AMC intends to adapt “all” of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books

AMC is making a show based on Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire, which was famously turned into a movie in 1994 with Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst. And that’s just the beginning. Per SyFy Wire, showrunner Rolin Jones appeared on a panel for the show during last week’s Television Critics Association virtual press day, and said that, “AMC has bought all of the books and AMC wants to make all of the books.”

The first season of Interview With The Vampire will cover the first half of the book. After that story is rounded out, AMC could go in any number of directions. Rice wrote 13 books in her Vampire Chronicles series, and they do not all fit neatly together; some are set deep in the past, some in the future, and at least one has vampires uniting to fight strange creatures designed the take down the lost civilization of Atlantis. It gets wild and AMC has its work cut out for it.

But that’s a ways in the future. Interview With The Vampire is up first, and at its heart that’s a pretty simple story about the vampire Lestat (Sam Reid) and his bloodsucker boyfriend Louis (Jacob Anderson). “‘I don’t think it’s a horror show. I think it is a gothic romance,” Jones remembers telling AMC during his pitch. “‘I want to write a very excitable, aggressive, toxic, beautiful love story.’  And they were down for it…Let’s see them really go through all the little obstacles and challenges of a relationship. Like Bogey and Bacall, with some fangs.”

Interview With The Vampire will change Claudia’s arc

Sounds tasty enough, but given that the ’94 movie told this whole story in a couple of hours, one wonders how AMC will stretch it out to cover multiple seasons of TV. “What we do in this version of Interview With the Vampire is look at an entire series of books,” said Reid. “When that film came out, [Rice] was still writing them so they didn’t have perspective of the entire work. And now we do have that perspective. And so when we’re looking at character arcs, we’re looking at a much broader scale. So it is a different feeling than a 90-minute film.”

But they’re not just adding back in things the film cut out. The new show will make changes. For instance, whereas the book started in 1791, the new show will begin at the turn of the 20th century. There are also some changes coming for the young vampire Claudia, who in the book is forever trapped in the body of a five-year-old girl. The movie aged her up to 11 and on the show she will be 14.

“Like a lot of people, I was in love with the Claudia from the novel,” said pilot director Alan Taylor. “But what Rolin built out of it, by finding this other crisis point in a young girl’s life and having that extend forever, became a really beautiful story to explore. I have two teenage daughters. And it’s fascinating to think what would happen if this phase was extended for potentially eternity.”

Jones teased a twist on the way: “For the Claudia fans, we do something really exciting structurally when she makes her entrance in Episode 3. I would say that we’ve set something up in her initial episode that I think will be exciting and thrilling.”

How intimacy coordinators are helping Interview With The Vampire

Finally, per Variety, Sam Reid talked a little about working with an intimacy coordinator for the show’s sex scenes. “I think it’s really important working with an intimacy coordinator,” he said. “I think it treats those scenes more like a stunt scene or a fight scene, so they’re choreographed as well as trying to keep some spontaneity in it. It was kind of fun doing it in that way. We got to rehearse it and know exactly what was going to happen.”

Intimacy coordinators have become de rigueur on film and TV sets in recent years, particularly since the MeToo movement, as a way of making sure these emotionally intense moments are safe for everybody involved. “It gives everybody the right to ask any questions they want any time, which can sometimes be difficult in a hierarchical crew,” Taylor said. “With a coordinator there, it’s like everything is on the table.”

These comments come not long after Game of Thrones veteran Sean Bean got some heat for saying that having an intimacy coordinator on set would “inhibit” him. Happily, it doesn’t look like that is the majority opinion.

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