As with so many movies in Jordans career, it began with his long-time producer Stephen Woolley as I found out when visiting the location on the last day of filming in Dublin last winter. I accompanied my teenage daughter to a school play titled A Vampire Story by Moira Buffini,” Woolley recalls. She had written it for the National Theatre Connections programme in 2008, and it has been performed all over the world by student actors. What perked my interest was its central characters were these two women, Clara, the mother only a few years older than her daughter, Eleanor, who have been around for centuries. One knows nothing about life, the other has seen it all, hates men and just sees sex as a means to an end. Clara sucks the blood of pimps and the scum of the earth, whereas Eleanor acts as an angel of death by only preying on elderly people who want closure to their suffering. One has a fatalistic view of the world, the other an optimistic outlook, and that made for an intriguing clash. It also reminded me of one of my favourite ever vampire movies, Harry Kumels Daughters of Darkness with which is also shared a bleak seaside backdrop.”
Woolly met Buffini and asked if shed be interested in developing her play as a film. At the time Moira was heavily involved with her screenplays for Tamara Drewe (starring Gemma Arterton) and Jane Eyre,” continues Woolley. Frankly she didnt seem to get what I was after, but I was persistent in my offer to turn her play into something stronger in terms of character and construction, the stories within time-shifting stories structure. Finally after three years Moira had a version we both liked.
She continues, Basically I could only see A Vampire Story in theatrical terms when Steve first came to me with the movie idea. So I had to re-imagine it completely and, in fact, theres hardly a line left from the play in the script. The sexual stuff was implicit in the play, now its more explicit, and is used to underpin what I wanted the main questions raised to be. What makes us tick? How do you survive damage? How do we move through time? What has happened to Clara to make her so ruthless, to make her the perfect vampire who doesnt give a damn? Why does Eleanor feel so compelled to share her life with someone other than her mother? Ultimately, what is the meaning of life? I hope I took everything fantasy horror offers, embraced it, subverted it, re-invented it and turned it on its head to create something unusual in the genre.”
Precisely because hed directed Interview With the Vampire, Stephen Woolley wasnt sure Neil Jordan would be interested in covering some of the same ground again. But I love the horror genre,” remarks Jordan, And in one of those rare coincidences Id just written my novel Mistaken when Steve offered me Byzantium. That book was about a character named Kevin Thunder who grew up with a double a boy so uncannily like him they were mistaken for each other at every turn. As children in 1960s Dublin, one lived next door to Bram Stokers house, haunted by an imagined Dracula, the other in a more upper class area. So the vampire myth was back in my conscience and when I read the BYZANTIUM script it reignited my enthusiasm further.
Jordan continues, Steve and I had dinner to discuss the project when it struck us that just after making The Company of Wolves, we had talked to author Angela Carter about adapting her radio play Vampirella to the screen. That was a reversal of the vampire myth to some degree too like Byzantium. I helped Moira with certain parts of the script by adding Irish undead myths into the mix. Because we could never afford going to Asia as she originally wrote, I suggested holding the key vampire sacrament on an Irish island as I did some research and found out that in County Antrim some Neolithic tombs had been found with the corpses heads cut off and stones holding down their bones to stop them rising from the dead. That extra Celtic flavor made me connect to the material more.”
