Interview with the Vampire Paper free essay sample

Summary Applications Paper: Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles I have enjoyed many vampire movies over the years, long before they became the popular pop-culture genre they have become due to the success of The Twilight Saga films. One movie I have enjoyed viewing many times since its debut in 1994 is Interview with the Vampire. This film is an adaptation of the book Interview with the Vampire written by Anne Rice in 1973 and published in 1976. The movie was directed by Neil Jordan who also co-wrote the script with Anne Rice. Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles is the story of Louis (Brad Pitt), portraying a depressed man, as he tells of his life as a vampire to a radio reporter (Christian Slater) in modern time San Francisco. It is the story of the coming of age, vampire style. Louis starts out by telling how he was turned into a vampire by Lestat (Tom Cruise) and how Lestat tried to teach him how to be a vampire and the art of feeding. Louis, however, could never get used to killing humans and thus learned to sustain himself on a diet of animals. Louis becomes very bitter and enraged toward Lestat for making him a vampire. Lestat then tries to reduce the bitterness and anger of Louis by giving him a family. He does this by turning a young girl, Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), and therefore giving Louis the child he had once lost. Claudia eventually also turns bitter and angry toward Lestat as she comes to mature, yet she still looks and is treated as a child. Lois and Claudia then try to destroy Lestat and escape on a ship to Europe to find other vampires. After they arrive in Europe they come across the Theatre des Vampires in Paris where they meet Armand (Antonio Banderas) and his troupe of theatrical vampires. These other vampires eventually find out what Claudia and Louis have done to Lestat and are bound by oath to avenge Lestat’s undoing. The theme of Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles is the loss of innocence, morality, and mortality. Louis comes to learn from his years as a vampire that self-preservation will always trump morality. In the end he admits that he is undead, likes human blood, and ends up letting go of his morality and guilt as portrayed in this quote from the movie Interview with the Vampire-The Vampire Chronicles: â€Å"That morning, I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can’t recall any sunrise before it. I watched its whole magnificence for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sunlight, and set out to become what I became† (Interview with The Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles). Photography Throughout this film one feels that they are watching the true events of Louis’ 200 year undead existence in many well-known cities around the world. This makes the film seem even more real in that the audience can relate the landmarks of those cities, such as the catacombs of the theatre company, to what is happening in the film and to their current time and locations. The realism is superb in this aspect. It makes us feel the film is deep, interesting, and fun. The film is also shot from the point of view of the audience even though the story is being told by Louis. A lot of the camera shots seem to be long shots and stay in the footlights of the screen as if the viewer were in the audience of a play (Rice). Even the characters seem to enter from the left or right as they would on a stage and then meet in the center for medium shots and their dialogue (Rice). Yet, in order to make the victimization scenes show the viciousness and lack of conscience of the attacker the camera focuses in on the eyes of the vampire (Rice). This made the scenes seem more powerful and deserving of staid treatment. In these scenes we start to see how the photography of the film supports the theme of innocence lost and what immortality is all about for a vampire. Not only survival, but what one will give up to attain greatness, power, or independence. The cinematographer of this film was Philippe Rousselot. His cinematography â€Å"creates an exceptionally inviting, varied look for this nocturnal story, and special visual effects are smoothly integrated into the action. The makeup that adds pale eyes, ghostly pallor and tiny blue veins to the principals faces manages to create a frisson of danger without marring the actors attractiveness† (Maslin). Rousselot used dark-lensing, a way to attain low key shots and thus created a huge contrast to the sets and costumes (Maslin). This made the characters seem as though they were the only important things in the otherwise dark and gloomy shots. Mise-en-scene The mise-en-scene of Interview with the Vampire is relatively theatrical in nature. Long shots are used for much of the movie and the intense close-up shots are retained for the extremely moving victimization scenes where the camera closes in on the eyes of the vampire attacking its victim and what the vampire is feeling thru its eyes (Rice). Also because of the darkness of most of the settings within the movie and the lushness of the immediate sets and costuming one gets the feeling of the importance of the characters and where they are at. The character proxemics and intimate distance of the shot when Claudia curls up with Louis in his coffin, shows the feelings and morality that Louis is fighting so hard to hang onto in his immortality and the loss of the innocence Claudia has accepted. Movement The movements in this film are nothing short of greatness in my mind. One of the opening scenes proves how powerful movement can really become in life and film. The radio reporter truly did not believe Louis was a vampire until Louis moved to turn on the light and was then seated before him before the camera could even focus on what movement had occurred. Louis’ extremely un-human speed convinced the reporter that Louis was definitely not an everyday human. When we need to feel sorrow and awe, such as in Louis’ last and first sunrise scene, movement is slow and steady until coming to a halt focusing on the beautiful sunrise. This puts the audience in the place and time with Louis and makes them feel what he is feeling. The awe and beauty of life and living verses the future of immortality. We are as an audience experiencing first hand Louis’ loss of innocence and coming to realize what he has done in accepting Lestat’s invitation to join him for eternity to walk the Earth and never die. Another scene that I believe truly shows the greatness of movement in this film is the scene at the Theatres des Vampires when the troupe closes in on their unsuspecting victim. The slow and fluid movements turn into one of a fast, feeding frenzy and completely make the viewer feel the unexpected dread and horror the victim must have experienced. Editing The scene in Interview with the Vampire that shows how well the editing worked for this film is the one also mentioned above where Louis moves so quickly from the light switch to the chair. The camera first shows Louis walking towards the light switch and then zooms in to only the switch, cuts away to a close up of the light being on, then immediately to a close up of Louis seated in the chair at the table all in about five seconds of film. Thanks also to the editing for making the vampires transitions from human like to bestial smooth and natural in appearance. There are several little editing issues that were pointed out to me by moviemistakes. com and after looking for them I indeed found them to be true. They include: when Lestat and Louis are fighting in the car at toward the end of the film and , therefore no one should have been driving the car, yet you see a black shrouded person in the driver’s seat, when Lestat cuts the prostitutes wrist at the hotel and her blood drips on the couch but when she is upright there is no blood, and when Lestat bites Louis atop the ships mast and then drops him in the river and when Louis is walking out of the river you can see telephone poles and telephones were not even invented at the time this event was taking place (Sandys). These editing issues obviously did not take away from my enjoyment of the film, nor did I even notice them until looking for them. Sound Elliot Goldenthal scored the 1994 film Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles and did a wonderful job portraying the feeling and times of the movie along with its gothic nature (Ruiz). The soundtrack is consists of mostly works written exclusively for the film by Mr. Goldenthal with the exception of the piece performed by Guns N’ Roses and written by the Rolling Stones called â€Å"Sympathy for the Devil,† that plays during the movies ending credits according to musicfromthemovies. om (Ruiz). One also notices in this film that often times Lestat is very loud and forceful and has a fast tempo which is intended to show his threatening and intense nature as well as the increasing tension in the film. This upbeat almost psychotic music is heard when Lestat attacks Louis for the second time in the cemetery. At first we hear the calm, peaceful sound of crickets and a loon, and then the volume increases exponentially to the sound of the attack of Lestat. This extreme differentiation in sounds gives the audience a feeling of unease and a knowing of something unexpected and dreadful will soon happen. Also, in this same scene after the two fell to the ground we hear the sound of a drum replicating a heartbeat letting the audience know that at that time Louis is alive and extremely scared because of the speed of the heartbeat. Eventually the heartbeat ceases and this helps us to understand that Louis the human is no more. Louis is now a vampire. The sound of Louis’ heartbeat also gets the theme across about our humanity and mortality. It was the loss of Louis’ innocence and mortality that caused his heart to stop. Acting I was not a true fan of the acting done throughout most of Interview with the Vampire. Brad Pitt as Louis does a fine job in showing the grief, the anguish, and agony in the realization of what he had become. No matter how hard Louis fought what he had become, the realism was he had become immortal and there was no turning back. His innocence and, therefore, morals were gone forever. However, I believe choosing Tom Cruise to play Lestat was the worst decision made for this film when it comes to the acting. Some aspects of his portrayal of Lestat seemed really good, but at times he seems unbelievable in this part. I noticed this most in the scene where Lestat and Louis attack the woman and her poodles and Louis finally has an outburst directed at Lestat. When Cruise as Lestat is thrown against the tree and taunting Louis it seems he is very out of character in his laughing and the way the words are spoken. Kirsten Dunst as Claudia is by far the best casting decision made for this film. She plays up the vulnerability of her childlike stature, yet also captures completely the air of being a woman trapped in the body of a child. She can be quiet and demure one moment and crazy and demanding the next just as a child is. As the author of the book, Anne Rice, says in her interview â€Å"The actress showed incredible intelligence and cunning, and yet a child’s tragic vulnerability and heart rendering capacity to be disappointed†¦. She drew us into her motives for violence and offered us a deeper understanding of all the moral rules given us, or created by us† (Rice). The loss of the childlike innocence is portrayed in full by Kirsten Dunst as Claudia. Drama The drama contained within Interview with the Vampire is exceptional for portraying what is occurring and in what time period. This is especially important in this film because we are seeing two hundred years of Louis’ life as he tells it. The costuming was consistently in proper time period as were the backdrops and scene styles. We see that Claudia is growing older in her thinking due to her attire going from that of a child of the period to that of scaled down versions of adult period clothing. This helps the viewer realize subconsciously that she, even though she looks like a child, has become a woman trapped in a child’s body. It shows symbolically the loss of her innocence and the true loss of her mortality. The costume designer, Sandy Powell, had to carefully recreate the costumes to reflect not only the time period being portrayed but also the characters (â€Å"Phoenix Filmography†). She used cold colors like blue and silver to represent Lestat, earthly colors such as brown for Louis, and innocent, feminine, and childlike colors of pink, lilacs, and other pastels for Claudia in order to showcase their thoughts and attitudes (â€Å"Phoenix Filmography†). The detail given to the Theatre des Vampires is another part of the time period drama, color, and symbolic function that sticks out to me. It is an actual theatre that existed and the appearance is that of a true theatre of the time period. It symbolizes the loss of those vampires’, who pretend to be human actors on a stage, mortality. They are acting as if they are vampires because they miss their mortality and human traits and actually resent the fact they are indeed immortal. If this film were to be performed on stage it would be fairly easy to get the storyline and plot across. It would not be as graphic as the film version, but I believe it would be a good candidate for a theatrical presentation, because it is quite theatrical in its film presentation. Story In the storyline of Interview with the Vampire we follow a central character, Louis, throughout the story of his two hundred years of being a vampire. The story is told in sequential order and follows Freytag’s Pyramid as discussed by Giannetti (Giannetti 341). This appears to be a rather classic realistic film to most viewers and the main genre is horror or suspense. We as an audience see where the story is taking us by means of the plot because it happens in chronological order. There are several plots occurring at once in this film. The first is Louis as the protagonist and the reporter as the antagonist trying to interview him. Louis finds himself trying to warn the reporter of the perils of being a vampire so as to keep him from the same fate which is their loss of morality and mortality. Unfortunately that is not what Louis accomplishes. He actually makes the reporter want to become a vampire and in the end actually asks Louis to make him one. Louis has failed. The main plot of the film is for Louis as the protagonist again to attain peace with what he has become. The antagonist in this plot is, of course, Lestat who tries to make Louis surrender to his vampire state and be like him. This is the dilemma that Louis faces throughout the rest of the film. Can he get away from Lestat and hold on to some form of his human morals and still be a vampire? We then watch the plot unfurl throughout the film, all the while Louis struggles with his internal conflict of human morals against what he has become as well as the external conflict of Lestat trying to force him to give into his vampire nature. The climax is attained when Louis watches Claudia kill Lestat. He changes then forever and realizes that he can in no way return to his human self and that he must accept his new life as a vampire. From here the story is over from the standpoint of Louis trying to change what his nature is. He realizes the best thing he can do to try and have some modicum of peace is to warn others that life is more precious than he originally felt and that being immortal will not change that feeling of guilt or loss for anyone. His goal is to warn people through the reporter. This, alas, does not happen either as Lestat kills the reporter before Louis’ story is told to the world. Writing Because the author of the book, Anne Rice, helped to write the script with Neil Jordan, the director of the film version of Interview with the Vampire, most of the story remains the same between the two portrayals. Some of the changes made include the reason for Louis’ want for death. In the book it was the loss of his brother, where in the movie it is the loss of his wife and child. This worked better for the movie because it gave a new meaning to the relationship and importance of Claudia’s character. Claudia was also a bit different in the book as opposed to the movie. In the book she was only five or six years old when turned, whereas in the movie she is around ten or eleven years old. This was done because it would have been nearly impossible to find that young of an actor to portray such a complicated and ever changing role in this movie. The point of view of the book versus the movie is also a little different. The book is told almost entirely in the first person narrative, whereas the movie is told from a third person point of view, as if were are watching Louis life unfold. Not that he is telling us the story, but that the audience is watching it as it happens. The only portion of the film that is in the first person narrative is the opening scenes with the reporter where we see Louis explaining himself to the reporter. The ending was perfect for the creation of a sequel as well. We see that Lestat is not dead and that Louis is still looking for complete closure of his humanity. Ideology This film in many different ways expresses its values to me directly through the character of Louis. He is sad and mournful, longing for death as a way to escape the pain of his human life. Because of this he is found by Lestat and succumbs to the idea of being a vampire. Louis feels this will release him form the pain and suffering he has been longing to escape from as a human. He quickly finds out he is wrong and spends the rest of the next two hundred years as a vampire fighting against himself and his very nature. This shows me that we all are part monster at times. Because he is eventually able to feed on humans and not just animals and because he actually does love Claudia not all of his human traits are lost nor is his guilt. He represents the struggle between nature and nurture, morality and immorality, mortality and immortality. The common view of a vampire is that of an evil monster who kills just to kill, where this film shows us a different side of the vampire myth. It shows them as more natural beings that simply kill because it is kill or be killed. It also shows how some are different than others in that they do not wish to accept this natural part of their existence but rather choose to fight it. Critique Overall, as I said to begin with, I find this film to be highly enjoyable from beginning to end. It is a true vision of vampire, gothic, realistic film and I believe it will be enjoyed by many generations to come. It’s only shortcoming in my eyes was the casting as Tom Cruise as Lestat. I to this day do not feel he was a good fit for the part. He did as well as I would expect him to with the part, but a better choice would have been Johnny Depp from my point of view. The actor needed to be more sinister and dark than what Tom Cruise could possibly ever portray on screen. The theme was in the foreground throughout the film and was easily understood by me. Louis and Claudia were in constant turmoil inside and out because of their loss of mortality and innocence. What follows is a critique from James Berardinelli written in 1994: â€Å"As horror films go, Interview with the Vampire has the right look. Atmosphere may not be everything, but its importance cannot be understated. With its gothic settings, superlative makeup (by Stan Winston), and sterling miniatures work, this film can claim visuals nearly on par with those of Kenneth Branaghs stylish Frankenstein. There are other parallels between these films, not the least of which is their equally erratic pacing. However, Interviews plot is probably more coherent and its characters somewhat better realized. There are flaws to be found here even for those not specifically looking but for the simple horrific pleasure offered, they can be set aside, if not entirely ignored† (Berardinelli). Conclusion In conclusion, I have found that Interview with the Vampire is a deeper portrayal of our daily inner battles between good and evil and that it portrays visually and artistically our worries about innocence lost and the loss of our morality as well as our views on life and immortality. It is realistic in its settings and keeps viewers on the edges of their seats wondering from scene to scene if it will turn out as they think it should.