerate of what we might need,
what we might be looking at,
-what we might want to touch. -[clatter]
There's always something tangible about way she designed it.
But inside these boxes,
there are tons and tons of incredible items.
This is the amount of detail that was in the show.
The original Fairplay matches.
And it becomes the Azalea.
Security equipment for the penthouse of du Lac.
[Sam] That's the only chess set.
Is this the one that I threw across the room?
[man] Yeah, and it surprisingly didn't break.
[Jacob] So this is just a box of voodoo dolls.
This scared the... out of me, this one.
It's-- Sometimes it's just better to not know. [chuckles]
♪♪
[Carol] It has been so grand and so epic.
So many big scenes with so many people.
And we've got a lot of amazing real period clothing
that is coming from all over.
But because our leads are vampires,
[grunts]
they're rough on their clothes. [laughs]
-[grunts] -[screams]
So many dresses made,
so many suits made, all of their shoes.
We make a lot.
We really kind of turned up
the color for Louis.
And when you meet him in this,
and he pops out in this gold and... it's just beautiful.
I get out of the car and people would be like,
"Damn! Ooh! Look at the suit."
Like, people, were ju-- like, were going crazy over my suits. [laughs]
The costume helps the actor in so many ways.
So one of the things that was a real challenge
was making sure that every single detail was just right.
And I've spent months researching so that you
really feel you're in that time,
and then your characters
can be who they need to be on top of it.
[Sam] Lestat really is a man from the 1700s.
So in terms of the costume, when we first meet him,
he's still wearing elements of that.
This was a coat that we designed for him to land in
and, um, a lot of texture and a lot of wear there,
and a little bit of elegance in that lining,
you know, when you get a pop of that,
it's like, "Oh."
Carol has done an extraordinary job
of really keeping the elements of bondage in his costume.
So I think they're really fun to walk around in.
The red cloak that I wear was definitely, like,
I remember walking outside and everyone was like,
"Holy cow." And I was like, "I know, right? It's so great."
When people see the show, they're going to really flip out
and fall in love with every aspect of it
and the way it looks and the way it sounds.
The music alone is amazing.
And the acting and the costumes,
the hair, and the makeup and the production design,
everything about it, it feels authentic.
And you buy the universe 100%.
♪♪
It's as if I'd walked my entire life as a dead man.
I know that I've always loved vampires as characters,
as creatures who've scared me from--
I remember at an early age
reading Bram Stoker,
there's something so...
sort of deliciously scary about them.
I think people really love, just, vampires
and vampire stories because...
it shows us the dark nature of ourselves.
It's like this funhouse-mirror reflection
on our own mortal lives and things that we all think about.
Everyone feels like they sort of know
the vampire mythology, but there's a lot of variation.
[Howard] We look atNosferatu .
We look at Bela Lugosi'sDracula.
You know, Frank Mangella'sDracula.
So many different versions of vampires.
But I think what's different about Anne Rice
than a lot of other vampire things
is the humanity of it all.
In terms of the look of our vampires,
we made decisions earlier on, which are
right out of the Anne Rice mythology.
That, you know, they are not monstrous,
they're not terrifying to look at.
Their look is sort of a heightened human beauty.
[Howard] I don't want to make them pale.
I don't want to make them veiny.
I don't want to give them a crazy forehead,
Because how would they integrate into the real world?
Everybody would be running away from them.
But instead, we went the other way
and made him look perfect in every way.
♪♪
Well, the eyes are described,
you know, very beautifully in the novels,
and-- and we've been very true
to the descriptions that we were given.
Each of our vampires has special contact lenses that they wear,
and they each have their own color.
Louis, he has these bright green eyes.
Lestat, his eyes are a beautiful pale gray.
And Claudia has these amber orange eyes that, like, pop.
When I looked in the mirror, I saw my lenses.
I can creep people out. Like, I have that power.
[Alan] And they have different contact lenses for different moods
and different, uh, levels of arousal and ferocity.
When they attack. their pupils dilate
really big, so we have separate contacts for that.
[Jacob] People look at you funny, and you're like,
"Why are people looking at me like this?
And you forget that you haven't blinked for four minutes
because there's no air going into your eyes. [laughs]
Well, one of the things we're doing differently in the show
is that the vampires don't always have their fangs,
and it depends on their mood.
So we have, like, what we call resting fangs.
We have attack fangs.
We have a lot of different fangs.
We made hundreds and hundreds of teeth for these guys.
There's three different lengths,
and there are slip-on caps that click in.
So obviously, when they're about to eat,
that's when their fangs appear.
And that will be a combination of us and digital effects.
Claudia has four fangs, and the standard is two.
Our tongues are not used to wearing things,
so that was a little bit awkward.
It took a while to practice learning how to speak
with a full set of dentures.
Claudia, Lestat and Louis, we have a set of
full bridges for attack mode.
Where are your parents at this hour?
Claudia! No, don't!
[snarls]
The fingernails have a big part of the Anne Rice lore. Um...
And the way they're described, there's a sheen to them.
They're-- they're extended, they're slightly pointed.
They're also useful as weapons, uh, but they're beautiful.
We didn't want claws on them. We wanted very slight...
but yet they looked like they were razor-sharp.
The nails are really fun, especially for Claudia.
One of the scenes is admiring her nails.
So even the way Claudia kills,
I always like to remember the nails.
Like, "These are my nails, I'm going to kill with these."
[Louis] You're wondering if your nails
would be like that forever,
and the answer is yes.
[Howard] I'll tell you, the biggest struggle
is keeping the nails on.
First brought in somebody to do all their nails,
like, once a week, but then nails would fall off,
and then we'd have to glue them on on-set.
[Tami] Jacob, he has these press-on nails,
whereas Sam, he's agreed to get acrylics made.
We have a nail person, a specialist, come in
and do acrylic nails on him and also on Bailey.
[chuckles] The only reason
I don't wear the acrylic nails
is because I have a-- a young daughter,
and I have to change her nappy and give her cuddles,
and I don't want her to-- want to scratch her. [chuckles]
We put them through a lot, you know?
Having sticky blood on you is a horrible thing.
I mean, imagine if you just covered yourself
in honey all day long.
So we had gallons and gallons and gallons
of vampire blood, dressing blood,
mouth blood, gel blood, the whole thing.
And then we had all the human blood,
which we spilled all over the place.
Tons and tons of blood.
And then we also had these big giant puddles of blood
that were synthetic, just like mats, like a doormat,
but they're in the shape of a giant puddle.
And we had all different sizes.
[Tami] Like, right down here is...
is our blood kit that we carry to set.
And we have different kinds of blood, like gel blood,
which is just kind of a solid blood, some low-light blood,
so it's like, because we're in the dark a lot.
This is pumping blood. So I usually hook up a tube,
Then-- [whooshes]
Yeah, there's a lot of blood in the show. [laughs]
They're actually cocktailing something right now
that we're going to use in Episode Seven,
and we're actually going to be drinking it,
and we're taste testing it...
to make sure we like it.
And there's, like, hibiscus in it,
but it looks like blood.
[chuckles] The drinkable blood is very sugary,
so you get this kind of, like, high from it,
which is probably not as intense a high
as vampires get from drinking real blood,
but there's something.
[Louis chuckles]
Ah-uh-uh-uh-uh.
We live off the blood of the living.
Out the back, I have a... fire extinguisher loaded
with blood, so I hook that up to my hoses.
[man] Great.
That's probably two gallons worth of blood right there.
And then we'd go crazy and just, like,
Kill Billit over the place.
We wanted it to be, like, boom!
One of the, um, things we had to be concerned about
is that we were shooting in locations
that are like, 150 years old in New Orleans.
There's a sequence in Episode One,
we just annihilate a bunch of people in there.
And we're shooting in this church and I'm like,
"Okay, we've got to be really, really careful."
The second the blood hit the floor,
we finished shooting it, we cleaned it right up.
It's no easy feat acting with fake blood in your mouth
and fake teeth that you can't chomp down on
and with contact lenses where you can barely see,
and then have to deliver a beautiful,
heartfelt performance.
-This is not a life! -That's 'cause you took my life!
The cast never complained about it,
and they always took it on beautifully because
they all saw-- special.
And makes the show that much more,
um, exciting to watch.
[director] Cut!
[indistinct chatter]
The beauty of Anne Rice's characters
is that they aren't creatures.
They are us. They feel the same way we do,
and they don't quite know where they belong in the world.
I think that a lot of alienated people can identify with that.
It's really empathetic and says it's okay to be
a little bit different.
It's okay to be feared by others.
It's okay to have these questions about yourself.
[Jessica] I think there was a very big female population.
I think there's a very big LGBT population who really...
captured from the book this feeling
that there wasn't a judgment for people
who had feelings for one another who are of the same sex.
[Levan] She really had an impact on my life.
It was the first...
Queer book... mainstream book... that I had read,
and I remember reading it and being so surprised by it.
I was like 15, and I was like, "Oh, my gosh, they're,"
you know, "in love."
And that was a very big deal to me,
And I'm very glad to be a part of this show.
[Jacob] We're all in love with Anne Rice's stories
and the questions that she asks in her books
and through her characters.
Why do you do this, Lestat?
Well, I like to do it. I enjoy it.
[Louis] Well, I don't!
It feels like holding this kind of
very precious thing every day.
♪♪
You know, Anne passed away while we were shooting this.
[Jessica] When we found out that Anne Rice passed away,
it was certainly something
that all of us immediately felt,
and the mood the next day feeling particularly heavy.
I think especially for the city of New Orleans.
She is an icon here,
and-- and this city has a lot to thank her for.
[Sam] It's a great tragedy. It's a huge literary loss.
I actually went down to the Garden District bookshop
that day and went and spoke to people
who knew her and, you know,
who often threw her book openings
and went through their old photographs...
of Anne Rice turning up to her book signings
and book openings in a coffin, in a bridal dress.
And...
This was an extraordinary person
who made a huge impact on a lot of people's lives.
I would have liked to have thanked her because
when I read Interview with the Vampire,
I felt understood on some level.
I felt spoken to, I felt...
I felt, um, comforted by how she writes.
[Jessica] On the morning of our next shoot day,
Rolin read a really beautiful passage
from the beginning of the book
and really spoke to the legacy that she has built.
I think we carry it, that legacy, as a great...
responsibility and with a huge amount of respect.
She's the reason that we're here
getting to tell this beautiful story.
[Jessica] It really was a wonderful moment for everyone
to come together and pay respect to her.
The thing that felt different after that was
you really got a sense then
that it was on us after that.
She wasn't going to be able to write any more, any more words.
So the canon is now set.
[Jessica] And for her to not be able to see all of these
wonderful characters come to life again,
I think is something that really sits with all of us.
And something that we feel even more of
a responsibility over,
creating something that hopefully
the fans and people who appreciate her
-will continue to do so. -[sobbing]
[Eric] I think every author loves their writing first.
If a movie or TV show gets people to go back
and look at it again, that's as honored as you can get.
So I think it's certainly, uh...
It would be something that would make her happy to think
that a really nice manifestation of her books
will get people to go back to her books.
I think she was a significant American writer,
And I think she has a bunch of people out there who...
This book is the book for them.
This thing means the world to them.
And I think, um, there's a couple of generations
that don't know it like that. And we're hoping that...
That'll happen again.
♪♪
We're making this show for a lot of people
who've never read Anne Rice,
perhaps have never even heard of Anne Rice.
So it has to satisfy them.
but most importantly, there are the readers.
You have to get the core right.
The spirit of the books has to be true,
and I believe...
I believe we got it right.
I think fans should be most excited about
diving into the Anne Rice world and this amazing,
beautiful world that Rolin has created,
um, in this adaptation.
I wasn't sure you remembered me.
Your book makes no mention of our prior meeting.
What I would say to fellow Anne Rice fans
is to trust us because we all love her, too,
and stick with us.
The thread of her storytelling is all the way through it.
People who have read these books closely,
I think will quite quickly figure out how much love
and how much reverence we had for this book.
You mentioned vampires and one of those,
readers tend to call bullshit.
Have I hit a nerve?
We are going to have a number of Easter eggs.
Some pretty obvious,
some only the keen viewer will be aware of.
I came to know Christ in a monastery.
I wanted to be a priest.
There are other, you know, Easter eggs
connecting to other books and other vampires.
There's a character from Queen of the Damned
that makes an appearance here.
The nice thing about how AMC is doing this
is there a few story threads
from Anne Rice's world rising at the same time.
So in Interview with the Vampire,
we get to make a few references
to the witches who are literally
just down the block in our story.
Plenty of brooms down the street at the Mayfair Sisters' home.
-[laughs] -He's calling me a witch, Momo.
[Mark] The Immortal Universe is a description of some of
Anne Rice's books with
interwoven and connected characters.
We obviously have Interview with the Vampire,
and on the heels of it, isThe Mayfair Witches.
And that is starring Alexandra DiDario.
It's a story about a woman, a doctor, in San Francisco,
who discovers that she's the 13th Witch
in a line of New Orlean witches
And comes to New Orleans and has to deal with
these desperate influences on her life.
And we will develop beyond that.
Interview with the Vampire, Season One, is such a wild ride.
- There's romance, there's backstabbing, -[giggles]
there's killing.
[grunts]
We have amazing stunt sequences.
You get a little bit of everything.
And there are some very funny moments as well.
I'm a person who very much believes that all drama
should have comedy and all comedy should have drama.
And I-- What I always say is
somewhere in the middle, humanity lies.
But I think the humor is in Anne Rice as well.
It's extreme stuff and these are extreme feelings
that they're feeling.
You know, it's gallows humor.
You have to find... the macabre funny.
-[grunts] -[moaning]
If we didn't laugh,
we'd all be screwed, really.
[Keith] It's compelling and it's humanity
and it's-- and it's beautiful.
And I think that that's what people
will be watching, uh, as they kill many...
many, many people.
Whenever you ready, Louis.
[screams]
When you see this, this will be your new
Interview with the Vampire.
Like, you'll get it and you'll be like,
there is no other Interview with the Vampire.
There's this version and that's that.
He's dead.
Yes, there is a lot of blood,
Yes, there are a lot of
really gross horror movie classic tropes,
But there's a beating heart to this show.
That is the greatest part about this show.
They're vampires. The emotions get wider and wider and wider.
[Mark] One of the most satisfying moments
for a producer just standing back
and just saying, "Oh, my God,
I had something to do with putting this together."
And you just beam with pride.
And this happened a lot on this show.
There's his mark.
So I really hope that the fans of-- of these books
and this world really see that we are
bringing in all of the elements
and that we can do them honestly
and truthfully and as blatantly as she wanted.
I'm really excited for people to see it.
And there's nothi-- I don't think there's anything else
like this show.
♪♪
-[snarls] -[grunts]