Remember when they cast Tom Cruise as Lestat and all the Anne Rice fans freaked out? Those were the good old days, before Team Edward and Team Jacob got volatile. Now, Interview with the Vampire director Neil Jordan is back with another vampire tale. Byzantium stars Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as vampires: Clara (Arterton), the literal maneater and Eleanor (Ronan) trying to make a life for herself but Clara keeps getting caught murdering people. We got to speak with Jordan by phone out of New York, where he had a good sense of humor about the vampire thing. We also spoke about The Crying Game, his landmark hit that thrived on secret twists.
Spoilers for the 20-year-old The Crying Game, in the interest of analyzing what movie secrets mean in today’s Mystery Box/social media age.
CraveOnline: A lot has changed with vampires since you did Interview with the Vampire almost 20 years ago, hasn’t it?
Neil Jordan: It has, but I haven’t seen them all. I’ve heard of this Twilight phenomenon. I only saw the first movie.
Maybe Interview was the start of seeing vampires as romantic characters.
Maybe, maybe. They were kind of doomed, ironic creatures. They were really Heathcliff, weren’t they? They were really interesting, but I suppose maybe every generation invents its own vampire, doesn’t it? Maybe Interview with the Vampire was at the time, maybe Twilight was at the time. I don’t know. I never thought I’d make another vampire movie but here I did.
Is vampire mode fun after doing history with “The Borgias?”
Oh, I always thought of “The Borgias” kind of as vampires actually. They’re dressed in red, a lot of this stuff is at night. They have this big vampiric 15th century music going on. In fact, when Trevor Morris, the composer composed the first scene in the first episode for the pilot that I did, there’s a 16th century composer called Gesualdo and I asked Trevor to embellish one of his pieces and he used to call it “The Vampire Theme” oddly enough.
Is it fun to explore the drama of vampires, not just the blood and seduction?
Yeah, that’s what this script gave me the opportunity to do. It gave me the opportunity to explore vampires as if they were characters and as if they had real dilemmas and had to find somewhere to sleep at night and all that sort of stuff.
And if you have a dysfunctional family you’re with them for centuries.
Yeah, you are. You’ve got a mother who just likes to set up whorehouses, you can never get your homework done, can you? You can never finish your story. No matter how you try, you’re always being disturbed by bumping sounds upstairs.
What was unique about having female vampires seducing men?
It was much more interesting because everybody says the reason vampires are so attractive is because of the strange sexuality or something. But when you’ve got Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan, you’ve got both the sensuality and the mystery too.
I think every vampire should be a female vampire frankly, from now on. They’re much more enjoyable to shoot. And I did love the story she came up with, the fact that there’s a brotherhood who doesn’t want to give this gift to women. Women aren’t allowed to have it and the fact that they’ve both robbed it and are on the run for it for all eternity, I thought that was a lovely feminist spin on the whole thing.
With the blood cliffs, is there any chance you actually dyed the water red for real without CGI?
It was practical. Yeah, we did. We dyed it red. We did. There’s a wonderful waterfall in the south of Ireland near where I have a house. We got divers to put a red dye into the water and it was cool.
That’s fantastic. I would have assumed it had to be CG. I’m so glad it was practical.
No, no, we did it for real. It’s much better to do things for real. We had to do a bit of, not CG tweaking, but in the DI, in the digital internegative, we did a bit of tweaking on the color because red is a different color. No, it was real. It was.
