A season-two post-immortemwithInterview With the Vampireshowrunner Rolin Jones.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
You wouldnt know it from watching the wildly creative, sexy, and devastating end result.
The show is built to make people feel insane, he told me.
The language is there.
I dont think were doing anything remarkably different than Anne did.
If theres one thing, we probably have a little bit more humor than that first book has.
But the later books have it!
The part that scared me the most was episode seven:Its a play.
Im not even individually satisfied with everything.
What werent you satisfied with?I fucking hate that stupidpunch in the headfrom thepilot!
Its funny now we embrace it.
We even wrote to it.
Then, of course, it tests better than anything else in the pilot.
The thing that makes it all really easy to embrace is that I love my actors.
Im more satisfied with this than anything Ive done in TV.
Its a weird fucking show!
And AMC has backed it fully.
Other networks probably have more money, but I dont think they would have made this show.
So we problem-solve like, How do you do a giant fight when you dont have enough time?
Oh, lets do it from Claudias point of view!
And we always give a shot to keep the stakes a little bit more grounded.
Its TV, and its dramatic storytelling, so it always comes back to casting and to actors.
No ones watching it to hear our writing or to see our little special effects.
Its about characters, and its about actors.
The basic building blocks of this show are great scenes for great actors.
Youre always looking for the unique backdoor to the story.
It really shouldnt work.
It was not supposed to.
It was rigged to fail.
Let me praise the people who are line-producing on this show.
They kill somebody every day.
Theyre just not going to have normal conversations or do normal things.
You start there as a dramatist, and you just go forward.
Its always some weird-ass thing.
I have no idea how we do it.
Youve alluded to the production being challenging.
We dont have 12 hours; we have six hours of night.
Its a vampire show!
The calendar is not friendly to us.
So we had to shoot over two nights.
On our crazy little show, we made this ridiculous pivot.
So the actors already knew each other and started relationships prior to the show.
Youre really trying to push them.
Well figure out how to do it.
I feel very grateful and very fortunate.
Ben and Roxanes characters, Santiago and Madeline, are fairly minor in the book.
In the show, theyre fleshed-out, major players.
The gift of TV is you have this extra time.
There are a couple of challenges, though, especially when we split the book into two seasons.
Thats frustrating to begin with, but its an opportunity.
We just got lucky that we get more time to sit with characters.
I want to ask about how theTheatre des Vampirescame to be.
They did a show calledThe Animals & Children Took to the Streets,and I remembered it forever.
These guys, theyre incredible!
So I always knew I wanted them to do the Theatre.
And it worked out, timeline-wise.
Two of our coven members, Estelle and Celeste, are the founding members of that company.
Each character in the coven gets a little moment in the stage show.
You gotta sneak Sam in there, because Sam is very important for the plot.
You have to hide that for a while.
Those are five-minute-long plays, and you see ten seconds of them onstage.
My writers room is almost exclusively playwrights.
We all come from the theater.
Most of our actors are theater people.
I apologize to anybody who didnt go to theater school that they had to suffer through it.
Thats fun and easy.
If anything, I was concerned about holding ourselves back.
You think theres a lot of that in there?
Trust me, there was way more on the board and in scripts.
I was worried aboutepisode seven, which is all set onstage.
But it was great.
We had a hell of a lot harder time going into the Dubai bedroom than we did the theater.
The stage is beautiful, but that backstage is just incredible.
When I walked into the backstage for the first time, I got choked up.
Why do anotheranythingwithout Mara LaPere-Schloop?
I never want to work with anybody else.
We have a little fun with some stuff.
Were not going fullForrest Gumpor anything, but we like to grab historical figures and weave them in.
We owed this episode since the ending ofthat one episodein season one.
It also answers people asking, Why is this a second interview?
Why are they doing this?
It was like, Okay, playwrights, here we go.
Lets see if we can pull it off.
This was the first scene we shot this year.
So that big fight in the beginning is Assads first scene as Armand.
Theres more from the books in this episode than youd think.
Theres this very interesting short story thatAnne Rice wrote forPlayboythat helped us shape Armand.
A lot of people probably asked the question, Why did Louis stick around with this guy?
But Louis is not always easy himself.
Hes a sloppy vampire.
You come up with a real spicy stew.
Its funny that you guys wrote this episode out of empathy for Armand.
He radically changes book to book.
Why do I feel unsettled around him all the time?
You introduce Justin Kirk this season as a Talamasca figure working with Daniel.
So I called in a favor.
Its something well be looking at going forward.
Hes going to be a bigger deal in this show than maybe he was in the canon.
How did you create Claudia and Madelines death scene?
Thats the sweet spot youre looking for.
The idea to not see the end but to throw it onto Lestats face is forward storytelling.
Its on him now.
He has to deal with it for the rest of the seasons going forward.
The idea of grotesque beauty.
We were trying to attain that from this awful, awful image.
The season finale ends with a really fun reveal: Vampire Daniel!
It felt like a gift to the fans.
Because we can work with that.
We know that in the books, Armand eventually turns Daniel Molloy.
Hows that gonna work?
So what if we turn you into a vampire?
Think about an 18-year-old Amish kid who goes on Rumspringa and just goes crazy.
And on a personal note, I just want to see vampire Barry Champlain.
Lets go back to hisTalk Radioguy.
Lets see what the hell would happen if you stopped worrying about your two kids for a little bit.
Your hands arent shaking anymore.
Just seeing pure id.
The idea going forward is it would be fun to write a vampire who gets turned as a 70-year-old.
How do you feel about the shows current level of popularity?
Im proud of the adaptation.
Theres the element of second windows, how these things are going to be disseminated going forward.
There does seem to be a lot of legwork done by fans.
But thats chasing hardware.
I dont care about any of that shit.
But yeah, AMC seems super-proud of it at least in the emails they send me.
