Adapting a beloved book to screen is a tricky proposition. On one hand the book is beloved for a reason and one wants to retain the things about it which its readers enjoyed in the first place. On the other hand, film and television are very different media from fiction and have different limitations and strengths from prose. They should be different by nature but an adaptation is often deemed successful by how "faithful" it is to the source material.
At the recent Celebration of Life for author Anne Rice, one of the speakers struck a somewhat sour note in an otherwise joyous occasion. He said something to the effect that we fans can still hope for accurate adaptations of Rice's work, apparently a dig at the AMC shows which have varying levels of fidelity to their source material. The best and most high-profile of the three shows, Interview with the Vampire, famously makes some bold changes from the book on which it is based.
It got me thinking that despite the popularity of her books, the work of Anne Rice has seldom been adapted for screen or television-which is sad because Anne Rice LOVED both of these media and would share her thoughts on movies and shows she enjoyed frequently online, in print, and often in her books themselves through the pens of her characters. Sadly out of a catalogue of about thirty-seven novels only the following had been adapted prior to the AMC deal: a film based on her religious book Christ Out of Egypt, a cable miniseries based on her historic book The Feast of All Saints, and a uniquely terrible comedy adaptation of her erotic novel Exit to Eden. And, most successfully, the 1994 adaptation of Interview with the Vampire which starred Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
Interview had a tortuous almost twenty-year journey to its first adaption which included a lot of close calls with potentially disastrous productions such as one that would have starred Cher in a gender-swapped version of the Louis role. The 1994 adaption was directed by Neil Jordan and at least partially written by Rice herself. The movie for the most part keeps the book’s story intact.
While it cut out some side plots like the business with the Freniere plantation, Lestat's secret fledgling, and the trip to Romania, the movie is about as faithful an adaption you could get in a feature-length film. It was also a big hit and remains a cult classic to this day. It was eventually followed by The Queen of the Damned which was not made by any of the people associated with the first movie nor with the same budget, thoughtfulness or general level of quality as Jordan's movie. From an adaptation point of view, it not only (mostly) skipped the second book in the series, The Vampire Lestat, but attempted to cram a very long and complex novel into a single feature film.
The rights to the Vampire Chronicles then returned to Rice and lay dormant like an emotionally exhausted vampire in one of her books. In the 2010's there were regular breathless stories about the Chronicles being purchased by various different production companies or streaming services or attached to different creatives like Orci and Kurtzman or even Bryan Fuller (as much as I love the AMC show, can you imagine a Vampire Chronicles show from Bryan Fuller, the showrunner of the incomparable Hannibal and American Gods?) At one point there was even a bizarre rumor that Robert Downey Jr. was attached to an adaptation of the fourth Vampire Chronicle, The Tale of the Body Thief. Ultimately, it was announced that AMC-the home network of The Walking Dead franchise-would be making a series based on the books, and that they were starting with Interview.
I was surprised and disappointed. Why we doing this again? We have a good adaptation already. Let’s get to stuff we haven’t seen on screen yet! I want my MTV Lestat!
Then I saw the cast, most of whom were low-profile actors or unknowns. I started having Queen of the Damned panic. Is this going to be some cheap-o Hot Topic version of my beloved Chronicles?
Jacob Anderson is Louis? Is Gray Worm really up for this role? How does a Louis-of-color change the story particularly since he is an antebellum Southern plantation owner? Who is this Australian rando playing Lestat? Daniel is being played by Eric Bogosian, an actor pushing 70?
Then I learned the time period was being changed from the 18th century to the early 20th century. Claudia was being aged up even more than she was in the 1994 version. (My dream for Claudia has always been a VFX version mo-capped by Glenn Close.) There were lots of seemingly cavalier changes to the story. My Spider-sense was tingling hard.
And then I watched it. And I watched it. And I watched it again.
Not only is Interview with the Vampire a really excellent television show but it is also a masterful adaptation of Rice's novel. It should be studied by people who are looking to adapt a literary work for the screen. It is full of very smart choices.
The show does the magic trick of being extremely faithful in theme and character without being slavish to the details. Most importantly, it justifies its own existence which is a threshold many book adaptations do not meet. It even maintains some of the storylines dropped from the 1994 movie...and at least a shout out to the Freniere family. And all those “cavalier” changes? In almost every case they enrich the story.
Who knew that Jacob Anderson, a musician best known for playing a tertiary character on Game of Thrones (another work which wrestled with the perils of adaptation, sometimes successfully sometimes not) with a limited emotional palette would have this magnificent performance in him? It’s genuinely delightful and surprising to me to see that he is capable of so much that I could not see from his past work. I've never been so happy to be wrong about a piece of casting.
Instead of being a white Creole slave-owner living in Louisiana like Book Louis, Show Louis is a black Creole New Orleans brothel owner in the infamous Storyville district of New Orleans, essentially trading one iconic New Orleans time period for another, and avoiding tiresome and toxic depictions of slavery while still maintaining Louis' as someone morally compromised by human exploitation even before he becomes a vampire, which is a thematically important element to his character. Interestingly, Louis refers to having had a plantation-owning ancestor who in the broad strokes seems to resemble the pre-vampire Book Louis, as though he is a descendant of that same character.
Show Louis is also explicitly a gay man, whereas this was buried under subtext and narrative hand-waiving in the book and movie. The intersection of his blackness, queerness, and vampirism make him a compelling character and serves the larger themes of the book about marginalization and otherness and provide this version of the character with very rich and earned conflicts. For example, his relationship with Lestat which had always been defined by its inequality is now complicated by the racial inequality of turn-of-the century New Orleans. Indeed, the instability of the trio of Lestat, Louis, and Claudia is now underscored by the fact that Louis and Claudia are now both black characters.
Another interesting choice is aging up Daniel Malloy, the interviewer who is only referred to as "the boy" in the book but later named in The Queen of the Damned. In the show's first season we learned that Louis and Daniel had actually already had an attempt at an interview in the 1970's which ended in half-remembered disaster, likely resembling the ending of the published novel and movie. The premise for the show is that Louis wants a re-do of said interview and has a genuine need to embark on an "odyssey of recollection." He approaches this second interview with a sincere desire to accurately tell his story and reckon with his past.
We flashback to this first interview several times in the first season and more so in the second season in which we learn the true series of events which transpired fifty years earlier and it is a truly wonderful payoff to what seemed to be an odd change to the Daniel character. This is also a lovely homage in both the time period and some of the dialogue is directly lifted from the novel, as though Show Louis' first interview was very close in character to that of the book.
Speaking of fidelity, another thing that this series brings to life that was only ever tangentially addressed in the books is the idea of point of view and the reliability of the narrator. Interview with the Vampire is the only novel in the series that is from Louis' perspective. Most of the others are from Lestat's point of view in a first-person narrative. Others are from the perspective of different characters as relayed through Lestat or another character. Ever petty, Lestat devotes a whole chapter in his book The Vampire Lestat presenting the events of Interview from his point of view, where he flat-out disputes his characterization and some of the events Louis had recounted. His distaste for Louis' "miserable memoir" is a running joke in the Chronicles. And based on the trailer for season three, it seems Show Lestat isn't any more of a fan of Interview than Book Lestat.
The show, however, makes the idea of Louis being an unreliable narrator a major plot point, particularly in its second season. In fact, one of the taglines of season two is "Memory is a monster." Things that seemed to be plot holes in season one are revealed to be lapses in his memory which calls his whole account into question. Compare that to the 1994 film which leaves all of Louis' story unquestioned. Show Daniel is a much more active, skeptical interviewer who frequently challenges and pushes back on the account, creating a real tension in those scenes.
While the bulk of the first two season are from Louis' point of view, we do see sections that are from Claudia's diaries and even a scene or two from Armand's perspective. There are potentially even some scenes which are not clearly identified as being from any particular character's point of view, such as the very Hollywood Loustat reunion scene, which for all we know could have been the invention of one of Daniel's editors to give "closure" to the story. It's important to note that the analogous scene in the novel is a scene Lestat specifically claims is made-up. Season three will likely be all or mostly from Lestat's perspective and will likely provide some alternative versions of events depicted in seasons one and two. and perhaps an offhand reference to this scene having been fabricated. Either way, the show seems to relish in keeping us on our toes.
One of the challenges of adapting the Vampire Chronicles is that every novel is based on a character recounting the story’s events, sometimes there are multiple levels of this with characters recounting tales told by other characters. This is particularly true of IWTV, the conceit of which is that the text of the book is literally meant to be a transcription of an interview session. Therefore, some of the book scenes have the quality of characters quickly recounting recalled events with a bit of vagueness as to the specifics. While that works as a literary device, it’s not really satisfying on screen and the thing that this adaption does best is to bring the characters and their relationships to vivid and very specific life.
The way that the show handles these relationships might be the greatest change of all but I would less call it an alteration of what is on the page but an expansion on it. While the characters and relationships in the Vampire Chronicles have always been compelling, the show creators have taken every relationship in the book and really mined them to make them more three-dimensional than they ever were in the source material. The dysfunctional and messy relationships between Louis, Lestat, Claudia, Armand, and Daniel are here rendered into vivid, unforgettable detail. Even side characters like Santiago and Madeleine really shine in this version. Even the "decadent" and "useless" vampires in the Theatre des Vampires feel like specific characters, albeit bitchy theater people.
Fans of Rice and her Vampire Chronicles are lucky to have such a miraculously good adaptation. While it may not be traditionally "faithful" it captures the spirit and character of its source material beautifully. I can't help but think that Anne would have fallen in love with it.
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