Queen Of The Damned: Once Bitten...

Queen Of The Damned opens in cinemas Thursday.

“I’m actually in Vancouver shooting a pilot for a TV show called Haunted,” explains Queen Of The Damned director Michael Rhymer. Now that you’ve proven yourself a horror director the offers are coming in?

“Actually this was something I’ve been wanting to pursue.” He explains. “I’m also doing some commercials and videos. If you’re a director you’re doing this is your life, you might as well try and make it interesting.”

Queen Of The Damned is a literary sequel to Anne Rice’s novel Interview With The Vampire. While the first book was a big budget film in the mid nineties, the cinematic version of Queen Of The Damned is a stand-alone feature, and makes no attempt to follow the path set by Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the original film.

“I set out, really, to make the book. What happened was that the studio wanted to make the third book in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. The third book, you have to know about half of the second book to even understand the third book. So it was very compromised in terms of what Anne Rice wrote. At a certain point we said to ourselves that it was more important to try and make a coherent film in it’s own right.”

“We set out to make a very stylistically different film to Interview, which was big stars, big budget. Queen Of The Damned is funkier. It’s more theatrical, done in the modern world. We try to key more of Lestat’s character.”

Stuart Townsend, the Irish actor responsible for bringing Lestat to life, was not originally in mind for the role when it was being written.

“He was the result of a very intensive casting process. Stuart was just the best man for the job.”

Opposite Stuart in the role of Akasha, the Queen Of The Damned, is R&B singer Aaliyah, who was tragically killed in a plane crash following the shooting of the film.

“It was devastatingly sad that some one that I worked with and cared about was gone,” Rhymer says. “It was a terrible tragedy for her family to deal with. She was beautiful, talented, she really had no limits to what she could accomplish. Shooting was done, the whole film was done and we were putting finishing touches on the sound design. Her brother actually came in and did some voices, the whispered track that you hear under everything she says.”

Music is a very large part of the film. Lestat becomes a rock star, angering other vampires by his showmanship. The soundtrack to his musical endeavours was provided by Korn frontman Jonathan Davis and composer Richard Gibbs.

“Vampire movies are tricky, but rock and roll is even trickier. We weren’t ever going to make the film if we couldn’t get the music right. The first thing we did was get Jonathan Davis and Gibbs on board. Jonathan wanted to get into film scoring. They wrote these songs that I though nailed it. What sort of music is a French nobleman turned vampire turned rock musician going to play? I went for the most aggressive sound I could find.”

Although Davis does not voice the soundtrack due to record label dramas, he still manages to land himself a role as a ticket scalper in the finished film.

“I had to talk him in to that one. He didn’t want to do it, but we had to give him a cameo.”

The bulk of the film’s production was shot in and around Melbourne.

“Id’ say 95% of the film was done in Melbourne. I love to be able to be at home and be around family and friends, but the real reason is that they wanted to do the film at a price, so we had to find a place where exchange rates and tax breaks and all that stuff were the most beneficial. There were considering doing it here in Vancouver, but I felt Melbourne was a better Goth town. And a better place to double Victorian architecture for London, even LA really. I though the supporting cast was going to be stronger coming out of Melbourne because the local theatre scene is really strong. We couldn’t have done it the same way anywhere else.”