Tag Archives: Iwtv

Interview with The Vampire script

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@aafmun​ submitted:

Okay, I know that I already submitted stuff to you before, but I think I have discovered something really cool. It seems to me that it’s the original script for the movie. However, I have not dug deep research into it.

Anyways, it’s very VERY morbid compared to the movie and in some parts is more like the book (and others, especially in the beginning, aren’t but are intriguing??).

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@i-want-my-iwtv​ replied: Yes! I’m aware of this version of the script, April 1992, second draft (allegedly, but I bet there were a lot more drafts). Pretty easy to find, and this is the one that is probably most commonly printed out for the actors to sign, when you see autographed copies up on eBay.

It is a really fun read, even w/ the slightly ooc dialogue at times, but I can understand that AR was trying to shoehorn in as much canon as she could and I can’t fault her for that goal! And yes, it includes scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut. Some weren’t even filmed 😛

It has little gems in it like the names of Louis’ wife and child who died:

“DIANNE DE POINTE DU LAC 1763 – 1791
INFANT JEAN MARIE – 1791”

^Dianne would have been a little older than Louis, if she died at 28 ;A; And really, “DiANNE”? Nice author cameo, AR. Very smooth ;]

Fortunately for us, some of the filmed scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut still had production stills taken which were used in pre-release publicity (collected them in my #cut scenes tag) like this one:

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^I think this was another early Tryna-Get-This-Dumb-Fledgling-To-Kill-People scene, before Louis ran off to chill in the sewers for a bit.

This version of the script also has a rewrite of the Lestat/Gabrielle waking-up-inside-a-crowded-church scene, but Louis and Claudia w/Lestat instead of Gabrielle!

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lunchiemunchies: #I WOULD’VE LOVED TO SEE THIS EXCHANGE #BECAUSE LOUIS IS LAUGHING AND THAT MAKES LESTAT WANT TO LAUGH #IT WOULD’VE BEEN SUCH A CUTE LITTLE MOMENT #AND A FUNNY SCENE SINCE THEY’D SCARE THE PEOPLE #INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE

Interview with The Vampire script

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novellaqueen:

“It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.” Interview with the Vampire – (1994)

“Even in his cruelest moments, Louis touched
the tenderness in me, seducing me with his staggering dependence, his
infatuation with my every gesture and every spoken word.” – The Vampire Lestat

Source: novellaqueen

Has Anne Rice ever confirmed officially that Claudia=Michele?

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^Stan and Michele Rice on the left, Lestat and Claudia de Lioncourt on the right. As a side note, before this gets into the more serious topic, AR has said she based Lestat on Stan, and there is a story out there that his name was meant to be “Lestan,” but ended up as “Lestat” bc of a typographical error. I don’t have a source on that.

Re: Claudia=Michele?

From the Vampire Companion:

(In the first draft of [IWTV], Rice described Claudia as three or four years old.)… Rice based Claudia’s appearance on her own daughter, Michele, who died at the age of five from leukemia. Claudia even shares Michele’s birthday, September 21.* However, despite the intense tone of suffering and guilt evident in Louis’s telling of the story, Rice insists that she had not been aware that she had included her feelings about Michele’s tragic death. “I never consciously thought about it when I was writing the book,” she says. “I wasn’t conscious of the connection. I knew that I was using the physical beauty of Michele as the model, but Claudia was a fictional character in her own right. The character, the voice, and the things Claudia say have nothing to do with my daughter – but there’s no question that this is the symbolic working out of a terrible grief. What else can it possibly be?”

In the first version of [IWTV], Claudia eventually goes off with three vampire brothers whom she meets in Paris. She does not die. As such, it was as if Rice had attempted to give her daughter a form of immortality. Rice, however, experienced psychological problems that cleared up only after she had rewritten the ending – by killing off Claudia and taking Louis through an experience of intense grieving. This version was much more cathartic for Rice.

*This is mentioned in canon in Claudia’s diary entry in QOTD, which recounts one of her birthdays.

Hit the jump for more, cut for length, not content.

From Premiere Magazine, November 1994:

(sorry, I don’t have a link, I transcribed this from the page)

In real life, Claudia was a nickname for Michele Rice, Anne Rice’s vibrant blond daughter, who had once piled her hair on top of her head, and spoken in a smoky voice like Claudia Cardinale. She was three years old when she developed leukemia, and five when she died, in 1972.

At first, Rice soaked her maternal despair in a steady stream of sixpacks. Then she unleashed her rage unto paper, into what eventually became Interview with the Vampire. Michele was reincarnated as Claudia, the raging woman locked in a child’s body. “Louis was me,” says Rice. “That dark, brooding, melancholy person ripped from Catholic faith and tormented with guilt – that was me. I’d love to be Lestat: the wishful me, the active, the dream, the other one. Louis was the more true, autobiographical portrait of the conflicted and lost and orphaned person. That’s what the book is about. It’s about being orphaned.”

From People Magazine, 12/5/1988:

“Writers write about what obsesses them,” says Rice. “You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I’m writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.“ 

Re: science. As for yourself: you’ve been talking about this for 30 years. Don’t you want to know? Hey- know what you could do? You could surrender to mortal science. Why don’t you surrender?

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♛As Louis once said, as much as your offer might appeal to me, I must regretfully decline.

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I’m only interested in surrendering myself to our own in-house scientists, anyway. Viktor is proof enough of that.

IWTV thoughts

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hedonistbyheart:

i-want-my-iwtv:

murdereratthematinee:

Ok but Claudia called Armand Louis’ “companion” and it’s p obvious that Armand wants to fuck Louis and then she asks for Madeline as a “companion” and this is probably a gross thought cause Madeline is like “I want a daughter who can’t die” and Claudia is (in appearance) a child but could she be a lesbian?

I know she pines after an adult body but could it be more than that? Could she want a woman to sleep with?

This is a fascinating idea and I have thought about it myself quite a bit. 

Possibly a very unpopular opinion but: I don’t think they were sexual w/ each other in the mortal sense, but there was more to them than a mother-daughter relationship.

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[X From Claudia’s Story]

I don’t think Claudia’s pursuit of Madeleine was purely for a platonic mother-daughter relationship. That may have been part of it, and it was how she sold it to Louis because he couldn’t perceive Claudia as more than his daughter or as an adult trapped in a little body who would be capable of being involved in a romantic way with anyone, and she needed him to actually do the work for her since she was unable to perform the Dark Gift herself (and I do think she tried before asking him).  

While it may not have been a relationship in a more conventionally romantic sense (I don’t believe they had anything sexual, in the mortal sense, going on), I do think Claudia/Madeleine was a ship of sorts, more of an emotional relationship. Claudia was the one in control, she was comparatively older and stronger in personality. 

can I hijack/add to this?
I think we can simplify the answer to this question a little if we go by canon, that is: the vampires aren’t actually sexual in the conventional sense, ever. This doesn’t mean that the emotions behind romantic love/sensual love isn’t a factor and I don’t think there’s anything in canon contradicting the idea of the two of them having the kind of sensual relationship the vamps enjoy; sharing blood, kissing etc. However I do think Madeleine was too mad to have any real awareness beyond wanting her daughter back in some form and while Claudia needed an assistant, a ‘companion’, I personally think she was too angry/bitter at this point to have room for Madeleine in her heart at all. If she wasn’t so hurt, I think she could have loved her in the typical taboo-defying way all Anne’s vamps seem to do. There isn’t really any definitive labels you could put on them as it is, beyond ‘vampire’ – as I read it anyway^^.

Just my two cents.

Good addition, good points! 

I think Madeleine was fairly mad as a new vampire, and if she had been given more time, she might have regained some sanity under Claudia’s tutelage. Yes, Claudia was a bit angry/bitter herself as Armand had his claws in Louis at the time. Claudia had to rush the acquisition of Madeleine because she sensed that the rug was about to be pulled out from under her.

Over time, Claudia might have gained a sense of peace with Madeleine, in guiding her through things, and then the two of them could have explored the world together. And possibly shared that canon sensuality that Ricean vampires can have, which is free of taboos, as you pointed out.