Anne Rice Interview With A Vampire Writer

Anne Rice  talks about creating Interview With A Vampire from the idea to the book.  Raised in a fertile breeding ground for fantasy and horror, Anne Rice , was schooled by the local legends and graveyards of New Orleans.   She highlights the different aspects of New Orleans culture from spending afternoons picnicking in graveyards to melange of cultures French, Caribbean and southern.  She ends by recounting some of the most horrific and disturbing legends, some like Madame LaLaurie (who was a real character) which was dramatized  in the movie Coven with Kathy Bates
The interview was conducted in 1980 (when I was young) in her Victorian house near 18th and Castro in San Francisco.  Ground zero for those who were being labeled as outsiders and carriers of a plague. I found her courageous...and someone to whom laughing or smiling was as natural as breathing.

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Transcript

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Anne Rice was raised in a fertile breeding ground for fantasy and horror, schooled by the local legends and graveyards of New Orleans. The darkness which inhabited the novel, such as Interview with a Vampire, was, in part, learned by a child, and later a mother, who suffered the tragic losses of her mother, and then, her five year old child. Her writing was not so much an effort to expiate her demons, but to become somebody, to have an identity that was independent and would survive any loss. She humanized her vampires, with struggles that are familiar to all outsiders who can't hide differences. Later in breaking from the church over gay rights, she became one herself. I've been asked that question so many times why I wrote the book or how I got interested in a vampire or what. I have no answer. I was sitting at the typewriter one night and I wrote the line. Shall we hold the interview here, said the vampire, and I started off just writing a short story about what would happen if a boy from an FM radio station found a vampire who would really tell him the whole story of his life, and I wrote that short story, I think, in 1969. Or even before maybe 68 and I kept it for years. I kept dragging it out and going over it. And then it developed into the novel. I mean, it was, but there was no more thought really going on in my mind. Like, let's just try this experiment on. This would be an interesting thing to do. The thing I liked so much about it for a vampire Novel, it was a very secular setting and especially being someone who works on FM radio. I could could really understand the motivation of this Young man finding an interesting subject in a vampire And it seemed perfectly plausible at the time that he would go and interview him. Maybe you could talk about just the opening sequence where he meets him in a bar. That's what I imagined, that he, that he was a person who went around interviewing all kinds of interesting people that he found in bars. And he found Louis in this bar and Louis told him he was a vampire and What the boy assumed was, well, here's someone who really believes that they're, that he's a vampire. So I'd like to know why this nut believes this. I mean, why would he even want to believe it? So they go to this rented room, which is never explained in the book, but it's actually a place that Lewis sort of lives in, or uses. To stay in during the day, I mean during the night, and they start the interview, but it becomes apparent to the boy within a few minutes that this is not an ordinary human being, and that, that it is, it is actually a vampire, and from then on it's an accepted fact in the book that Lewis is a vampire, I mean that isn't even an issue. It's then the story of how he became one and so forth and so on. It's one a million , other than seeing it in your book, that they actually go behind the misery that a vampire feels and his separation from society, and the sort of utter, It's very much like a living hell. Yeah. I meant it too. I mean, that's what it certainly evolved into. You know, as I said, I didn't have any plan when I was writing it. It was just a matter of putting myself in Lewis's place. And that became apparent very early that there must be agony in feeding off humanity, coming that close to humanity all the time, you know, I mean, bringing death to people every night and death. And when you bring death, you do it in an embrace, you know So how can you get any closer than that? And yet you're totally shut out. You're a monster. And you know, that, that became one of the major themes of the book. Sort of almost at the moment of work as the person vanishes from you that you had in your arm. Exactly. As a matter of fact, I'm writing the sequel to it right now. And, and we'll start a vampire who's the hero of the sequel actually says that people we love die in our arms, you know, that line is in there. And that's sort of the theme of second book too, you know, but it's, it's, of course. The second book is about how this character Lestat, who's a much more active, stereotypically virile, I hate to use those words nowadays, but, stereotypically virile character than Louis, how he handles that, or how he handled it, you know, that's the theme of the second one. In Interview with the Vampire, Louis never found any solution, except misery. One of the reasons I guess he became a vampire is there seemed to be some sort of magnetism to the vampire who initiated the camp between the two men. It meant them to be highly magnetic. It seemed to me that was part of the myth, you know, of vampires that we've inherited. That they have a tremendous amount of power. Do you get charmed by them and seduced by them? Almost to the point where when they kill you, it seems to be part of the rapture. Yeah. I was, I was talking at a high school not long ago in San Jose, and I asked the girls that I was talking to, I was talking about an interview with a vampire. They were in a gothic novel class, and I asked them if they met Louisa Lestat, what they would do. Kill Louisa Lestat. How would they really feel? Met a vampire. Met something. supernatural, ancient, immortal, you know, what would be your reaction? Want to destroy it or what? And I remember one of the girls said, I'd say bite. And I think, I think that's part of the vampire mythology, that they're so charming, that you might do that. And the nice thing about the vampire myth too, is It's almost explains sexual attraction in a way. It's sexual. I mean, there's no question about it. I think when I write those scenes, I mean his approaching a victim, there's a sense of his, of Lestat or Lewis possessing that victim. It's actually more fun to write the sequel from Lestat's point of view because he's much more up front about that as a character. At least that's the way he evolves. Whereas Lewis was always, oh my god, it's going to happen again. I'm going to kill somebody. How terrible. I mean, I don't want to make fun of my own character, but he was, you know, regretful. I'm So it wasn't as much fun. Maybe you could talk about how that scene between Claudia and Lewis came up, came about, and I guess you must've got some small amount of flack or, no, for writing a scene in which Five year old comes to love her. Yeah, well there's been, there really hasn't been much flack. I don't think the interviewers who, I mean, not the interviewers, but the reviewers didn't really pounce on that aspect of the book. I mean, if, if the reviewers objected to the book, they objected to it totally. You know, they objected to the whole idea of making vampires charming, of making blood Letting and blood sucking seem so natural and so luscious and so forth. But in general, they really didn't pick on Claudia in particular. There, there've been a few people who've said things about it, but I think that they misunderstood it. I mean, it isn't a child molesting scene. I mean, she's really a vampire. I mean, they are vampires. I mean, one of the things I think that would happen, You know, when, when you enter into the metaphor that you're working with a vampire as a character, you look through his eyes, and one of the things you wouldn't see is that everybody becomes beautiful. That there are no boundaries any longer. I mean, you're not just attracted to women, or just attracted to men, or just attracted to children, or, or, you know, everyone is potentially gorgeous. I mean, one of the tragedies of Lewis is that he doesn't see Life is beautiful until he's outside it, but I, I meant to indicate to him even a very old person would be beautiful, you know, that he would see. And so when, to me, when he saw Claudia, what he was seeing was what we all see when we see children. Only, unfortunately, being a vampire, he, his passion led him to do what he did. You know, but I think that's a very different thing than molesting a child. With that enhanced vision, The images come back to him so strong that it's a very natural way for him to act. It seems nowhere out of the normal. It's actually very moral within his framework. Yeah, yeah, I think the immoral thing that happened there was that they made Claudia a vampire. I mean, she was, she was actually dying when Lewis saw her in the room when he laid eyes on her. Okay. Then he made a victim of her. Then she was really dying. You know? And so then Lestat sort of forces the issue to where they make her one of their company. And then that becomes kind of the terrible crime that they commit within the framework of their world. Because to make victims is one thing, but to make people into vampires is another. That's inviting someone to share the same health that they already share. Okay. All right. Well, I've, I've been collecting dolls for about two or three years now, and the type of doll I collect is this, this doll here, which is a German doll with a porcelain head, probably made around 1890, maybe 1910. And the reason I like this doll so much is because it's sort of the image of Claudia the Vampire in Interview with the Vampire. It's about a five year old child, and it has golden hair, and as you probably, you know, may remember in that book, there is a doll maker, Madeline, who makes dolls, and she falls sort of in love with Claudia. Whom she calls a child that cannot die. And I think I like the dolls for reasons that come out in the books. You know, I have to keep myself from putting a doll maker and dolls in every book I write. It could be a real bad habit. There are no more of them. And now I think one of the reasons we see so many children in horror movies is because as a culture we're terribly troubled about the question of having children. Well, I think horror movies reflect that. I think there are a lot of reasons why people feel that way, and some of them, are understandable and some of them aren't very excusable. I think it has something to do with the tremendous amount of self sacrifice required to have a child. You know, I mean, I think that I think the exorcist I heard that when max saw the final print of the exorcist He he was apparently quite surprised because he had and he said something like my god Do we really hate children that much? You know, I grew up reading ghost stories about houses in louisiana terrible ghost stories I mean some of the most awful ghost stories i've ever read came out of new orleans. Oh, they're there many different legends There's a quadrille for example a ghost quadrille that walks on the rooftop of a house on royal street, I believe and she You She was, she had a white lover, the story goes, and when she was alive, and the white lover said he would marry her if she would agree in the dead of winter to go up naked and walk on the roof, and of course she died of pneumonia as a result of doing this, and he never married her. That's one of the milder ones. Then there was a very famous woman named Madame LeLaurie, who apparently was a sadist, and she tortured her slaves in the attic, brutally, absolutely terribly. She had them chained to the walls, and she inflicted unspeakable tortures on them, and And her house in the, in the French Quarter is supposed to be haunted to this day by the ghosts of those slaves. A slave girl runs across the roof and jumps to the patio below. This was one of the slaves who in real life escaped the attic and ran. And that's, that's one of the grimmest stories. The, in, in the newspapers at the time when, when these slaves were discovered, they were carried to the local city hall and they, you know, they were quite a spectacle because they were emaciated and burned and I don't know what all, you know, as a result of the torture. That's one story. I don't remember all the others, but, but they always involve, I mean, many of them involve elements of torture and brutality and, and terrible, terrible. There was, there was, of course, a, a mad person in New Orleans who cooked human beings and served them to people to eat. That story, I think, that occurs in London and Paris as well. You know, that, that kind of stuff. But I read those stories at the local library, and I remember going and passing the houses where these ghosts apparently hung out. I never saw a ghost. I've never seen one. Do you think in the folklore, and as growing up as a kid in New Orleans, they have a special love for, well, I guess in a way, Feast of All Saints is a special festival, which they don't have too many other places, and a special love for the fantastic, and being close to the Caribbean, I guess there's voodoo bustling in there somewhere. Oh, there's a lot of voodoo in New Orleans. Apparently, I never ran on it, but there was a lot of it practiced. In the old days, it was Congo Square in the French Quarter, where the Voodoo people would meet and dance. I mention it in Feast of All Saints, that on Sundays, Marcel, the hero, can hear the drums from Congo Square. It's particularly torturesome, because it represents something about the Black background that he gets. I can't in any way understand. As you grew up, did that influence you as a child? Oh, I heard those stories. I remember the black lady that worked for us telling me that she had hung her son up in the fireplace to smoke the devil out of him. And I remember saying, you didn't really do that. And she said, oh yes, I did. So I heard of it all my life, you know, and again, it's a matter of being steeped in an atmosphere. I grew up looking at those houses every day, seeing those trees, those cemeteries, hearing that talk. It's a very sensuous atmosphere and it makes all the mystery and the horror seem part of the beauty of the magnolias and, you know, the fragrance of the flowers and the breeze off the river and the delicious food. It all seems to be one fabric. It's beautiful. And in your book, Cry to Heaven, it takes place, it starts with an aristocratic family of Venice. Maybe you could set that for the people a little. Well, that book, I think, is sort of, in a way, about the same thing that Interview with the Vampire and Feast of All Saints is about. It's about outsiders. Only the outsiders there aren't vampires or mulattoes, they're castrato opera singers. And Tony Otresky, the hero of the book, is castrated at 14, the same age in which Marcel in Feast of All Saints finds out that he's black, or not white. And he becomes an outcast, but he comes from this aristocratic family in Venice, but as you can see in the early pages of the book, the aristocratic family in Venice is, is, is, is a decayed family. facade for an extremely unwholesome situation. I mean, a young mother that's sort of going mad and a very old father that never sleeps with the mother. But this is normal life. Antonio gets cast out of normal life when he's castrated and sent away to study music. But what the irony is that he happens upon a real life. as a castrato opera singer that is infinitely better than the life he lived before. But, you know, I grew up in a sort of a bohemian atmosphere at home with people dancing to ballet music in the living room and my father carving wood carvings in the back and, and there was, there was a lot of, there was always classical music playing. There were, there were always exciting discussions going on and it was very chaotic. And, and one of the things that has always interested me as a writer is The two different realms were faced with in life, the realm of the normal with all its power. You know, I used to envy the girls in New Orleans that went to the right schools and made debuts and had their pictures in the paper and had, had everything normal and wonderful and working in their lives. And yet at the same time, I loved my own existence of complete, much madder bohemian upbringing. And, and so I really wanted to, you know, Talk about that in, in Cry to Heaven. I mean, what, what is it like when the normal life is really miserable and the artistic life is really better? And is the artistic life really better? I never could make up my mind for Tanya in the book whether it was really better. Okay, and maybe just finally you could tell people what you're working on now. You're in process of working on a sequel to Interview with the Vampire. Right, I'm working on a book called The Vampireless Stot, and it is the sequel to Interview with the Vampire, and it concerns Stot's coming back. He was the, he was the devil vampire of the first book who made Louis a vampire and made Claudia a vampire. And in the end of that book, he sort of goes underground. He goes into exile, into decline. And in this book, he comes back out in the 1980s. And it's really, it's very different from Interview with a Vampire in that I don't think it will have the same atmosphere as Interview with a Vampire. It's really about the modern world and how a vampire would function in the modern world. It's kind of, in some ways, my answer to the books that impressed us when we were teenagers so much. George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I mean, it's kind of like my version of that, only it's a vampire novel and it's with Lestat as the hero.