lestat queen of the damned interview with a vampire

Shooting got underway at the start of October 2000 then, running through to early 2001. Warner Bros had managed to just about beat the clock, and hold onto the rights. Stuart Townsend would join the cast in the lead role in 2000 (Wes Bentley was high on the list too), and filming was able to begin just ahead of the required deadline. Tom Cruise was still a possible to reprise the role of Lestat, but it’s unclear whether he wasn’t interested or the studio figured it was better off recasting (not least financially). Furthermore, Michael Rymer was hired to direct, and the decision was made to shoot the film in Australia, to save on production costs. It had until the end of 2000 to get physical production movie, and in came Scott Abbott and Michael Petroni in 1999 to pen the film’s screenplay. Try three issues of Film Stories magazine – for just £4.99: right here! The studio thus decided to skip over The Vampire Lestat novel altogether and jump to book three: Queen Of The Damned. And Warner Bros, keen to generate another hit in the series, wasn’t keen on that.īy 1998, it knew it had to get cracking, and with precious little chance of luring Tom Cruise back to the lead role – he was making Eyes Wide Shut with Stanley Kubrick by this stage – it was back to the drawing board. The studio had to get a new film adaptation moving by the year 2000, else the rights would be returned to Rice. Warner Bros still had the rights to Rice’s book though, although with an important caveat: the clock was ticking on them.

The plan was to adapt the book The Vampire Lestat at that stage, but the project quickly ran out of steam (Jordan would make Michael Collins with the studio instead). It seemed, when Interview With The Vampire returned some $220m at the global box office (before becoming a video hit too) that a sequel was a forgone conclusion, and Jordan duly got to work on a follow-up. The rights had bumbled around Hollywood for just shy of two decades by the time the film came out, and it was Warner Bros that ultimately picked up the screen permissions to make films out of Rice’s first three Vampire Chronicles titles, as well as her Mayfair Witches trilogy.

Humble pie was duly eaten when she saw the resultant film, that Neil Jordan ultimately adapted (although didn’t get credit for) and directed. 1994’s blockbuster Interview With The Vampire would be a controversial production, not least when Rice herself actively came out against the casting of Tom Cruise in the lead role. Yet the first big screen outing for Anne Rice’s Lestat ticked all those boxes. The 1990s were hardly alight with big studio films costing $70m to make, that also happened to be about vampires and come with an 18 certificate.

Lestat queen of the damned interview with a vampire