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At first glance, Kim Kardashian‘s new project may seem out of left field. But in reality, her latest subjects — elite sports momagers — hit awfully close to home.

The eight-episode first season of Team Moms: Baseball premieres in full on Sept. 24 on Paramount+, and while the service no longer offers a free trial of its own, Paramount+ Premium is currently complimentary for three months with DirecTV’s Signature packages — Entertainment, Choice or Ultimate — which also offer a standard five-day free trial.

At a Glance: How to Watch Team Moms: Baseball Season One

“Team Moms: Baseball follows a group of parents whose sons attend Legendary Prep Academy: a premier baseball training school in Scottsdale, Arizona, dedicated to molding the next generation of star athletes,” reads the logline. “The competition on the field is fierce, but it’s nothing compared to the drama in the stands.”

Where to Stream Team Moms: Baseball Online Free

All eight episodes of the inaugural season of Team Moms premiere on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 12 a.m. PT/3 a.m. ET on Paramount+, which costs $13.99 per month for the ad-free Premium package or $8.99 monthly for the ad-supported Essential package.

While the service no longer offers a free trial of its own, customers can claim three complimentary months of Paramount+ Premium (and a host of other add-ons) with DirecTV’s Entertainment, Choice or Ultimate packages. Alternatively, the Premier package, DirecTV’s top-tier Signature package, includes Paramount+ Premium at no extra cost as part of its premium channel lineup. These are both on top of DirecTV’s standard five-day free trial.

Learn more about each DirecTV plan option, including how to build your own channel lineup (starting at just $19.99 per month), at directv.com.

In its first few episodes, Netflix’s A Different World does not quite live up to its title.

Sure, the Hillman College we first encountered in the 1980s looks different now, full of modern young people with their modern concerns and their modern fashions and their modern music (beginning with an updated opening theme by Brandy). But with so many familiar faces from the earlier A Different World onscreen, rehashing so much of their familiar dynamics, the new spinoff-sequel-reboot thing might appear upon first impression like more of the same.

It’s not until this A Different World begins to come out from under the shadow of its parent that it really starts to flourish — but then flourish it does, aided by an endearing young ensemble and smart, heartfelt storytelling. By the end of its first season, it not only cements itself as a worthwhile standard-bearer for its predecessor, but proves ready to leave a mark of its own.

As is typical for one of these many-decades-later brand extensions, our new protagonist is a literal descendant of the old protagonists. College freshman Deborah (pronounced Deh-BOH-rah, never “Debra,” and played by the irresistibly radiant Maleah Joi Moon) is the youngest daughter of Whitley (Jasmine Guy), now a cosmetics mogul, and Dwayne (Kadeem Hardison), now the school provost. She’s also something of the family’s black sheep, the well-meaning but impulsive one who can’t seem to stop getting into trouble.

Said trouble often though not always involves Shaquille (Cornell Young IV), a childhood friend turned serious NFL prospect and fellow Hillman freshman, who just so happens to be the son of Whitley and Dwayne’s college buddy Ron (Darryl M. Bell). Around these two families, creator Felicia Pride, along with returning director Debbie Allen, builds out a whole updated universe that’s rich with Hillman history at every turn: from the returning characters (among others, Cree Summer’s Freddie recurs as a professor), to the buildings named after non-returning characters (Vernon Gaines Library, Walter Oakes Stadium), to the dialogue referencing the decades-old exploits of all of the above.

This clear affection for the source material is simultaneously one of A Different World’s biggest draws and, at least initially, one of its more worrisome hurdles. On one hand, anyone who loved the original as much as Pride and Allen obviously do will surely relish catching up with old friends (between move-in day, homecoming and a funding crisis, the first three episodes offer no shortage of excuses for alumni to pop by) or diving into the poignant current drama with Dwayne and Whitley, who find themselves on the brink of divorce after over 30 years of marriage.

On the other, anyone less familiar with the original — including, presumably, most of the Gen Z target audience — may wonder why we’re lingering so long on middle-aged guest stars reminiscing about decades-old gossip. Especially when that time could be directed to a central ensemble bursting with more than enough charm, chemistry and appropriately youthful folly to generate plenty of tea on their own.

But much like a freshman settling into a new identity at a new school, A Different World benefits from a bit of patience. It’s around the fourth installment, a fun and frisky half-hour about the advent of cuffing season, that the show properly zeroes in on the younger characters, leaning on the sweet but star-crossed romances that are the show’s dramatic bread and butter — whether it’s the tumultuous history between Shaquille and Deborah, or the instant sparks between their roommates Kojo (Chibuiken Uche, adorable), an extroverted Ghanaian-Nigerian fashion major, and Rashida (Alijah Kai, even more adorable), an ambitious criminal justice major from Compton.

And it’s around the fifth episode, set during a finals week interrupted by a bomb scare, that A Different World really starts to fire on all cylinders. Like the earlier series, this one readily acknowledges how real-world horrors can puncture even a relative safe space like Hillman. It gives Freddie the opportunity to point out that HBCUs like it have always been under threat in America, “not just because of what students do but because of who you might become.” It grants Deborah the space to vent her frustration about the same in the moment, and revel in the community that got her through it in the aftermath.

But it also understands the way more mundane concerns can coexist even with such major crises. Deborah’s prim-and-proper buddy Hazel (Kennedi Reece) can pray that God leads the Hillmanites to safety and also that, once He has done so, He might consider moving them to vote for her in the dorm beauty pageant. Hazel’s bestie Amir (Jordan Aaron Hall) might as well take advantage of the lockdown to corner the guy who’s essentially ghosted him after a great night together. Life goes on, in all its quirks and intimacies and frivolities, no matter what horrors might lurk on the horizon.

For the rest of the season, the worst complaint I could muster about A Different World is really more a compliment in disguise: There simply isn’t enough of it. At just 10 half-hours, the season is over too soon after it hits its stride. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help wonder how many of the occasionally rushed-feeling plot points we do get would have benefited from a 20+ episode season, like its forerunner got. There would have been more room to let the romances simmer, to explore the nuances of each friendship, to flesh out some of the supporting characters.

As it is, A Different World still manages the trick of going from looking like an exercise in Xennial nostalgia to delivering a portrait of youth that feels at once fresh and timeless. Even its reverence for the old guard evolves from a distraction to a crucial element in the bigger picture it’s painting about the legacy of Hillman, as a place where the young minds of yesterday went to shape the world that nurtured the young minds of today, who will someday go on to shape the world for the young minds of tomorrow.

If that sounds like a lot to put on a comedy whose episodes are still mainly filled with college kids breaking up or making up or sneaking into clubs or sneaking back into their dorms after curfew, the show wears it easily — grounding bigger themes in intimate character work, balancing heavier emotions with bursts of lighthearted humor or displays of simple joy.

As Deborah ecstatically puts it after escaping a crisis: “We are studying, we are partying, and we are living our best young gifted Black talented lives right here in our space.” Maybe they aren’t doing all those things in exactly the way their moms and dads did once. But the new A Different World is doing things its own way, and is all the more winning for it.

Halle Berry, Regina King, Celine Song, Aleshea Harris, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Patty Jenkins and H.E.R. were among the artists and filmmakers who attended the 11th annual Chanel and Tribeca Enterprises’ Through Her Lens luncheon in New York City on Tuesday afternoon.

Hosted at Locanda Verde by Tribeca Enterprises co-founder and co-chair of the board Jane Rosenthal, the annual event brought together the latest class of emerging nonbinary and women filmmakers for an intimate lunch with industry heavy hitters. Among this year’s jury is Ryan, Berry, King, Autumn Durald Arkapaw and Ella Rubin, with mentorship from Song, Aleshea Harris, Prince-Bythewood, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Fala Chen. Conversation leaders include H.E.R., Jenkins, Laura Karpman, Miyako Bellizzi, Cassandra Kulukundis and Riva Marker.

“This is at the core of what we do, which is support the independent filmmaking community and artists who want to come together to support the art form and get people a leg in. Everyone who’s involved — the jurors, mentors and [conversation leaders] — are really committing their time, whether it be actresses in front of the camera or creatives behind the camera,” said Rebecca Glashow, CEO of Tribeca Enterprises. “The support is not just in name only. [Program participants] are spending time with all these directors when it’s very challenging to get into this space, and they’re giving them actionable guidance and support.”

Just a day ahead of the luncheon and workshop, which has helped launch the careers of talent like A.V. Rockwell (A Thousand and One) and Nikyatu Jusu (Nanny), the Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount merger cleared one of its biggest and final hurdles. The move will have sweeping implications for the production ecosystem and opportunities for filmmakers, and has come amid a year where lower-budget films — predominantly directed by men — have defined the box office. Meanwhile, new data has revealed the stagnation or recession of women being hired or represented in production, both in front of and behind the camera.

Inside the lunch, Rosenthal recalled an experience early in her career when there “weren’t many women and there were even fewer women in positions where they could actually make decisions.” In a role where she was able to develop stories, she came across the script for The Burning Bed, the true story of Francine Hughes, a woman abused by her husband for years. The story was eventually made for TV and starred Farrah Fawcett, becoming “part of the national conversation about domestic violence,” the producer and Tribeca co-founder shared.

That was after she initially took it to her male boss at the time, whose response was demeaning and dismissive of her as well as domestic abuse survivors. Rosenthal found a way around him, and it got produced anyways.

“Domestic violence wasn’t new, women had been living with that forever. Their stories weren’t being told. And sometimes people deciding on which stories matters couldn’t even imagine that reality of their lives,” she told the crowd. “That woman taught me something very early. It matters who’s in the room. It matters even more who has the power in the room and who is willing to use that power to say yes.”

“Years later, my dear friend, Paula Weinstein, who produced over 30 movies herself, founded Through Her Lens with Chanel and I. We wanted to create a place where women filmmakers would be given resources, mentorship, access and freedom to tell the stories of their own and on their own terms,” the producer continued. “History is erased when contributions go unrecognized and when women are missing from the decisions about our culture and what our culture chooses to remember. We cannot pretend that we’re in another cycle here. That’s why Through Her Lens matters. For years we’ve talked about giving women a seat at the table. I don’t think a seat is enough anymore. We need our own fucking tables.”

For Golden Globe nominee and star of Hulu’s Furious Emmy Rossum, creating her own production company was her way of creating that table amid Hollywood’s historical hiring and representation issues.

“My goal with [company] Composition 8 is to tell stories that investigate contemporary womanhood, and the best way to do that is by hiring more women behind and in front of the camera. We are the majority of the overall population, so I do not understand why we are not reflected as such in the art that we are creating. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but I think the desire is there for it,” she told THR on the carpet ahead of the luncheon. “I’ve always felt like the walls are always going to be there. You just have to decide that you have to make something happen and get scrappy with how you’re going to do it. So it’s amazing to have a program like this that is funding the opportunity to make those connections to do that.”

Rosenthal also points to programs like the larger Tribeca Festival as key to ensuring voices don’t get erased amid an industry shift and studio consolidation. “Festivals can identify new work and new voices that the general audience doesn’t typically find, and we do that by helping curate and identify projects that whatever company then buys or hires their filmmaker. I think that’s why festivals are important,” she noted.

For Daisy Jones and the Six actress and director Riley Keough — who co-created In Process, a limited series inspired by the Through Her Lens filmmaker program — the dynamics of the current moment have left her focused on trying to be “hopeful or else I would stop working,” she joked. “There are so many cool films that are blowing up, and there have been a couple of moments this year of amazing theatrical success. But at the end of the day, in order to be effective, someone has to be on the ground helping shepherd young filmmakers and young women. Chanel’s commitment to that is so amazing, and it is effective. These kinds of things really help people start their careers. When people are saying we need more female filmmakers, that’s how you have to do it. You have to start from the ground up.”

Francesca Scorsese, who says Rosenthal has supported her in her own career, added, “Making connections with all these new creatives and creatives in general in the same industry as you is so important. It’s such a big part of it. You never know who you’re going to meet and who you’re going to be inspired by. When that leads to future partnerships or creative endeavors together, that’s amazing.”

The Emmy and Oscar-winning King sits on this year’s jury, in a position that gives her the power to help unlock the gate for the next great female or nonbinary filmmaker. It’s a position she describes as “a little nerve-wracking because there’s a part of you that just wants the opportunity to be available for all of them.” The One Night in Miami director noted that over the next three days, she’ll be “trying to approach it as if I am a juror, but I’m not judging, and that’s a really fine line to walk. It’s not seeing them in comparison to someone else because that’s so hard for us.”

On the carpet, King called this particular industry moment that the program’s filmmakers are launching into “a really interesting time,” adding that “this is not the first of these types of mergers, but there’s a lot of money that was being lost from Warner Bros. before these conversations. The understanding is that they will still operate as separate studios, though that remains to be seen,” she told THR. “You also have the conversation about AI that, in a lot of ways, can be a helpful tool, but in a lot of ways we’re watching when it comes to the arts it already starting to replace artists. It’s terrifying, so I am right now trying to keep my energy high and expectations low.”

Rosenthal described the current state of the studio system as “limping along.” Alongside it, a potentially new pipeline has emerged, championed as the era of the YouTube creator, something Tribeca Festival has already embraced through offerings like the Creators Market. For Rossum, one of the under-acknowledged lessons from this year’s successes is that it’s not going to be different models that save storytelling. Regardless of whatever pipeline Hollywood uses, she said, the solution to finding good stories is the same: Access and hiring.

“It’s not a model problem, it’s a hiring problem. There are lots of incredible, amazing filmmakers that are just not getting those shots. We have to stand alongside them and say, ‘We want to make those movies’ and help them get them made. I made a movie this summer with a first-time feature filmmaker, Hanna Gray Organschi, who’s one of the most exciting directors that I have worked with in the last decade. She is ready to make a huge movie. She’s ready to make lots of movies,” Rossum explained. “We just need more shots to be taken and more people to write checks so that women can tell stories.”

Interview with the Vampire filmmaker Neil Jordan pulled off a dream casting coup with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

But much to Jordan’s chagrin, Cruise immediately found himself at the center of a casting-related nightmare. It wouldn’t be the last time he faced scrutiny over playing an iconic literary character, but his go-round nearly two decades later as Jack Reacher came with one notable distinction.

Jack Reacher series author Lee Child endorsed Cruise’s casting at the time, despite the actor not matching the physical description of his massive ex-Army investigator. It wasn’t until 14 years later, amid the success of Reacher, the hit Amazon Prime series starring 6-foot-3, 240-pound Alan Ritchson, that Child ultimately conceded that readers were right to protest the 2012 and 2016 movies’ lack of fidelity to the title character’s imposing presence.

In the case of Interview with the Vampire, the call came from inside the house. Novelist and screenwriter Anne Rice led the charge against Cruise’s casting as Lestat de Lioncourt, a French theater actor in the 1700s who’d already become an immortal vampire by the time he’s introduced. Rice had been tied to the movie’s development since the late ’70s, and over the years, she’d envisioned a bevy of names to play the tall, blonde bloodsucker, including Rutger Hauer, Julian Sands, Daniel Day-Lewis, John Malkovich, Tom Hanks and several others.

While Rice later went to great lengths to apologize to Cruise after seeing his performance, even commissioning a two-page spread in various outlets to heap praise on him, Jordan says the circumstances created an unwanted dynamic on set.

“It was a pain in the ass for me as a director, for him as an actor and for the entire production, when the whole world was saying, ‘Oh, you’re wrong,’” Jordan tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Interview with the Vampire’s new 4K Blu-ray release. “The opposition that Anne Rice took to his casting was an absolute distraction. It wasn’t a welcome thing at all.”

As one would expect, Cruise was fueled by the naysayers.

“When everyone told him he was not the right choice for the part, he liked the challenge of proving them wrong,” Jordan says. “He was just beginning to explore the non-Tom Cruise aspects of himself, and there are a lot of sides to Tom that he has yet to explore, let me put it that way.”

Rice even suggested Cruise and Pitt swapping roles, something Pitt may have been open to in retrospect. Nobody complained when Pitt received the part of Louis de Pointe du Lac, a wealthy plantation owner in the late 18th century whom Lestat would eventually sire after Louis is consumed by grief over the death of his wife and child. But the strain of playing a vampire during a nocturnal production and its unusual makeup process drove Pitt to the brink of asking producer David Geffen how much it would cost for him to vacate the role mid-shoot. (The answer was $40 million.)

“It’s all my fault. We had intense discussions about it. We shot six months at night in New Orleans, Paris and New York. He found it very oppressive in a way that Louis himself found it oppressive,” Jordan shares. “The combination of the part and Brad’s unease about shooting constantly at night — and me hanging him upside down and painting the veins on his face and putting haptic lenses in his eyes — maybe all that got to him a little bit.”

Bear in mind, Pitt was on the verge of superstardom at the time. He was coming off Thelma & Louise, as well as A River Runs Through It. He’d also just filmed Legends of the Fall, which, along with Interview, were destined to cement his movie star status by the end of 1994. Jordan theorizes that his dissatisfaction with playing the submissive Louis opposite the dominant Lestat may have influenced the choices he’d make from there.

“When we later see Brad Pitt in Fight Club, Se7en and the Quentin Tarantino movies, he’s much more muscular, aggressive and all-American,” Jordan says. “So maybe that’s the direction he wanted to go in, but at the time, he was between directions in a way.”

Across its theatrical and home video releases, the sumptuous vampire drama would go on to gross over four times its $50 million to $60 million production budget. Warners soon contracted Jordan to write a sequel, The Vampire Lestat, based on Rice’s second installment in her The Vampire Chronicles series. However, Cruise’s then-lack of interest in sequels — and in reprising the role — has kept that script in a drawer ever since.

In 2022, AMC began adapting The Vampire Chronicles as a TV series, starting with two seasons devoted to Interview with the Vampire. The third season evolved into The Vampire Lestat, exploring Lestat’s time as a rock star in a modern context alongside his origin story in the 18th century. Jordan says his sequel would have focused more on the latter.

“I wasn’t as interested in Lestat as a David Lee Roth, Iggy Pop kind of rock star with leather pants and a muscular torso. It seemed a little bit cornball to me,” Jordan reveals. “The bulk of the script that I wrote was about Lestat’s story in the 18th century, how he was turned into a vampire against his knowledge and against his will. I would’ve loved to have done that. I would’ve opened it on the Golden Gate Bridge [like the end of Interview with the Vampire].”

Below, in a conversation with THR, Jordan also discusses remaining faithful to Rice’s Interview with the Vampire despite reworking what he considered to be a “limp” ending.

***

It’s always interesting to revisit movies many years later. We process them differently with time and distance, and I imagine filmmakers have a particularly unique version of that experience. What struck you most when you opened Interview with the Vampire back up for the new 4K release?

When I watched it again, I really was just glad I was allowed to make it. I like the movie, and it still seems like the kind of movie that studios don’t normally make.

Following The Crying Game, you probably had multiple doors you could’ve gone through at the time. Do you remember the circumstances that led you through this one?

I was being asked to do very many things by different people. I wasn’t going to direct another Indiana Jones, although I suppose now I’d be doing a Marvel movie, wouldn’t I?

The jump from indies to franchises is often how it goes now.

I wouldn’t have done that. I’m Irish. I liked the vampire thing. I liked the challenge of turning a vampire movie into a huge historical epic, all at night. The visual challenges of it really excited me, and I liked Anne Rice’s book and the script she had written. A decade earlier, I had made a movie called The Company of Wolves with [novelist-screenwriter] Angela Carter, and it was a fantasy — a fairy tale gone dark, wrong and weird. Before she died in 1992, she wanted to make a movie that she was going to call Vampirella. So I saw The Interview with the Vampire as a companion piece to what myself and Angela had done all those years before. That was it, basically. It was a weird thing, but it was cool and lovely.

Casting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt was the coup of all casting coups, especially since Cruise’s character is absent for a 40-minute stretch in the second hour. Considering he was, and is, the biggest movie star in the world, did Cruise voice any concern at the time?

No, he didn’t. Not at all. He just liked the challenge of playing a flamboyant monster. When everyone told him he was not the right choice for the part, he liked the challenge of proving them wrong. It’s a great part, and he’s a great actor. He was just beginning to explore the non-Tom Cruise aspects of himself, and there are a lot of sides to Tom that he has yet to explore, let me put it that way.

The backlash to his casting included the aforementioned author and screenwriter Anne Rice, so he used that as bulletin board material?

It was a pain in the ass for me as a director, for him as an actor and for the entire production, when the whole world was saying, “Oh, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong.” You don’t want the challenge of having to prove yourself right. You want the challenge of making the character work and the movie work. So the opposition that Anne Rice took to his casting, and stuff like that, was an absolute distraction. It wasn’t a welcome thing at all. But I don’t think it was a contributing factor to what he did with the part. I think he did what he thought was interesting.

I mentioned the 40-minute stretch in which Lestat does not appear, but there are rumors of deleted scenes where he teamed up with the Théâtre des Vampires to get revenge against Louis and Claudia. Did you actually shoot any material with Cruise for that Paris section?

Yeah, I did. I shot one little scene, but it wasn’t very good. It wasn’t very interesting. I don’t know why. But when we met him again in New Orleans, it was fucking great. We’ve included deleted scenes on the [4K Blu-ray].

Yes, I watched them. I wondered if Lestat’s Paris scene would be among them, but now I know why you didn’t include it.

It didn’t make sense, really. The character would not have been that weak [in the Paris scene]. It was more interesting to find him in that abandoned house in New Orleans. There was something ghoulish and denatured about him in some strange way. That was much more interesting than seeing him with a bunch of strange … The fact of the matter is, the Theater of Vampires displayed itself best in the scenes in the theater itself. This coven of vampires living in these crypts was only interesting when you began to chop them with a scythe like Brad Pitt eventually did.

Of all the deleted scenes, is Louis’ confession the one you regret not including the most?

I cannot work out why that’s not in the finished movie. I’m sorry about that. I just can’t work it out. It’s been 30 years. I had long discussions with the editor about it. We were trying to track down our very first cut, and we couldn’t find it in the Warners vaults. But we did find these deleted scenes, some of which are interesting. So that’s why I’ve included them.

Brad, in hindsight, talks about how miserable he was shooting nights in the makeup and being hung upside down to drain the blood from his face.

It’s all my fault. All of that.

So it’s not retroactive exaggeration?

No, I sensed it at the time. We had intense discussions about it. You’ve got to face it. We shot six months at night in New Orleans, Paris and New York. Then we got some respite on the Pinewood set we used. But the problem is that the character suffers. Interview with the Vampire is Louis’ account of how he was turned into this thing by somebody who jumped him in the middle of the night. And he has spent the rest of his life trying to understand what this thing is. So that’s the part that Brad played, and he found it very oppressive in a way that Louis himself found it oppressive. So the combination of the part and Brad’s unease about shooting constantly at night — and me hanging him upside down and painting the veins on his face and putting haptic lenses in his eyes — maybe all that got to him a little bit.

He’d done Thelma & Louise, Legends of the Fall and A River Runs Through It. He was on the cusp of defining what kind of actor he wanted to be. When we later see Brad Pitt in Fight Club, Se7en and the Quentin Tarantino movies, he’s much more muscular, aggressive and all-American. So maybe that’s the direction he wanted to go in, but at the time, he was between directions in a way. He was still quite a young actor, but a great actor.

Kirsten Dunst’s character, Claudia, really tells it like it is, and from my interaction with her, Kirsten herself is also a straight shooter. Was she direct and forthright even as an 11-year-old kid?

She was a kid, but the minute I met her and tested her, I knew she’d be acting for the rest of her life. I didn’t feel the normal trepidation one has when casting a kid. I said to her mother at the time, “You do realize she’ll be acting for the rest of her life?” And her mother said, “Yes, she knows that.” So we cast a kid who was not only a superb actor, but she also played one of the most interesting parts in the whole story. Claudia is a child who is never able to grow up, and there’s something fairy tale-ish and ghoulish about it. There’s something of a porcelain doll about it. Of all the dilemmas that all the characters faced, it was the most interesting dilemma.

Nowadays, so many movies set themselves up for sequels, but in the ’90s, it was a rare occurrence. And to me, the ending in the Mustang always felt like it was setting up another movie. Were you actually thinking about a potential The Vampire Lestat movie when you shot it?

No, I just wanted to bring the character back in. I thought the ending of the book was kind of limp. [Christian Slater’s] Molloy says, “I want to be what you are.” And Louis says, “You’ve not listened to anything I’ve said, have you?” Then he vanishes, and Molloy runs down the street without knowing what he’s done. I just thought it was a bit limp. So I wrote this fun ending to bring Lestat back into the picture because I enjoyed the Lestat that Tom Cruise gave birth to in the earlier sections of the film. It was great to see him back again.

There was a conversation with [producer] David Geffen. He’d bought the rights to the whole string of [The Vampire Chronicles books]. After we made the movie, Warners asked me to write a script for the second book, The Vampire Lestat, which I did. But I wasn’t as interested in Lestat as a David Lee Roth, Iggy Pop kind of rock star with leather pants and a muscular torso. It seemed a little bit cornball to me, but I did write a script.

The bulk of the script that I wrote was about Lestat’s story in the 18th century, how he was turned into a vampire against his knowledge and against his will. He was an actor in the Commedia dell’arte troupe, and it was fascinating to me. His mother gets sick, and he turns her into a vampire. It was kind of cool. I would’ve loved to have done that. If I had done that, I would’ve opened it on the Golden Gate Bridge [like the end of Interview with the Vampire].

[Writer’s Note: At that point, Cruise not only didn’t make sequels to his own movies, but he also declined the chance to reprise Lestat, effectively ending the short-lived follow-up idea.]

There’s been a lot of debate this year about creative license in adaptations. The Odyssey in particular received so much guff for its changes, but a movie adaptation is not meant to be a 1:1 translation. So how did you approach that tug of war between the source material and doing what’s best for the movie?

Well, there was no tug of war at all, really. When I was given the project, it had been hanging around for years. I just heard that Anne Rice spoke to Tom Hanks about playing Lestat at one point [n ’93], and there was an earlier version of it where she apparently wanted to change the character of Louis to a woman and have Cher play that role.

[Writer’s Note: Rice’s novel was optioned upon its release in 1976, but the project stalled in development, which she believed was largely due to its homoerotic themes. As a last-ditch effort to get the film greenlit in the ’80s, she gender-swapped the role and heterosexualized the Louis-Lestat relationship. Geffen then approached her in 1992 for a more faithful adaptation.]

The novel was beautiful, and I could feel the atmosphere of it. I could touch it almost. But a lot of stuff had been taken out of the existing script. So when Geffen and Warners asked me to do it, I said, “I’d love to do it, but will you let me do my own pass on the script?” And they did. So I went back to Anne’s book and reintroduced a lot of elements from the book.

One of the main changes that Anne had introduced in the script was Louis lamenting not the death of his brother, but the death of his wife, when the story opens. It’s not a huge change, really, but I do think the movie is as accurate to the book as a movie can probably be without turning it into a version of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I tried to reproduce exactly the feeling I had when I returned to that novel, so I think it’s pretty accurate.

The metaphor of two men, sexuality and blood is intact. The fact is that it’s a gay family with a child at the center of it. The child is created to keep this family together. It’s all there, really. The most dynamic aspect of the book was this family. There’s Lestat, the dominant; Louis, the passive; and Claudia, the kid. That was it. So I thought I’d make a movie about the story of this family, and it’s as accurate to the book as I could make it. I can see how you could take that material and go anywhere with it, but I regarded my job to reflect the novel itself.

***
Interview with the Vampire is now available on 4K Blu-ray.