Neil Jordan on Restoring ‘Interview With the Vampire’ for 4K and Why the Film Didn’t Have Jump Scares

Thirty-plus years after its original release, Neil Jordan’s Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise starring gothic vampire movie “Interview with the Vampire” is available in 4K and on 4K UHD Blu-ray.

The bonus features include never-before-seen deleted scenes, as well as two special features: “Eternal Night and Deadly Light,” where Jordan and film editor Mick Audsley discuss the approach to cinematography and the gothic romanticism achieved by director of photography Philippe Rousselot. Another feature, “Interview with the Vampire: Creating the World,” with Jordan and production designer Dante Ferretti showcases the detailed sets, augmented locations and costumes of the film.

Marking the film’s release in 4K, Jordan spoke with Variety about the release, the deleted scenes and whether he’d ever consider shooting for Imax.

It’s been 32 years since the film’s release. What does it mean to finally have the film in 4K?

We can restore the movie to the way we originally shot it. The last time I saw the film was on the 25th anniversary. I asked Warner Bros. for a 35mm print. But either the cinema or the projector lights were so low, or the print had been so degraded or something, it was so dark I couldn’t see the film. So to be able to restore it, and to scan it frame by frame, is just a wonderful opportunity. I’m glad it exists so you can basically bring a movie to life again and remind yourself why you shot it in the first place.

We have to talk about the deleted scenes, like the moment with Louis in the church and inside the confessional as the priest is telling him about the capacity to forgive…

Why is that not in the finished movie? I don’t know. I swear to God, I was looking at it with Mick Audsley, the editor and I was saying, “Why did we not include that? It’s dramatic. it’s bloody, it’s tortured — it’s everything the movie is. Maybe it was for reasons of length. Or maybe the character Louis — his sense of suffering and his declarations of suffering — were all becoming a bit too much.

This film has had a lasting impact, and then there was the TV show. Why do you think “Interview With the Vampire” has such lasting appeal?

Anne Rice changed the perception of this thing that doesn’t exist. She took the story of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” that image of Dracula and of the vampire. She placed it in the 18th and 19th centuries. She set it in this glamorous French Louisiana background and made the question of eternity the focus. What would it be like if you were given the gift of eternal life? What would it be like to live forever? How bored would you get with your partner — be it Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt or Kirsten Dunst? Most people can’t survive a marriage. How would you survive eternity with somebody else? She retouched the archetype of a vampire. It affected everything. It definitely affected the “Twilight” novels. In some ways, it made them far too cutesy and Heathcliffian in a way. But Anne’s stuff is still dangerous, and it deserves to be continually explored.

How did you keep that danger in the film?

I saw it as a film about a doomed family. That’s what I thought was the center of it. That’s why I thought the part of Claudia is so important. In the book, she’s about six, or a bit younger. When she was 11 or 12, she still was a child. If you go to 14 or 15, you’re talking about a different kind of period of development. To me, it was a story about two men who are obsessed with each other. One tries to leave, and the other says, “OK.” He creates the child from the two of them. They’re stuck with each other, and she’s stuck with them and she doesn’t know why she became this thing.

That, to me, was a fascinating story and that was a story that would sustain an entire movie.

The problem with it was I found, is that because we’re telling a story from the heart, from the perspective of the monster — from Louis’s perspective, and also from Lestat’s perspective in a way — the studio kept saying to me, “Oh, is it scary?” I had to say to them, “Look, you’re not going to get jump scares out of this because these people — you can’t kill them. You can harm them, you can burn them or expose them to daylight. But you can’t even chop off their heads effectively. How do you scare the scariest creature that has ever existed? You can’t. So it becomes something different. It becomes about dread. It becomes about what Anne wrote about: the punishment of time. But that’s perhaps not the best subject for a horror movie in general. That’s what I had to grapple with, to make it kind of terrifying. The terror had to come from within, or the terror had to come from the ideas of these characters themselves.

So much of that dread comes from the visual language of the film — the way it’s directed, the cinematography, the lighting. What was one of the most challenging sequences for you to shoot?

The big stuff is not that difficult. We were lucky enough to be at a period before CGI had taken over the world and taken over cinema. Everything that we saw in the film had to be photographed. We built that New Orleans set, and we burned it. We had cameras across the Mississippi. It probably was one of the last times when you could actually do that.

CGI was just in its infancy, and we had a great special effects supervisor, Rob Legato, who had just set up Digital Domain with James Cameron, but that whole movement of cinema into something that is not essentially unreal hadn’t begun yet — or at least I wasn’t aware of it.

The most difficult scene to shoot is where Tom has that prostitute in his room, and she gradually realizes that she’s with two vampires. He puts her in a coffin, and Lestat is trying to force Louis to admit who he is. That was a difficult set of scenes to shoot. I think we went on for about eight days. That was the essence of the movie: Lestat getting Louis to embrace the monster within him.

That just reminds me of one of the other deleted scenes, the ones the one at the beginning, where Lestat is sitting down and then he gets up and he’s got the bullet hole through his hand. Why did that get left on the cutting room floor?

Maybe there was something slightly theatrical about it that you know that didn’t deserve to stay within the film. I don’t remember why these scenes were not in the final cut. I just know that the first time I showed the movie, saying to David Geffen and to Warner about this, “Look, this film is too long and David insisted on previewing what we had shot in front of an audience. The audience watched it, said, “Oh, the film is too long.” I had already worked out how to compress certain things. But it’s I’m glad those scenes are available to people and fans of the movie to see.

I want to go back to format for a second. Audiences love seeing movies in Imax, even Imax 70mm. If you were making this movie today, would you consider shooting it in Imax 70mm?

I spoke with Christopher Nolan last night. I was asking him about that. I’m not sure I would be able to wheel those bloody cameras around. I do like to be able to hold a camera on my shoulder, I love 35mm. I love the way you hear the film whirring through the gate. I’m not sure I’d be able to handle Imax. If I ever get to make another big studio movie, I’ll definitely look into it. I will.

What would you say to somebody that has never seen your “Interview with the Vampire?

I’d say it’s a companion piece to an earlier movie I made, “The Company of Wolves.”