Geffen PicturesTomorrow morning, Netflix will unveil the full list of titles available to stream next month—but today, E! News can exclusively reveal that the 1994 horror drama Interview With the Vampire, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, is one of the dozens of movies being added to its vast library.
Directed by Neil Jordan, and based on Anne Rice's novel of the same name, the film received generally positive reviews upon its release. It received two Academy Award nominations, and an adolescent Kirsten Dunst received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The supporting cast includes Antonio Banderas, Stephen Rea and Christian Slater. Slater replaced River Phoenix in the interviewer role, after the young actor died of a drug overdose.
For Pitt, making the movie was a miserable experience. "You gotta understand: My character wants to kill himself for the whole movie. I've never thought about killing myself. It was a sick thing. I don't like when a movie messes with your day," he told Rolling Stone in 1994. "Right now, I'd like to play a guy who just wants to f--k everybody so I can have a damn good time." Asked to describe the shoot, he said, "You know, Legends of the Fall was great." Similarly, when asked to describe working with Cruise, he said, "I'm tellin' ya, Antonio Banderas is the greatest guy."
Jordan said he was unaware of rumors that the two A-listers didn't get along on set. "They're two very different actors. And their characters were very different. Tom's character loves control and loves inflicting pain on Brad's character. Brad's character just wants to escape. In many ways they related to each other way their characters did. Brad really suffered this role," he told the magazine. "He came into it totally exhausted from doing Legends. He did agonize."
Cruise wasn't a "bad guy," and he gave a "good" performance in the movie, Pitt told Rolling Stone. "I like the guy. I honestly like the guy. But at a point I started really resenting him. In retrospect I realize that it was completely because of who our characters were. I realize that it was my problem," he laughed. "People take everything so seriously. It's a movie, and it's done."
In 2008, Pitt again described Interview With the Vampire as a "very tough" shoot. "First of all, the whole thing was in the dark. In New Orleans, we shot for three months in the dark – we shot all nights. There's an opening scene in the movie that's daylight, and that's it," he told Rolling Stone. "The whole movie is in the dark. And it really started to mess with my psyche."
Pitt said he was "disappointed" with the way the movie turned out, "at least for my character. Because in the book, it was a guy trying to figure out who he was—if he's a god or if he's of the devil. The film focused more on the sensational antics of Lestat, which were done really well, but my character ended up getting dragged place to place and set up for the sensational moments. And it just became a little bit more whiny than a real search. That frustrated me."
In 2011, Pitt confirmed he not only looked "miserable" onscreen—he was "miserable" in real life. "Six months in the f--ing dark. Contact lenses, makeup, I'm playing the bitch role..." By the time the production moved to the U.K., Pitt reached his breaking point. "London was f--king dark. London was dead of winter. We're shooting in Pinewood, which is an old institution—all the James Bond films. There's no windows in there. It hasn't been refabbed in decades. You leave for work in the dark—you go into this cauldron, this mausoleum—and then you come out and it's dark. I'm telling you, one day it broke me. It was like, 'Life's too short for this quality of life.' I called David Geffen, who was a good friend. He was a producer, and he'd just come to visit. I said, 'David, I can't do this anymore. I can't do it. What will it cost me to get out?' And he goes, very calmly, 'Forty million dollars.' And I go, 'OK, thank you.' It actually took the anxiety off of me. I was like, 'I've got to man up and ride this through, and that's what I'm going to do.'"
In fairness, Pitt admitted the shoot wasn't all bad. "The great thing that came out of that movie is that it birthed my love affair with New Orleans," the actor told Entertainment Weekly. "We were shooting nights, so I just rode my bike around all night. I made some great friends there."
Interview With the Vampire is available to stream on Netflix starting July 1.