25 Things You Didn’t Know About Interview With The Vampire
12. The Film Was Nearly Developed As A Musical Instead
At one point, Rice was working on the adaptation with the late Julia Phillips, producer of The Sting, Taxi Driver and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Phillips was the first woman to win an Oscar, so even a decade after her heyday and in the aftermath of a career-crippling cocaine addiction, her opinion carried significant weight.
Had that situation continued, things could have gone in an entirely different direction - because Phillips was insistent that the best way to do justice to Rice’s work would be to adapt the novel as a Broadway musical.
Fortunately for the film, Phillips was about to commit the greatest act of career suicide that Hollywood had ever seen. She’d lost all her money on a box office bomb three years earlier, and to stave off bankruptcy she’d written a tell-all memoir, the excoriating You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again.
‘Tell-all’ is euphemistic: the book was an almighty slagathon, a vicious, gossipy attack on everyone Phillips had ever met or worked with. One of the people she’d shredded was her current boss, producer David Geffen (she wrote that the work he’d had done made him look like a middle-aged baby). She was fired, and never worked in movies again.
The film alludes to a famous musical, though. When Louis dismisses Le Théâtre des Vampires as "vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires”, it’s a reference to a very similar line in Victor/Victoria, in which Julie Andrews pretends to be a female impersonator.