“Anytime you can shove theater into the face of TV viewers is always a good thing,” argues “Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire” showrunner Rolin Jones about introducing the sinister Théâtre des Vampires from the novel in the second season of his gothic horror AMC series. “Season one was like a chamber drama between three characters. And we got to expand it not only with just the bodies, but in space and time too.” We talked to Jones as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV showrunners panel. Watch our complete video interview above.
“Interview with the Vampire,” which was previously adapted into a 1994 film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, follows the undead Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) as he recounts his experiences to journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). In the second season we meet the French troupe of actors where Louis encounters Armand (Assad Zaman), who becomes his lover.
“We always kind of had the specter of the movie behind us, and they did that part really, really well,” Jones admits. But “our timeline really opened up a lot of opportunities to make it a grittier, dirtier, slightly more dangerous theater of the vampires than the movie or even in the book.” The storyline was also an opportunity to explore Paris, France, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. “You see a lot of Paris during the war. And then you don’t see a lot of stuff done in those first four or five years afterwards.”
There’s plenty of room to expand the story even beyond that. After spending two seasons adapting the “Interview with the Vampire” novel, the series will cover the sequel “The Vampire Lestat” in season three … and after that there are 11 more books in Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles.” “Like anything else you’re supposed to take a really good hard look at yourself and go, do you have anything left to say about vampires?” he says about the potential longevity of the series.”I think somewhere along the way, you’ve got to hand that thing off,” or else you get to the point where “you’re up to writing the 540th scene of Louis. You really need some new blood in there. I think that’s a while off … So we’re just going to try, as long as AMC gives us the dough, try to make aggressive things with it. We’re very privileged to do it.”
