25 Things You Didn’t Know About Interview With The Vampire

The late Stan Winston’s studio performed the remarkable make-up effects and prosthetics on the film. His colleagues had nagged him to offer their services as they loved Rice’s novel so much.

However, despite the three Oscars on his shelf, Winston had to persuade Neil Jordan that he was the man for the job - because he’d done too good a job on the dinosaur animatronics on Jurassic Park earlier that year.

I hadn’t read the book yet, but I was a big fan of Neil Jordan as a director. So I put a call in to him, asking that he take a meeting with me regarding the film. And he was shocked to hear from me - shocked! - because, to his mind, I was ‘the dinosaur guy’. He would never have thought of this studio for the make-up effects for Interview With The Vampire. I literally had to sell this studio and myself to him. I had to convince him that we did make-up, that I’d started doing make-up.

Seeing the film as a chance to move on from dinosaurs and back to serious horror, Winston pressed his case, reminding Jordan that some of his earlier work included The Thing, The Terminator and Aliens, the latter of which had won him his first Oscar.

Of course, while working on Interview With The Vampire, Winston won his fourth Oscar for Jurassic Park - proof that dinosaurs weren’t yet done with him. He’d go on to work on the next two Jurassic Park movies too.