Interview with the Vampire

Anne Rice's novel, which this film adapts, is written against Stoker's, and the film keeps the argument. Stoker's Dracula is seen only from outside, through the documents of the people hunting him, and is never given an interior life. Interview with the Vampire is the same creature narrating: a vampire who explains what it is like, at length, to a journalist with a tape recorder. Both works use the testimony format, and that is the direct inheritance. What Rice adds is the point of view, and the film is built entirely on it.

Anne Rice wrote the screenplay herself, from the first novel of her own sequence. She objected publicly to the casting of Lestat and then reversed herself in a paid advertisement after seeing the film, which is an unusually well documented case of an author's involvement.