A coffin is hauled from a dank stone crypt; Antonio Banderas appears with the long black locks of a speed-metal bass player. “This is the Theater of the Vampires in Paris,” Danielle Germano says in hushed, sepulchral tones, the scene on the monitor before her flickering like a silent movie. “The Parisians don’t know there actually are vampires onstage…”
“Please,” says a cellist, holding up a paperback copy of Interview with the Vampire. “I’m only on page 75.”
Eight union musicians in T-shirts and poly-blend plaid are hanging out in the break room of the Hit Factory, where they have been brought in at very nearly the last minute to goose the soundtrack of “Interview”; Elliot Goldenthal, the composer of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” [sic], is attempting to infuse some Saturday matinee into a score that was apparently deemed unsuitably ‘big’ for a monster movie, even a $50-million-plus monster movie. The pressure is high: The movie opens the week after next, and Warner Bros. could book only this one day at the Hit Factory’s huge, sixth-floor Studio 1, the one with the 30-foot ceilings, where Madonna is a more typical client.
“That’s one of those mezze forte/pianos,” conductor Jonathan Sheffer scolds the string section. “Bop bop bop, bop bop bop.”
Sheffer murmurs into the white telephone by his side, the one that connects to the studio’s control room.
“If we can just get the piano and trombones to nail it,” says an engineer, standing beside the control room’s soundboard. Slumped in a leather sofa along the back wall, dour director Neil Jordan – wearing a blue polo shirt and jeans – pulls his face from his hands and rocks forward to listen.
Back in the break room, Germano, the Hit Factory’s vice-president, and fellow Anne Rice cultists dissect the film snippets they can make out on the monitor draped with a blanket next to the orchestra conductor’s perch.
“Brad Pitt and those bright-green eyes!” shrieks one onlooker. “Louis is supposed to be dark. With curly hair!”
“I didn’t get that at all,” says Germano.
Even here, at this late date, the armchair recasting continues.
“I always pictured Lestat as, like, Robert Plant in the seventies,” says one woman.
“Julian Sands.”
“Daniel Day-Lewis.”
“If they wanted to be smart, they would have cast a woman,” Germano says with a knowing nod. “Christy Turlington.”
