Interview with the Vampire is a 1994 American gothic horror vampire film directed by Neil Jordan, based on Anne Rice's 1976 novel of the same name, and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. It focuses on Lestat (Cruise) and Louis (Pitt), beginning with Louis's transformation into a vampire by Lestat in 1791. The film chronicles their time together, and their turning of ten-year-old Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) into a vampire. The narrative is framed by a present-day interview, in which Louis tells his story to a San Francisco reporter. The supporting cast features Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas, and Stephen Rea.
Interview With The Vampire The Vampire Chronicles Dual Audio 22
In modern-day San Francisco, reporter Daniel Molloy interviews Louis de Pointe du Lac, who claims to be a vampire. Louis describes his human life as a wealthy plantation owner in 1791 Spanish Louisiana. Despondent following the death of his wife and unborn child, he drunkenly wanders the waterfront of New Orleans one night and is attacked by the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt. Lestat senses Louis's dissatisfaction with life and offers to turn him into a vampire. Louis accepts, but quickly comes to regret it. While Lestat revels in the hunt and killing of humans, Louis resists his instinct to kill, instead drinking animal blood to sustain himself.
Eventually, amid an outbreak of plague in New Orleans, Louis feeds on a little girl whose mother died in the plague. To entice Louis to stay with him, Lestat turns the dying girl, Claudia, into a vampire. Together, they raise her as a daughter. Louis has a love for Claudia, while Lestat spoils and treats her more as a pupil, training her to become a merciless killer. Thirty years pass, and Claudia matures psychologically but remains a little girl in appearance and continues to be treated as such by Lestat. When she realizes that she will never grow older or become a mature woman, she is furious with Lestat and tells Louis that they should leave him. She tricks Lestat into drinking the "dead blood" of twin boys whom she killed by overdose with laudanum, which weakens Lestat, and then slits his throat. Though Louis is shocked and upset, he helps Claudia dump Lestat's body in a swamp. They spend weeks planning a voyage to Europe to search for other vampires, but Lestat returns on the night of their departure, having survived on the blood of swamp creatures. Lestat attacks them, but Louis sets him on fire, allowing them to escape to their ship and depart.
After traveling around Europe and the Mediterranean but finding no other vampires, Louis and Claudia settle in Paris in September 1870. Louis encounters vampires Santiago and Armand by chance. Armand invites Louis and Claudia to his coven, the Théâtre des Vampires, where vampires stage theatrical horror shows for humans. On their way out of the theater, Santiago reads Louis's mind and suspects that Louis and Claudia murdered Lestat. Armand warns Louis to send Claudia away for her own safety, and Louis stays with Armand to learn about the meaning of being a vampire. Claudia demands that Louis turn a human woman, Madeleine, into a vampire to be her new protector and companion, and he reluctantly complies. Shortly thereafter, the Parisian vampires abduct the three of them and punish them for Lestat's murder, imprisoning Louis in a coffin and trapping Claudia and Madeleine in a chamber, where sunlight burns them to ash. Armand does nothing to prevent this, but the next day he frees Louis. Seeking revenge, Louis returns to the theater at dawn and sets it on fire, killing all the vampires including Santiago. Armand arrives in time to help Louis escape the sunrise, and again offers him a place by his side. Louis rejects Armand and leaves, unable to accept Armand's way of life which involve forgetting the past and knowing Armand had allowed Claudia's murder.
Filming took place primarily in New Orleans and in London, with limited location shooting done in San Francisco and Paris.[17] Louis's plantation was a combination of primarily Destrehan Plantation, just west[18] of New Orleans, and Oak Alley Plantation in nearby Vacherie.[19] The depiction of 18th- and early-19th-century New Orleans was achieved with a combination of location shooting in the French Quarter of New Orleans and filming on a purpose-built waterfront set along the Mississippi river.[20][21] Production then moved to London, where interior sets were constructed at Pinewood Studios.[22] The sets designed by Dante Ferretti included the interiors of Louis, Lestat and Claudia's New Orleans townhouse, Claudia and Louis's Paris hotel suite, the Théâtre des Vampires (built on Pinewood's 007 Stage), and the catacombs where the Parisien vampires live.[23] Shooting took place in San Francisco, mainly on the Golden Gate Bridge, with the external façade of Louis's hotel located at the intersection of Taylor Street, Market Street, and Golden Gate Avenue.[21] In Paris the exterior and lobby of the Opera Garnier were dressed to film Louis and Claudia's arrival at their hotel in Paris.
Visual effects were overseen by Stan Winston and his team, while the newly founded Digital Domain was responsible for creating the digital effects under Visual Effects Supervisor Robert Legato.[25][26] Director Neil Jordan was initially hesitant to use Stan Winston Studios, because they had gained a reputation for specializing in large-scale animatronics and CGI with Jurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgment Day; Interview with the Vampire was going to require mostly makeup effects.[9] Winston designed the characters' vampire appearances and makeup effects, including a technique for stenciling translucent blue veins on the actors' faces.[27] This required the actors to hang upside down for 30 minutes, so that the blood would rush to their heads and cause their veins to protrude, enabling the makeup artists to trace realistic patterns.[6]
Digital effects were used mainly to add small details or to enhance certain physical effects, like the burning of the New Orleans set or the burning of Louis's plantation, whereby CGI flames were imposed on a miniature of the house.[25] The most difficult digital effects to illustrate were Louis and Claudia's transformations into vampires, which were technologically very advanced for the time.[27] The scene where Claudia cuts Lestat's throat was achieved by transferring from Tom Cruise bleeding from a prosthetic wound to an animatronic model designed to 'wither' as it bled out, enhanced with CGI blood.[28] Winston also sculpted the rough model for the charred remains of Claudia and Madeleine, using archival photographs of victims from Hiroshima for inspiration.[28]
Thrill and action collide in this newly released film. When a doctor with a rare blood disease attempts to cure himself, the result is a bit more sinister. Jared Leto stars as the "living vampire" Morbius, who becomes a foe of Spider-Man.
It hasn't even been a year since a plantation owner named Louis lost his wife in childbirth. Both his wife and the infant died, and now he has lost his will to live. A vampire named Lestat takes a liking to Louis and offers him the chance to become a creature of the night: a vampire. Louis accepts, and Lestat drains Louis' mortal blood and then replaces it with his own, turning Louis into a vampire. Louis must learn from Lestat the ways of the vampire.
We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks--as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . . He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir--young, romantic, cultivated--to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life . . . learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings . . . to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures. He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him . . . We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire--all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child--and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court . . . night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death--a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below . . . We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their future can be . . . We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagining . . . to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them to the doors of the Théâtre des Vampires--the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within . . . to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled . . . In its unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, Interview with the Vampire bears witness of a literary imagination of the first order. 2ff7e9595c
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