“He’s found a state of peace, which he’s never had,” Anderson said. “Louis has never, in any of his existences, has ever felt a sense of peace and calm. I think he’s always like, there is always an alarm going off somewhere in his head. And I think like he’s finally found this place of reconciliation, where he’s like, I am this. You know, I am this thing. I am the Vampire Louis, and if you have a problem with it, come get me. If you’re not going to, fine, but I’m here. I’m going to sit on my beautiful couch. I’m going to look at my beautiful paintings. I’m going to look at this skyline. I’m going to think about my brother, who I loved. I’m going to think about my sister and my daughter, who I loved. He’s found himself.”

“I think that’s what that final moment is, is like, he’s finally become what he was always supposed to be,” he continued, “and it’s kind of beautiful. Yeah, I’m really proud of him for getting there.”

Jacob Anderson on the Season 2 Finale (x)

I love a show that will hold a shot on some art and expect you to know what you’re looking at

Writing an adaptation of The Vampire Chronicles without Claudia dying is kind of like writing an ASOIAF adaptation without Ned Stark dying. Her death changes everything that comes after it.

I can't wait for the Queen of the Damned storyline because I know when Maharet has all the remaining vampires gathered up together in her lair that Daniel is going to call them something like "the homo Avengers" or "the Real Housewives of Oblivion" or "the '95 Chicago Bulls lineup if Jordan was a cannibal and Scottie Pippen was a pedophile."

i keep on thinking: in the 80s Marius used to just stick a tv in akasha and enkils faces and keep it on mtv for some fucked up reason. TV is kinda de@d now so wtf would he even do now…Akasha is stuck watching ridiculousnesses reruns

Another book detail that feels insane in the remembering… absolute choice to embed Mother and Father in a Nam June Paik installation… it’s going to be Lestat’s five hour long confessional YouTube stream

So is Armand actually swimming twice a day when he’s feeling one kilo too “plump,” or was Louis making up stuff to make him seem more human?

Because if I had to spend 500 years feeling insecure about my weight, I’d… Like I’m not even eating food except maybe pineapples to make my boyfriend happier?!

(Gif of me trying to get a mediocre star to chicharrone my body)

I honestly wonder if this was meant as an indication that the showrunners have changed the worldbuilding (again) re vamps being physically constant, because it would be insane for Louis to have improvised that piece of Rashid lore on the spot in response to Daniel’s stray thought. That being said, I can’t imagine the rules being changed to the effect that these immortal beings gain any benefit from exercise. What even is the point then lol. (That Armand likes to swim in this ‘verse I’m prepared to accept? That Louis had encountered a real human minion that had had this particular hang up and remembered it is feasible, but somehow feels wrong. I don’t expect this ever to come up again later in the series mind you)

“The other really exciting and really challenging part of that set was curating the artwork around him. For me, Rolin’s mandates were that he’s this cultured, international person and it needs to broadcast that there’s a lot of wealth, so we knew we needed some big names. But I didn’t just want it to be big for the sake of being big, but that there would be connections to the study of psychology, connections to African American culture in the United States. So, there’s a lot of Basquiat, but then also Bacon. And then we have a Vivian Maier photograph. She’s in the dining room in the back. What else did we have? We had a few artists from New Orleans, some contemporary. I wanted there to be his connection to New Orleans, to home, his connection to his race, his connection to international travel, to psychology. There’s also a textile piece that’s hanging that’s a kimono by a Korean artist. I think that knowing Louis’s character, there’s different paintings in the background that relate to women — whether that’s an allusion to Claudia or his sister or his mother — but these devastating relationships, so there’s imagery of women that we wanted to capture. We suffered quite a bit over making sure we were getting all these things that have way more significance for us than I’m sure the average person, but for me Louis was such a fascinating character. And again, with someone with infinite wealth, access, and resources, it was a really, really cool challenge. The hardest part is always just balancing the financial with the reality of getting the rights for things because we had to get the rights or all those things. In the end I think we were all really happy with what we ended up with.”

Interview With The Vampire Q&A — Production Designer Mara LePere-Schloop On Bringing Storyville To Life

Offered Spring 2023. Syllabus available here; course packet available here.

Only saw the instructor name *after* I read this on AO3 last night then reblogged today lmao. I can tell we're gonna be invoking Todd Haynes a whole lot in this house

I’ve been thinking about this book that amc-Daniel wrote about the growing AIDS crisis. The back blurb says it was first published as a running series on Kaposi Sarcoma during the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic, which was before it was even called AIDS. Which means Daniel would have been in his late-20s at the time when writing about it (circa 1981). 

This means that Daniel was writing a running series for some newspaper (or maybe multiple papers) about this illness that seemed to be infecting only gay men (which is what was thought about the disease at the time - the original name for AIDS was GRID: “gay-related immune deficiency.”) Given how Daniel frequented gay bars, plus lived in both San Fransisco and New York, he might have even known a person or two who contracted it.  

If Devil’s Minion did happen in the past (and the hints even from the showrunners and cast is that it did), and it happened for the same length of time that it did in the books, then that also means Daniel was still writing, and was specifically writing a lot about this topic, even when he was entangled with Armand (and possibly Louis as well too in the show’s version of it). 

Thank goodness for the price of lumber or whatever it was. Especially this year after coming off several lavishly beautiful and expensive Amazon adaptations with pacing issues (all of which I enjoyed more than not… still, either too few episodes, too many, or weird choices in what to cut or focus on). That being said, I can somewhat mentally reconstruct the counterfactual, and I wouldn’t have minded it: you could telescope 5 and 6 (Claudia didn’t need to make two attempts to leave before the one that took, basically, and I could really have done without the SA in retrospect) and tighten the edit to do the New Orleans arc in 6 eps then Paris in a brisk 4. You can see the elements of the setup that allow Paris to be all quick payoff: pre-establish Claudia’s resentment of Louis, pre-establish Armand as Louis’s longterm partner and the overall tenor of their relationship.

As it is, s2 will run longer than its material unless significantly rejigged: as Rolin Jones points out, the canon is a lot of sitting around and talking (followed by murder). You’d have to give Europe a whole episode, Claudia and Madeleine a whole episode probably, and go completely hog wild on the Dubai and San Fran bits. There’s an obvious temptation to bring in the TVL Paris timeline as a parallel, but 1) you can’t shoehorn Lestat’s narrative into the Dubai framing, 2) conversely, you won’t be able to do it all in 8. I count TVL among the grandly problématique French historical novels of the 20th century that happened not to be written in French (think Angélique), and like the showrunner I want it to have a lot of room to breathe lol.

(To be honest, putting on my project manager hat, if AMC had Amazon Studios’ cash flows, they should shoot S2 (IWTV pt 2) and S3 (TVL) simultaneously: very little cast overlap, but a lot of set overlap.)

Alright then, I need to say my piece or I will actually explode. The statement that Louis repeatedly chose Lestat over Claudia is untrue. At best, it’s reductive. The crux of the issue is that Louis is incapable of making that choice; he wants to have his cake and eat it too, because he loves them both and doesn’t want to lose either.

On Lestat in the AMV series

Watched/read some cast interviews. Found it touching that Sam Reid believes evidently in Lestat's redemptive potential while being frankly disappointed in his boi's lack of emotional growth this season lol. Which also made me realize the show was not merely papering over the discrepancies between IWTV Lestat and thereafter series Lestat with sheer force of performance plus theory of ~*~*~unreliable narration~*~*~ but had actually rejigged Lestat's character arc entirely? Intentionally?

This was already too long / just me thinking aloud but I feel like I didn’t get to what I thought was interesting about it? What I thought was interesting is that Lestat is all of 30 when he meets Louis in the book, and really 21 at best in emotional age lol. He gets into a 60-something year long starter marriage in which Louis angsts about his lost humanity every night, as opposed to spending a century with Gabrielle or Marius or by himself coming to the conclusion that humans aren’t worth it except in the most superficial sense. In the book it’s Lestat’s idea to make Claudia, because he can. In the show he knows it’s a bad idea and only does it because Louis asks; while he might care for Claudia to some extent, it’s hard to believe he loves her the way he did in the book, despite or even because this Claudia is significantly more humanized. There’s a lot of he-said-he-said in the books regarding how much book Lestat is a gremlin vis a vis all that monstrous longtermist capital, but the series presents both Lestat and Louis as practiced and canny with money. And so on. Book Lestat is much more of a hot mess; series Lestat has become a worse and meaner person who truly deserves to die a couple of times over so he can learn and change. He’s got more of a way to go, but it’s been pruned into a clearer arc.