Neil Jordan Knows Why Brad Pitt Had a Bad Time Filming ‘Interview With the Vampire’

Brad Pitt is certainly not a night owl. In this week’s Variety, Interview With the Vampire director Neil Jordan revisits his 1994 film adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel, which starred Kirsten Dunst, Tom Cruise, and an apparently melancholy Pitt.

Pitt played the moody Louis de Pointe du Lac, a vampire who recounts his experience with the blood thirsty and eccentric Lestat du Lioncourt (Cruise) to reporter Daniel Malloy (Christian Slater) over the course of the movie. “I think the problem that he suffered from was the fact that the role suffers,” Jordan told Variety about Louis de Pointe du Lac’s character. “It was the passive role, and it was the central role…often the narrative central character can be the most passive element in the whole equation.”

Although 30 years have past since Interview With the Vampire premiered, Jordan remembers the conditions on set and Pitt’s mood well. “We were shooting at night constantly, we never saw the daylight for months and months, and I think it affected him,” said Jordan. “But it was part of the character as well. I mean, Louis is somebody who is punished through a 300-year period by this creature. So the way the role affected Brad was not unlike the journey Louis himself had to go through.”

It’s no secret that Pitt was not elated while filming Interview With the Vampire. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2011, Pitt said he was “miserable” while shooting the movie, which he called “six months in the fucking dark”: “Contact lenses, makeup, I’m playing the bitch role.” Still, Pitt told EW that Jordan was “a really good friend of mine…. In the movie, they took the sensational aspects of Lestat and made that the pulse of the film, and those things are very enjoyable and very good, but for me, there was just nothing to do,” he said. “You just sit and watch.” While Pitt was unhappy, he didn’t blame Cruise for having the flashier, more alpha role: “No discredit to Tom, man. He had pressure on him,” said Pitt. “There were all the fanboys of the book. He had all this pressure to make it work, and he made it work—and good on him.”

Another reason Pitt might have had a worse time than his costar making Interview was the sheer amount of time he spent on set. “Brad was there for far longer than Tom Cruise was, so he had to endure the entire production,” said Jordan. “So maybe that—and the passivity of the role, perhaps—took a toll on him a little bit.” The director, at least, was elated with Pitt’s performance. “I thought he was really good in the part,” he said. “Any faults of what people perceive to be the performance are faults of the actual character itself, and of the novel itself. I mean, Louis suffers in the novel from the moment he’s turned into a vampire to the very end of the book. So I’m sure it was a tough journey for Brad, but it was also a tough journey for the character too.“