Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles, 1994
Director
Cast
visit the film locations
San Francisco: Flights: San Francisco International Airport
Tourist info: San Francisco tourism
Paris: flights: Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport
Oak Alley Plantation, 3645 Louisiana State Highway 18, Vacherie, Louisiana.
London: Phoenix Cinema, 52 High Road, East Finchley
Trivia
The 1985 TV film of William Faulkner’s The Long Hot Summer, with Don Johnson and Jason Robards, was also filmed at Oak Alley Plantation.
Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles filming location: Louis’ estate: Oak Alley, Vacherie, Louisiana
Photograph courtesy Oak
Alley Plantation
Neil Jordan’s lushly romantic yet blackly comic film of the Anne Rice novel was filmed on wide-ranging locations, including San Francisco, Louisiana, London and Paris.
Tom Cruise was the last person you would have thought of as aristocratic vamp Lestat, and though he’s not perfect, he’s far better than any of us expected. It’s left to Antonio Banderas and Neil Jordan regular Stephen Rea, though, who demonstrate the real style needed.
Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles filming location: Louis spins his tale in the fictitious 'St Martin's' hotel: Market Street at Taylor Street, downtown San Francisco
You won’t be able to book a room at the ‘St Martin’ hotel in San Francisco, in which Louis (Brad Pitt) recounts his story to incredulous journalist Daniel Malloy (Christian Slater). There’s no such establishment. You can see the building used in the film on Market Street at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Taylor Street in downtown San Francisco.
Louis’ estate is the venerable Oak Alley Plantation, 3645 Louisiana State Highway 18 in Vacherie, Louisiana.
One of the chain of restored antebellum mansions between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Oak Alley, built in 1839, takes its name from the avenue of 28 oaks leading up to it. It’s open to the public most days.
Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles filming location: the lobby of the grand Parisian hotel: Paris Opéra, Place de l'Opéra
The overwhelmingly elaborate lobby of the Parisian hotel in which Louis and Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) stay, is the Paris Opéra, Place de l'Opéra in Paris. Described, on its opening in 1875, as looking like “an overloaded sideboard”, the opera house is now regarded as a grandiose masterpiece. Understated, it’s not.
And, yes, it is the opera house haunted by Erik the phantom in the Gaston Leroux novel Phantom of the Opera, though the only version of this much-filmed story to use the real Paris Opera as a location is the 1990 TV film directed by Tony Richardson.
Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles filming location: Louis watches a sunrise: Phoenix Finchley, East Finchley, London
The film was largely based in the UK and there was filming around London. The interior of the ‘US’ picture house, in which Louis watches a sunrise (on film) for the first time in 200 years, is the Phoenix Cinema, 52 High Road, East Finchley, in north London.
Built in 1910 as ‘The East Finchley Picturedrome’, the cinema claims to be the oldest purpose-built cinema in continuous use in the UK. Remodelled in the Thirties, it’s a listed building and, after being rescued by a local campaign from redevelopment, the truly independent cinema is now owned and run by a trust.
The Phoenix can be seen in another Neil Jordan film: The End of the Affair, as Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore) flees the cinema pursued by Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes). It was also the ‘Southport’ cinema at the centre of gentle 1985 comedy Mr Love.
It’s widely claimed that scenes were shot at the famed Wilton’s Music Hall, off Cable Street in the East End. The theatres seen in the film, though, are studio sets, and I’ve not been able to recognise Wilton’s, or to confirm that it was ever used at all.
Wilton’s is a film star in its own right. You can see the photogenically faded music hall in four biopics: Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin (with Robert Downey Jr); The Krays, Karel Reisz’s Isadora (with Vanessa Redgrave as the extravagant dancer); and De-Lovely (with Kevin Kline as Cole Porter). It ’s since appeared as the ‘Liverpool’ theatre in which the Crummles troupe performs in in Douglas McGrath’s star-studded 2002 adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby; and in Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream.
Another no-show is St Paul’s Church in Deptford. South London newspapers got quite excited when it was rumoured that Tom Cruise would be filming in the area. It never happened, but Brad Pitt did shoot a scene for Interview With the Vampire. here.
St Paul’s Church, Deptford High Street, became the interior of a ‘New Orleans’ church in which Louis attacks a priest but, sadly, the scene never made it to the final cut of the movie.
Not to worry, South London’s fans of the undead can catch the church in another vampire movie, Shimako Sato’s little-seen 1992 film Tale of a Vampire, with Julian Sands.
It’s back to San Francisco for the finale, with Lestat making a sudden reappearance as Malloy drives across the Golden Gate Bridge.
