Interview With The Vampire begins filming in December, in New Orleans

The Walking Dead is ending, but AMC isn’t about to give up on dominating the spooky genre space; it’s just switching from zombies to vampires. The network acquired the rights to Anne Rice’s extensive Vampire Chronicles series a while back, and is planning several shows based on her work. The first is an adaptation of her most famous book, 1976’s Interview With The Vampire, which was already adapted as a successful 1994 movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac, two vampires making their way through the centuries.

This time around, Lestat and Louis will be played by Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson, who Game of Thrones fans will remember as Grey Worm. And that’s not the only Game of Thrones connection. Alan Taylor, the director who chopped off Ned Stark’s head in the show’s first season, is serving as an executive producer on Interview With The Vampire and directing the first two episodes. He recently shared with Collider that the first season will be “seven or eight” episodes long, and that it will begin filming this December in New Orleans, which is where much of the book is set.

“I have a personal relationship with the book.” Taylor said. “I read Interview With the Vampire, and I just loved it. It gave me this feeling, which I think is the main thing I took away from the book, which is, every other story you’ve heard about vampires is kind of bullshit, and here’s the truth. This is the reality. This is what it would really be like.”

Interview did indeed change the game for vampires back when it came out; we can trace the sexy, brooding vampires of shows like The Vampire Diaries and Twilight back to Anne Rice’s bloodsuckers. Will the new show bring vampires back to prominence again? “We have a great Lestat and a great Louis,” Taylor said, “and I’ll try and bring some of the stuff I loved about the novel into the show.”

One thing I’m wondering is whether those seven or eight episodes will tell the whole of the story of Interview With The Vampire or whether AMC is planning to stretch out the story over multiple seasons. They haven’t revealed their full plan yet, but all in good time.

Alan Taylor holds out hope for adapting Larry Niven’s Ringworld series

Taylor also talked a bit about the long-in-gestation TV adaptation of Larry Niven Ringworld novels, a sci-fi series about an artificial world created by aliens. “I think I read it when I was 14 or something and just thought it was the coolest thing in the world, and there are still ideas in it that I think are the coolest ideas I’ve ever comes across in science fiction,” Taylor said. “The idea of a character like Teela Brown, who’s basically seventh generation lucky, is so fun to play with. So I was so excited about it. That and the Kzinti and the extended world of Puppeteers. There’s so much I love.”

"[I]t’s a really challenging adaptation, because what I mostly love is these brilliant ideas that Niven has, but it’s tough to put it in terms of character and story arc that play for TV. And so I think it’s been a hard problem to solve. But I would love to see it done and would love to participate if it ever moves ahead."

As heady as the Ringworld books might be, there’s never been a better time to adapt them than now, when networks and streaming services are willing to shill out big bucks to bring epic stories to life. If it can happen for Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, it can happen for anything:

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