Lestat Rocks!
Jun. 19th, 2010 01:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forgottenbennetI can't remember if I posted this before and I'm too lazy to check if I have or not.
QUEEN OF THE DAMNED
Lestat Rocks
By MICHAEL HELMS
The second Anne Rice vampire movie promises harder-core horror than its predecessor.
Even in broad daylight, if you walk down the right Melbourne, Australia alleyways, you can glimpse vampires. Naturally, this occurrence has increased dramatically during QUEEN OF THE DAMNED’s shoot all over the city (followed by pickup shots in LA). The locations for the film (which Warner Bros. releases February 22) range from a disused quarry pit to a giant factory space on the outskirts of suburbia; today, Fango finds itself on a street outside the upscale restaurant Rosati’s, as lunchtime crowds surge back and forth. From within their midst emerges a figure in white. A ghost? An omen? No, just makeup FX expert Bob (DEAD ALIVE) McCarron, strolling around in his standard blindingly pristine (but soon not to be), blazingly white overalls.
The aforementioned eatery hides a nightclub accessible only through a seedy backstreet. This club is the number-one venue for the hippest Queen of the Damned immortals, plus various curious humans and vampire wannabes. Just outside, a man with fangs in his pocket is lurking in the midday shadows: none other than underground icon Rowland S. Howard. In between praising the Robin Casinader track his group performs as the house band and joking with fellow luminaries, Howard sneers, "We only play to the in-crowd." He then dutifully dons his fangs, and all present cannot believe it has taken this long for someone to cast him as a vampire.
Fango gets a quick peek inside the bar before filming re-commences, and suffice to say it is well set up for any type of bloodbath. The only light emanates from the well-stocked serving area and the adjacent stage. Five feet back, and you’re enveloped in total darkness. Anything can happen - and a lot does in QUEEN OF THE DAMNED, which combines an adaptation of the eponymous Anne Rice book with elements of her previous bloodsucker chronicle, THE VAMPIRE LESTAT. Described by its makers as a “supernatural adventure,” QUEEN follows the legendary Lestat (Stuart Townsend), who has reinvented himself as a rock star in the contemporary American scene. His music wakes Akasha (Aaliyah), the queen of all vampires, and inspires her to want to make Lestat her king - but Akasha’s malevolent power is so great that the rest of the immortal vampire race must stand against her if they want to survive. Things get complicated when Jesse (FIRESTARTER: REKINDLED’s Marguerite Moreau), a young Englishwoman with a fascination for the dark side, falls in love with Lestat. The screenplay was adapted by Scott Abbott, who did the basic groundwork for the story; other contributing writers include Michael Petroni (who shares final script credit with Abbott), Bernie Goldman and director Michael Rymer.
Back outside, the excitable Moreau positively vibrates as she chats about her role of Jesse and the whole DAMNED thing. “I’m fascinated by vampires,” she says. “I don’t know about other actresses, but it’s always been high on my agenda. I’ve always wanted to play a vampire, be eaten by a vampire, eat like a vampire. I saw BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA and went around for hours going sluuurp.”
Moreau then reveals how her character comes into contact with the fanged undead: "Jesse works for this secret order that studies paranormal activity. They've told her never to go near vampires. Ghosts and things like that, they're OK; you can deal with superstition and all that stuff, but vampires are too dangerous. But she can't help it because she's falling in love with Lestat. So, what can a girl do?"
Despite that romantic subplot, Moreau notes that there's plenty that's frightening about Queen of the Damned's bloodsuckers. "They can move at supernatural speed," she says. "Often I'll be talking to one of them, or think I'm talking to one of them, and they'll be in one place and then they're right in front of me. Basically, they scare the shit out of me. When they attack, their eyes and teeth change and they turn into these wild beasts. It's animal and primal. As Jesse, I get the best of both worlds. It's great being a mortal in this film. We're making a big fantasy fairy tale, but it's very much set in the real world, and that's fantastic."
The character of Jesse has seen the most development from the novel, though Moreau notes that she and director Rymer share a deep reverence for Rice's work. "There are some definite differences with age and little things that we've changed, but Michael really loves horror films, and it's an honor to get to do something with such a backstory," she says. "I've got three fat novels to delve into and go to their world. Out at the studio, the sets are wonderful. It's incredible, the world that we've created. It's so lush. That's what Anne Rice created, and Michael loves it so much and has been extraordinarily careful in translating it. This movie will be less literal than Interview With The Vampire; it will be a more abstract journey."
Producer Jorge Saralegui recently returned from another strange world - Mars (he was a producer on Red Planet, also shot for Warner Bros. Down Under) - and takes a moment to trace his own involvement with Queen. "I had just come to Warners as a producer and Courtney Valenti, the executive in charge of the project, asked me to read the book to see if I would be interested. Michael was the director, but we had no writer. In a sense, we hadn't yet worked out a story. It was exciting to be asked to work on an Anne Rice novel, and I found the book pretty amazing. The obvious first task was, 'Where is the movie story in this?' That was the hardest thing.
"There's a lot of material", he continues, "but it's episodic or it's just this or that person's story, and we couldn't do it all. We could have made it a miniseries, but if you're doing a feature, where is the core story? We ended up inventing the romance between Lestat and Jesse and chose to frame everything against it. That allows the audience to enter from the point of view of Jesse, who's about the only human in the whole movie."
According to the producer, the ration of humans to non-humans sets Queen apart withing its horrific sub-genre. "In most vampire movies, it's nearly all humans and you have one or two vampires who are bad," Saralegui explains. "Here, its mainly a vampire world. In the subtext you get to see that they are humanistic and you soft-shoe over the fact that they kill somebody every single night. The best analogy that we offer is to liken them to American Indians killing buffalo, where they thank the buffalo for giving them skins to wear in winter, meat to eat, etc. It's about having reverence for mortals, reverence for you victims, this is what the more humanistic vampires feel. One of the things we show, which is also in Anne Rice, is that when you drink somebody's blood, you receive images of their life, you experience it and their life experience is inside you. Which, on one level, you could use as a rationalization for killing somebody. So that's what good vampires do. Whereas Akasha is saying, 'They're cattle. Kill them. Have a massacre. It's fun. Have a big orgy.' "
Fidelity to Rice would certainly seem to be an issue here, especially given the author's public early criticisms of Interview (which she later recanted upon seeing the film). Saralegui claims that the Queen production has had very little contact with Rice, adding, "At some stage, you end up saying that a movie is different from a book, which I definitely believe. A book stands on its own ground, and hers are beyond reproach. But this is a movie and it is under two hours long, and you can't put everything in. You must make changes. Queen of the Damned is not a visual presentation of her book, it is a separate work of art inspired by the book."
A work that sounds like it'll be pretty brutal, as Saralegui describes the films ghoul-on-ghoul battles. "When they have a fight, they hurt each other", he says. "We don't get into the two superheroes hurling each other against walls and then getting up to fight again. With the vampires, it's a case of bleeding the other person. If I drain you of your blood, then you're dead. But all the vampires heal very quickly - we have that from the books - so that's what you're fighting against. Now - if it's me against you, it would be really hard for me to kill you, because I can't drink your blood at once and you're healing even as I'm doing it, unless I'm much more powerful than you - it can be teeth, it can be fingernails, it can be knives - so that you're bleeding at a greater rate than you can regenerate."
There is certainly plenty of blood being shed for Queen, including one bit that Saralegui cites as his favorite on-set moment so far. "There's a scene where Akasha is biting someone. It's really cool and sexy and creepy - she's drinking from this guy's chest with blood all over her and in her mouth, and it was too much. Aaliyah was keeping it together, but as soon as 'Cut' was called she went bleeuugh and all the blood in her mouth spilled out. And she was laughing, because now she was Aaliyah, not Akasha. Her character is very different from her as a person, but she totally gets into it as an actress. More than anybody, when you say 'Cut', she's somebody else. It's really funny to see her face change and become like a regular person's. Everyone else, they don't push themselves that much further to become a vampire. She's really pushing it."
The singer turned actress (who tragically died in a plane crash following the completion of Queen's shooting) wins the producer's highest praise. "She's been incredible, more than any of us expected. This is a great relief, because she's picking up a lot of the burden that the story places on her as an actress. Her scenes have to kick ass, and they do."
The next stop is the makeup FX van, where veteran artist McCarron is demonstrating the workings of a blood-pumping organ as he gets to the heart of various matters. "As well as doing makeup effects, I'm a paramedic," he reveals. "That's the other side of my life, so we do try to make things anatomically correct here. I've seen plenty of hearts in surgery, but I've never opened anyone's chest. A female vampire rips this out of a guy's chest and holds it in her hand. Then she bites it as the barman jumps over the bar. Without looking, she flicks her handbag and it splits him across the throat in three places and he, as a stuntman, gets thrown against the wall. Then we see him lying on the floor with blood gushing out of his throat. "
"She turns back to the heart," he continues, "and we've made what we call clay-slip models. They're like pottery hearts and are full of powder. And they are the most fragile things I've ever made. You've only got to touch them and they crumble. So she holds it in her hand and - in slow motion- goes thwack and the whole thing just turns to dust. Then she turns around and kills everyone in the bar [laughs]."
McCarron has worked on movies big and small, from tiny Australian indies to major Hollywood productions, and says, "The last film of mine you would have seen was The Matrix, but this has twice as many effects. The other day we did 20 people around a pool with ripped-open throats, full prosthetics, floating in the water. We've got teeth by the hundreds; every person who turns into a vampire has fangs. We've got different types of contact lenses. We've got a mechanical hand that grabs a junkie in the beginning; that's supposed to be Lestat when he first wakes up in the crypt.
"We get into some other characters called the Ancients," he continues. "Bruce [The Road Warrior] Spence is playing Khayman, who's a mummy, so he has four prosthetics over his whole head, chest and arms, and he has alopecia hair, which is like cancer-ridden hair. He's a real mess. When we kill some of the Ancients, we use makeup effects to enhance pulsing veins and fluid coming out of their ears and noses. For the concert scene, we've got decapitations, stabbings, and glass fully embedded from one guy's head to his feet.
"This film has buckets of blood in it," McCarron adds, as if the emphasis was necessary at this point. "Every time Michael says, 'Can we get some blood on set?' it's buckets. And when you see vampire marks on someone's neck, I refuse to have two holes where they've been bitten, and he's been happy with that. I love Hammer; I was brought up on it. I've put my fair share of double fang wounds on necks, but when an animal bites you, and this is a human with long teeth, you're going to have bottom teeth marks and top teeth marks and fangs. So I said to Michael, 'When a vampire bites, they can do it gently to preserve a person or rip the throat out like a dog would'. So we've mostly gone for ripped throats - take it right out. When Akasha bites a few people, you actually see the throat exposed and the esophagus hanging out and a lot of flesh flapping."
Before Fango leaves McCarron for a lunch date with the director, the FX master casually mentions one more effect guaranteed to affect the appetite: "There's a girl there with a whole set of teeth marks across her breast, all inflamed. We're trying to make these people look like junkies in a way, because they come to the bar often and feed the vampires. They want to be vampires themselves."
Putting all these horrific acts on screen might seem out of character for director Rymer, who made a critical splash with 1995's award-winning Angel Baby and debuted in the U.S. with the crime drama In Too Deep. But he does have a bit of a genre background (he scripted the Linda Blair-starring hospital thriller Dead Sleep), and as the wool-clad director manages to keep his cool under a blazing sun, he states, "I've seen every horror movie ever made, but I particularly like the old Universal and RKO classics - Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Rave, The Black Cat and King King. Also great '60's ones like Rosemary's Baby. The them in those films always appealed to me - I was always on the side of the monster. I was a little kid into monsters because they looked cool and were scary."
Unlike the epic, star-laden Interview, Queen is being produced at a relatively modest $30-million cost, which is fine by Rymer. "Warner Bros.and [producing entity] Village Roadshow wanted to do this one at a price, so they didn't want to do a big megastar vehicle," he says. "I was very happy about that, because it's always easier to be convincing where reality is being stretched if you're not dealing with big names. And the fact that they were gutsy enough to cast relatively unknown leads took a lot of pressure off. Conversely, the fact that we were doing this film in Melbourne made it less of a risk for them to not have a big star."
Rymer points out a particular element which will hopefully elevate Queen above recent vampire films. "We've got a rock star for a vampire, and the only way to get away with that is to an extend, he has to be a vampire pretending to be a rock star where everyone thinks it's the other way around. And he plays with that. For instance, in the videos where he's goofing on Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, he's playing, in quite a modernist way, with his own expectations. He's winking a little bit - I'm a vampire playing a rock star playing a vampire. What's real? Whats not?' " And, the director notes, the greater challenge lay in presenting the character's more realistic side, as opposed to the fantastical one. "Vampires are easy - it's rock stars who are scary things to try and get right. And I think we've done pretty well. The music's working and Stuart Townsend is an amazing vampire, but also a great rock star.
"This is a combination of the second and third books," Rymer continues, "and the other thing that differentiates this film from Interview is that there, Louis was a very human vampire who didn't really want to kill and was sort of very angst-ridden about his predicament. He was moaning and whining through most of the film, whereas by the time you get to the second and third books, Lestat has become the main character and doesn't give a shit about that. He wants to be a vampire and loves being a vampire. He's a damn good one and just wants to share it with the world. Essentially, he wants to be famous, and that makes him a very modern hero."
Yet Lestat, of course, doesn't get titular billing; the movie is named for Akasha, and like Saralegui, Rymer could not be happier with the actress inhabiting the role. "From the very beginning, I was always pushing for an African queen, because 6,000 years ago Egyptian queens did not look like Elizabeth Taylor," the director says. "I felt it was more truthful and realistic to have a black actress in that role. The studio was very excited about Aaliyah in Romeo Must Die, so I put her through acting boot camp. We had her working around the clock with coaches. She auditioned several times and, like the other leads in the movie, really earned her role. She proved herself and has become a huge asset. She is fabulous as the evil queen.
"There's a general principle in this movie that vampires are not as much frightening as fabulous-looking," Rymer adds. "They are the beautiful immortals who have made the decision to give their souls to live forever. If you're going to live forever, you want to look good. Aaliyah is just so sensual and sexy and beautiful, and it's really her actions that make her frightening. It's a tricky role. You think, 'Oh, Queen of the Damned, should I find someone like Anjelica Huston? A more mature woman?' But to play her more as the kitten who is eating the mouse, and not seeing anything wrong with that, is more frightening than sneering evil. We said to the actors, 'Let the makeup and the teeth and the costumes take care of the vampire bit, you play a character.' And that has worked very well, particularly for her.
"She does some terrible things. She emasculates a couple of dozen vampires, burns them from the inside; she rips a guy's heart out and sucks on the aorta like a straw. But even when she's not being evil, when she is being sexual and coming on to Lestat, she just has this menace and power about her as a result of the costuming and the way she alters her behavior, and it all comes together in this wonderful villain. She's fascinating but frightening at the same time."
Shooting in his hometown has been a breeze for Rymer so far, with one exception: "We ran into a serious problem when we had to film an airplane. Melbourne has no caretaker airport, so planes are only here for two hours. This turned out to be a major pain in the arse. It has also been a little tricky because of the accents sometimes. But one of my big arguments for coming to Melbourne rather than Vancouver was, first, Melbourne is a much better Goth city. It has a much greater variety of architecture. Then you add the exchange rate and the tax breaks. We're building enormous, elaborate, detailed sets you just couldn't do in the States. And, for selfish reasons, I knew there was a very strong acting base here, so I could give supporting roles to great players. You know, it only takes one bad actor to ruin a film."
As he's called back to the set, Rymer leaves us with a final assessment, one that is surprising in light of McCarron's comments. "The gore level is moderate in this film," he insists. "You've got a lot of people biting each other and a lot of bleeding, but there are no real gross outs. As a fan of classic horror, I've never been particularly enamoured of cheap shocks. But that's a very subjective thing. My wife is terrified by all of it, so for the hardcore fans of Sam Raimi or Elm Street or even Tarantino, Queen is not geared to produce that grimacing reaction of 'That's disgusting'. It's more like Akasha seducing Lestat, groping him and then biting his chest and blood spilling out of her mouth, which is hopefully arousing in another way. You go, 'Oh, that's weird, but I'm aroused.' Thats the razor's edge we're trying to travel."
QUEEN OF THE DAMNED
Lestat Rocks
By MICHAEL HELMS
The second Anne Rice vampire movie promises harder-core horror than its predecessor.
Even in broad daylight, if you walk down the right Melbourne, Australia alleyways, you can glimpse vampires. Naturally, this occurrence has increased dramatically during QUEEN OF THE DAMNED’s shoot all over the city (followed by pickup shots in LA). The locations for the film (which Warner Bros. releases February 22) range from a disused quarry pit to a giant factory space on the outskirts of suburbia; today, Fango finds itself on a street outside the upscale restaurant Rosati’s, as lunchtime crowds surge back and forth. From within their midst emerges a figure in white. A ghost? An omen? No, just makeup FX expert Bob (DEAD ALIVE) McCarron, strolling around in his standard blindingly pristine (but soon not to be), blazingly white overalls.
The aforementioned eatery hides a nightclub accessible only through a seedy backstreet. This club is the number-one venue for the hippest Queen of the Damned immortals, plus various curious humans and vampire wannabes. Just outside, a man with fangs in his pocket is lurking in the midday shadows: none other than underground icon Rowland S. Howard. In between praising the Robin Casinader track his group performs as the house band and joking with fellow luminaries, Howard sneers, "We only play to the in-crowd." He then dutifully dons his fangs, and all present cannot believe it has taken this long for someone to cast him as a vampire.
Fango gets a quick peek inside the bar before filming re-commences, and suffice to say it is well set up for any type of bloodbath. The only light emanates from the well-stocked serving area and the adjacent stage. Five feet back, and you’re enveloped in total darkness. Anything can happen - and a lot does in QUEEN OF THE DAMNED, which combines an adaptation of the eponymous Anne Rice book with elements of her previous bloodsucker chronicle, THE VAMPIRE LESTAT. Described by its makers as a “supernatural adventure,” QUEEN follows the legendary Lestat (Stuart Townsend), who has reinvented himself as a rock star in the contemporary American scene. His music wakes Akasha (Aaliyah), the queen of all vampires, and inspires her to want to make Lestat her king - but Akasha’s malevolent power is so great that the rest of the immortal vampire race must stand against her if they want to survive. Things get complicated when Jesse (FIRESTARTER: REKINDLED’s Marguerite Moreau), a young Englishwoman with a fascination for the dark side, falls in love with Lestat. The screenplay was adapted by Scott Abbott, who did the basic groundwork for the story; other contributing writers include Michael Petroni (who shares final script credit with Abbott), Bernie Goldman and director Michael Rymer.
Back outside, the excitable Moreau positively vibrates as she chats about her role of Jesse and the whole DAMNED thing. “I’m fascinated by vampires,” she says. “I don’t know about other actresses, but it’s always been high on my agenda. I’ve always wanted to play a vampire, be eaten by a vampire, eat like a vampire. I saw BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA and went around for hours going sluuurp.”
Moreau then reveals how her character comes into contact with the fanged undead: "Jesse works for this secret order that studies paranormal activity. They've told her never to go near vampires. Ghosts and things like that, they're OK; you can deal with superstition and all that stuff, but vampires are too dangerous. But she can't help it because she's falling in love with Lestat. So, what can a girl do?"
Despite that romantic subplot, Moreau notes that there's plenty that's frightening about Queen of the Damned's bloodsuckers. "They can move at supernatural speed," she says. "Often I'll be talking to one of them, or think I'm talking to one of them, and they'll be in one place and then they're right in front of me. Basically, they scare the shit out of me. When they attack, their eyes and teeth change and they turn into these wild beasts. It's animal and primal. As Jesse, I get the best of both worlds. It's great being a mortal in this film. We're making a big fantasy fairy tale, but it's very much set in the real world, and that's fantastic."
The character of Jesse has seen the most development from the novel, though Moreau notes that she and director Rymer share a deep reverence for Rice's work. "There are some definite differences with age and little things that we've changed, but Michael really loves horror films, and it's an honor to get to do something with such a backstory," she says. "I've got three fat novels to delve into and go to their world. Out at the studio, the sets are wonderful. It's incredible, the world that we've created. It's so lush. That's what Anne Rice created, and Michael loves it so much and has been extraordinarily careful in translating it. This movie will be less literal than Interview With The Vampire; it will be a more abstract journey."
Producer Jorge Saralegui recently returned from another strange world - Mars (he was a producer on Red Planet, also shot for Warner Bros. Down Under) - and takes a moment to trace his own involvement with Queen. "I had just come to Warners as a producer and Courtney Valenti, the executive in charge of the project, asked me to read the book to see if I would be interested. Michael was the director, but we had no writer. In a sense, we hadn't yet worked out a story. It was exciting to be asked to work on an Anne Rice novel, and I found the book pretty amazing. The obvious first task was, 'Where is the movie story in this?' That was the hardest thing.
"There's a lot of material", he continues, "but it's episodic or it's just this or that person's story, and we couldn't do it all. We could have made it a miniseries, but if you're doing a feature, where is the core story? We ended up inventing the romance between Lestat and Jesse and chose to frame everything against it. That allows the audience to enter from the point of view of Jesse, who's about the only human in the whole movie."
According to the producer, the ration of humans to non-humans sets Queen apart withing its horrific sub-genre. "In most vampire movies, it's nearly all humans and you have one or two vampires who are bad," Saralegui explains. "Here, its mainly a vampire world. In the subtext you get to see that they are humanistic and you soft-shoe over the fact that they kill somebody every single night. The best analogy that we offer is to liken them to American Indians killing buffalo, where they thank the buffalo for giving them skins to wear in winter, meat to eat, etc. It's about having reverence for mortals, reverence for you victims, this is what the more humanistic vampires feel. One of the things we show, which is also in Anne Rice, is that when you drink somebody's blood, you receive images of their life, you experience it and their life experience is inside you. Which, on one level, you could use as a rationalization for killing somebody. So that's what good vampires do. Whereas Akasha is saying, 'They're cattle. Kill them. Have a massacre. It's fun. Have a big orgy.' "
Fidelity to Rice would certainly seem to be an issue here, especially given the author's public early criticisms of Interview (which she later recanted upon seeing the film). Saralegui claims that the Queen production has had very little contact with Rice, adding, "At some stage, you end up saying that a movie is different from a book, which I definitely believe. A book stands on its own ground, and hers are beyond reproach. But this is a movie and it is under two hours long, and you can't put everything in. You must make changes. Queen of the Damned is not a visual presentation of her book, it is a separate work of art inspired by the book."
A work that sounds like it'll be pretty brutal, as Saralegui describes the films ghoul-on-ghoul battles. "When they have a fight, they hurt each other", he says. "We don't get into the two superheroes hurling each other against walls and then getting up to fight again. With the vampires, it's a case of bleeding the other person. If I drain you of your blood, then you're dead. But all the vampires heal very quickly - we have that from the books - so that's what you're fighting against. Now - if it's me against you, it would be really hard for me to kill you, because I can't drink your blood at once and you're healing even as I'm doing it, unless I'm much more powerful than you - it can be teeth, it can be fingernails, it can be knives - so that you're bleeding at a greater rate than you can regenerate."
There is certainly plenty of blood being shed for Queen, including one bit that Saralegui cites as his favorite on-set moment so far. "There's a scene where Akasha is biting someone. It's really cool and sexy and creepy - she's drinking from this guy's chest with blood all over her and in her mouth, and it was too much. Aaliyah was keeping it together, but as soon as 'Cut' was called she went bleeuugh and all the blood in her mouth spilled out. And she was laughing, because now she was Aaliyah, not Akasha. Her character is very different from her as a person, but she totally gets into it as an actress. More than anybody, when you say 'Cut', she's somebody else. It's really funny to see her face change and become like a regular person's. Everyone else, they don't push themselves that much further to become a vampire. She's really pushing it."
The singer turned actress (who tragically died in a plane crash following the completion of Queen's shooting) wins the producer's highest praise. "She's been incredible, more than any of us expected. This is a great relief, because she's picking up a lot of the burden that the story places on her as an actress. Her scenes have to kick ass, and they do."
The next stop is the makeup FX van, where veteran artist McCarron is demonstrating the workings of a blood-pumping organ as he gets to the heart of various matters. "As well as doing makeup effects, I'm a paramedic," he reveals. "That's the other side of my life, so we do try to make things anatomically correct here. I've seen plenty of hearts in surgery, but I've never opened anyone's chest. A female vampire rips this out of a guy's chest and holds it in her hand. Then she bites it as the barman jumps over the bar. Without looking, she flicks her handbag and it splits him across the throat in three places and he, as a stuntman, gets thrown against the wall. Then we see him lying on the floor with blood gushing out of his throat. "
"She turns back to the heart," he continues, "and we've made what we call clay-slip models. They're like pottery hearts and are full of powder. And they are the most fragile things I've ever made. You've only got to touch them and they crumble. So she holds it in her hand and - in slow motion- goes thwack and the whole thing just turns to dust. Then she turns around and kills everyone in the bar [laughs]."
McCarron has worked on movies big and small, from tiny Australian indies to major Hollywood productions, and says, "The last film of mine you would have seen was The Matrix, but this has twice as many effects. The other day we did 20 people around a pool with ripped-open throats, full prosthetics, floating in the water. We've got teeth by the hundreds; every person who turns into a vampire has fangs. We've got different types of contact lenses. We've got a mechanical hand that grabs a junkie in the beginning; that's supposed to be Lestat when he first wakes up in the crypt.
"We get into some other characters called the Ancients," he continues. "Bruce [The Road Warrior] Spence is playing Khayman, who's a mummy, so he has four prosthetics over his whole head, chest and arms, and he has alopecia hair, which is like cancer-ridden hair. He's a real mess. When we kill some of the Ancients, we use makeup effects to enhance pulsing veins and fluid coming out of their ears and noses. For the concert scene, we've got decapitations, stabbings, and glass fully embedded from one guy's head to his feet.
"This film has buckets of blood in it," McCarron adds, as if the emphasis was necessary at this point. "Every time Michael says, 'Can we get some blood on set?' it's buckets. And when you see vampire marks on someone's neck, I refuse to have two holes where they've been bitten, and he's been happy with that. I love Hammer; I was brought up on it. I've put my fair share of double fang wounds on necks, but when an animal bites you, and this is a human with long teeth, you're going to have bottom teeth marks and top teeth marks and fangs. So I said to Michael, 'When a vampire bites, they can do it gently to preserve a person or rip the throat out like a dog would'. So we've mostly gone for ripped throats - take it right out. When Akasha bites a few people, you actually see the throat exposed and the esophagus hanging out and a lot of flesh flapping."
Before Fango leaves McCarron for a lunch date with the director, the FX master casually mentions one more effect guaranteed to affect the appetite: "There's a girl there with a whole set of teeth marks across her breast, all inflamed. We're trying to make these people look like junkies in a way, because they come to the bar often and feed the vampires. They want to be vampires themselves."
Putting all these horrific acts on screen might seem out of character for director Rymer, who made a critical splash with 1995's award-winning Angel Baby and debuted in the U.S. with the crime drama In Too Deep. But he does have a bit of a genre background (he scripted the Linda Blair-starring hospital thriller Dead Sleep), and as the wool-clad director manages to keep his cool under a blazing sun, he states, "I've seen every horror movie ever made, but I particularly like the old Universal and RKO classics - Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Rave, The Black Cat and King King. Also great '60's ones like Rosemary's Baby. The them in those films always appealed to me - I was always on the side of the monster. I was a little kid into monsters because they looked cool and were scary."
Unlike the epic, star-laden Interview, Queen is being produced at a relatively modest $30-million cost, which is fine by Rymer. "Warner Bros.and [producing entity] Village Roadshow wanted to do this one at a price, so they didn't want to do a big megastar vehicle," he says. "I was very happy about that, because it's always easier to be convincing where reality is being stretched if you're not dealing with big names. And the fact that they were gutsy enough to cast relatively unknown leads took a lot of pressure off. Conversely, the fact that we were doing this film in Melbourne made it less of a risk for them to not have a big star."
Rymer points out a particular element which will hopefully elevate Queen above recent vampire films. "We've got a rock star for a vampire, and the only way to get away with that is to an extend, he has to be a vampire pretending to be a rock star where everyone thinks it's the other way around. And he plays with that. For instance, in the videos where he's goofing on Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, he's playing, in quite a modernist way, with his own expectations. He's winking a little bit - I'm a vampire playing a rock star playing a vampire. What's real? Whats not?' " And, the director notes, the greater challenge lay in presenting the character's more realistic side, as opposed to the fantastical one. "Vampires are easy - it's rock stars who are scary things to try and get right. And I think we've done pretty well. The music's working and Stuart Townsend is an amazing vampire, but also a great rock star.
"This is a combination of the second and third books," Rymer continues, "and the other thing that differentiates this film from Interview is that there, Louis was a very human vampire who didn't really want to kill and was sort of very angst-ridden about his predicament. He was moaning and whining through most of the film, whereas by the time you get to the second and third books, Lestat has become the main character and doesn't give a shit about that. He wants to be a vampire and loves being a vampire. He's a damn good one and just wants to share it with the world. Essentially, he wants to be famous, and that makes him a very modern hero."
Yet Lestat, of course, doesn't get titular billing; the movie is named for Akasha, and like Saralegui, Rymer could not be happier with the actress inhabiting the role. "From the very beginning, I was always pushing for an African queen, because 6,000 years ago Egyptian queens did not look like Elizabeth Taylor," the director says. "I felt it was more truthful and realistic to have a black actress in that role. The studio was very excited about Aaliyah in Romeo Must Die, so I put her through acting boot camp. We had her working around the clock with coaches. She auditioned several times and, like the other leads in the movie, really earned her role. She proved herself and has become a huge asset. She is fabulous as the evil queen.
"There's a general principle in this movie that vampires are not as much frightening as fabulous-looking," Rymer adds. "They are the beautiful immortals who have made the decision to give their souls to live forever. If you're going to live forever, you want to look good. Aaliyah is just so sensual and sexy and beautiful, and it's really her actions that make her frightening. It's a tricky role. You think, 'Oh, Queen of the Damned, should I find someone like Anjelica Huston? A more mature woman?' But to play her more as the kitten who is eating the mouse, and not seeing anything wrong with that, is more frightening than sneering evil. We said to the actors, 'Let the makeup and the teeth and the costumes take care of the vampire bit, you play a character.' And that has worked very well, particularly for her.
"She does some terrible things. She emasculates a couple of dozen vampires, burns them from the inside; she rips a guy's heart out and sucks on the aorta like a straw. But even when she's not being evil, when she is being sexual and coming on to Lestat, she just has this menace and power about her as a result of the costuming and the way she alters her behavior, and it all comes together in this wonderful villain. She's fascinating but frightening at the same time."
Shooting in his hometown has been a breeze for Rymer so far, with one exception: "We ran into a serious problem when we had to film an airplane. Melbourne has no caretaker airport, so planes are only here for two hours. This turned out to be a major pain in the arse. It has also been a little tricky because of the accents sometimes. But one of my big arguments for coming to Melbourne rather than Vancouver was, first, Melbourne is a much better Goth city. It has a much greater variety of architecture. Then you add the exchange rate and the tax breaks. We're building enormous, elaborate, detailed sets you just couldn't do in the States. And, for selfish reasons, I knew there was a very strong acting base here, so I could give supporting roles to great players. You know, it only takes one bad actor to ruin a film."
As he's called back to the set, Rymer leaves us with a final assessment, one that is surprising in light of McCarron's comments. "The gore level is moderate in this film," he insists. "You've got a lot of people biting each other and a lot of bleeding, but there are no real gross outs. As a fan of classic horror, I've never been particularly enamoured of cheap shocks. But that's a very subjective thing. My wife is terrified by all of it, so for the hardcore fans of Sam Raimi or Elm Street or even Tarantino, Queen is not geared to produce that grimacing reaction of 'That's disgusting'. It's more like Akasha seducing Lestat, groping him and then biting his chest and blood spilling out of her mouth, which is hopefully arousing in another way. You go, 'Oh, that's weird, but I'm aroused.' Thats the razor's edge we're trying to travel."
