Tag: fiction and literature

Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel-winning novelist, hospitalized with Covid-19 | CNN

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CNN
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Peruvian novelist and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa has been hospitalized in Madrid with Covid-19, his son said Monday.

“In light of the interest by the news media in our father’s health, we make public that he has been hospitalized since Saturday after being diagnosed with Covid-19,” Alvaro Vargas Llosa tweeted on behalf of himself and his siblings, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa.

The 87-year-old has been in hospital since July 1, surrounded by family, and is being treated by “excellent” professionals, the tweet added.

Vargas Llosa lives in Madrid and holds Spanish as well as Peruvian citizenship.

Born in Arequipa, Peru in 1936, Vargas Llosa was brought up by his mother until his father reappeared and brought an authoritarian change to his life.

As well as the hostile environment at home, Vargas Llosa lived through Peru’s political turmoil, which saw the rise of dictator Manuel Odría in 1948.

In 1963, he published his first novel, “The Time of the Hero,” a tale based on his own experience, about adolescents struggling to survive in a brutal military academy.

Social change has been a key theme in his literary works, and in 1990 he ran unsuccessfully for President of Peru. Three years after this defeat, he became a Spanish citizen.

In 2010, the Nobel Prize committee awarded him the Literature Prize, writing in its citation that he was receiving the prize “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”

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July 3, 2023
Cormac McCarthy, among America’s greatest authors, dies at 89 | CNN

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CNN
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Cormac McCarthy, long considered one of America’s greatest writers for his violent and bleak depictions of the United States and its borderlands in novels like “Blood Meridian,” “The Road” and “All the Pretty Horses,” died on Tuesday, according to his Penguin Random House publisher Alfred A. Knopf. He was 89.

McCarthy died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Knopf said.

Over a nearly 60-year career, McCarthy – hailed by the late literary critic Howard Bloom as the “true heir” of Herman Melville and William Faulkner – wrote a dozen novels, many of them critically celebrated if not commercial hits, though he would eventually achieve both. For years, he wrote while living on grants, most notably the MacArthur “genius grant,” which he was awarded in 1981.

Despite accolades, McCarthy remained relatively obscure for much of his career; as recently as 1992, 27 years after his first book was published, the New York Times Book Review said he “may be the best unknown novelist in America.”

Both before and since, McCarthy was seen and portrayed in the media as reclusive, eschewing the kind of book tours, signings, interviews and lectures other renowned writers would see as professional obligations. But McCarthy famously abhorred talking about his books, which principally featured male characters and profuse violence, as well as sparse punctuation.

Still, he was a “writer’s writer,” the Times reported, with a cult following and a reputation “far out of proportion to his name recognition or sales.”

“I never had any doubts about my abilities,” McCarthy told the Times in one of his few interviews. “I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.”

That obscurity changed with “All the Pretty Horses,” the first installment of his “Border Trilogy,” which became a bestseller and won the 1992 National Book Award, at last marrying the critical acclaim he’d enjoyed with mainstream success.

His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Road,” which followed a father and son traveling through a post-apocalyptic America, further catapulted McCarthy to popularity, thanks in part to Oprah Winfrey selecting the novel for her book club. McCarthy, in turn, granted Oprah his first and only television interview.

“The Road” was also one of several of McCarthy’s books adapted for film, most notably the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of “No Country for Old Men,” which won four Academy Awards, including best picture.

The author was born Charles McCarthy Jr. on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island. His family moved when he was still young to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father was an attorney for the Tennessee Valley Authority. His was a relatively comfortable childhood, one that played out on a plot of wooded land in a large white house with maids.

“We were considered rich,” he told the Times, “because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks.”

For all his later literary achievements, McCarthy was not a voracious reader in his childhood or adolescence. It wasn’t until he served in the US Air Force after dropping out of the University of Tennessee that McCarthy began reading extensively, in his barracks while stationed in Alaska, he told the Times.

He would later move to Chicago, where he finished his first novel and in 1961 married his first wife, Lee Holleman, with whom he had a son. They soon divorced.

That novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” was published in 1965, after shepherding by the famous Random House editor Albert Erskine, who also edited Faulkner. Erskine, who died in 1993, would go on to edit McCarthy for two decades despite the fact, Erskine admitted to the Times, that McCarthy’s books never sold.

“Outer Dark” followed in 1968 and “Child of God” in 1973, after a stint in Ibiza and McCarthy’s subsequent return to Tennessee with his second wife, Annie DeLisle. But still, they lived in “total poverty,” DeLisle once said, “bathing in the lake.”

“Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books,” DeLisle told the New York Times. “And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

But McCarthy didn’t become a writer to make money, instead “maybe simply, because I can do it,” he told the Maryville-Alcoa Times, a Tennessee newspaper, in 1971. “There are a lot of easier ways to make money. I could sell tickets to people and let them watch while I was run over by a truck.”

His next novel, “Suttree,” was published in 1979. McCarthy was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship two years later, giving him financial security to focus on writing. McCarthy left DeLisle and used the money to abscond to the Southwest, where he spent the next several years steeped in research for “Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West,” published in 1985.

The historically based novel – widely regarded as McCarthy’s masterpiece – follows a brutal gang of scalp hunters as they journey across the Southwest, massacring Apache and members of the Mexican Army.

“All the Pretty Horses” was published in 1992 and was followed over years by “The Crossing” and “Cities of the Plain,” which together comprise “The Border Trilogy” – in all a more idyllic ode to the region that recounted the adventures of two young cowboys.

“No Country for Old Men” in 2005 received a less positive critical reception than McCarthy’s earlier novels, though its standing improved with time. The book, which the author began as a screenplay, did well as a movie under the direction of Joel and Ethan Coen, with the talents of Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin, as well as Javier Bardem as the fearsome but unforgettable killer Anton Chigurh, a role that won Bardem Academy Award for best supporting actor.

McCarthy’s attention turned away from the American West for 2006’s “The Road.” The book, dedicated to his then-young son – he had by then divorced and remarried again – was conceived on a trip to El Paso, Texas, he told Winfrey, as he looked out the hotel window one night.

“I just had this image of these fires up on the hill and everything being laid waste, and I thought a lot about my little boy,” he said, and wrote a couple pages. Revisiting the idea several years later, he realized those pages were the beginning of a book about a man and his son traveling through that ashen landscape while staving off the threat of cannibals.

The book wrote itself, he said, in a few weeks’ time.

The ensuing years were quiet ones, with little in the way of new material. By this time, McCarthy was spending much of his time at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, an independent research group of mostly scientists where he eventually became a lifetime trustee.

McCarthy, whose interest in the sciences was well-documented, enjoyed the company of the physicists, biologists and geologists at the institute, and it was there he was often seen writing on his Olivetti typewriter, working on his next novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” released just six weeks apart in 2022.

The books dealt with the same story from different perspectives and featured a female main character as McCarthy’s dearth of well-developed women protagonists in his writing had long been a point of criticism. After being married three times, he told Oprah, “I don’t pretend to understand women.”

But he alluded to the twin novels and their story’s female protagonist in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2009, saying, “I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.”

As for the lavish amounts of violence in his work, McCarthy told Vanity Fair in 2005 he didn’t know what resonated with him about that theme, only that he felt death was the principal motif at the heart of all our lives.

“Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us,” he said. “It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.”

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June 13, 2023
Tosca Musk, Elon’s sister, has a business venture of her own — and it’s all about romance and female sexuality | CNN

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Atlanta, Georgia
CNN
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Tosca Musk strides onto the red carpet at a Regal Cinemas, statuesque in a white pant suit and glistening burgundy silk top.

A hush comes over a group gathered outside the theater’s doors. Some whip out cell phones and start recording her every move.

It’s a chilly October night in Atlanta, and the fans are here for the premiere of “Torn,” the second in a trilogy of romantic fantasy movies based on books by author Jennifer Armentrout. The group of mostly female fans range in age from their twenties to their seventies, and some flew in from Boston, Detroit and other cities.

This is a big night for Musk and her five-year-old streaming service Passionflix, the backer of the movie. It’s their first public film premiere since the pandemic started.

She floats from one group to another, chatting effortlessly with Passionflix’s superfans, known as Passionistas. Her older brother, Elon Musk, may be the most famous sibling in the family, but he’s not the only one who’s founded a company.

Musk, 48, is the force behind Passionflix, which adapts romance novels into movies and streams them to a devoted niche audience. Romance novels are the most popular genre of books in the United States, and Musk is tapping into that market with stories about sultry, powerful female leads and handsome men with chiseled abs. She directs some of the films herself.

“Passionflix focuses on adapting romance novels exactly as the fan and the author envision it,” Musk says in a separate CNN interview. “We focus on connection, communication and compromise – and remove the shame from sexuality, specifically for women, because it empowers women to both acknowledge and ask for pleasure.”

Days earlier, on the set of a Passionflix movie, “The Secret Life of Amy Bensen,” Musk provides a few glimpses into life with her famous family.

Perched on a navy blue couch in a room tucked inside a warehouse in suburban Atlanta, she chooses her words carefully when asked about her older brother, who was on the verge of his Twitter acquisition.

The Musk children – Elon, Tosca and another brother, middle child Kimbal – were born in South Africa and spent time in Canada before coming to the United States. Their father, Errol, is an engineer and property developer, while their glamorous mother, Maye, is a model.

Tosca Musk attended film school at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and moved to California after graduation. For three months, she worked for one of Elon Musk’s companies, Zip2.

“I realized every time I stepped out of the film world, I was just not happy,” she says. “It just wasn’t my thing.”

After a brief stint at the Los Angeles office of Canadian media company Alliance Atlantis, she began directing and producing films while still in her twenties.

Musk produced romance films for the Lifetime and Hallmark channels and in 2005 launched a comic web series, Tiki Bar TV, which was hailed by Apple CEO Steve Jobs as ahead of its time in the emerging field of vodcasts – or video podcasting.

Then came Passionflix. Its origin story is a classic tale of when one door closes, another one opens.

About five years ago, Musk got an email from a woman who wanted her to turn her script into a movie. Musk loved the script, but there wasn’t much interest from production companies.

“People weren’t really that interested because it was too risque … It was an adult movie with a little bit of reincarnation, things like that,” she says. “It just wasn’t one of those things that regular network television wanted to do.”

But Musk met the woman, Joany Kane, in Los Angeles, and they bonded over their shared passion for romance novels. During that conversation, Kane brought up the idea of turning romance novels into movies and creating a streaming platform for them.

And with that, Passionflix was born – with Musk at the helm and Kane as a co-founder.

“We had no investors. We had to go out and find every investor. So it was a matter of going out and pitching every single person,” Musk says. “We pitched every friend, every family member, everybody just for that small bit of angel investment. It was hard. The first money in is always the hardest money.”

Musk declines to say whether her brother Elon was one of her original investors. But she says she can always count on her two brothers, including restaurateur Kimbal Musk, to give her advice on her business ventures. She tries not to ask unless she really needs to.

“I get advice from them to a certain degree when I ask for it. But no unsolicited advice,” she says. “If I ask for advice, I have no doubt that he (Elon) will give it to me. And then I have to take it, because he’s going to be right. So you have to really want to know what you want to ask. But most of the time when I’m with my family, we talk about family things.”

So what does she think about her brother’s new role as CEO of Twitter – and the flurry of headlines surrounding it?

No comment.

Passionflix’s first film was “Hollywood Dirt,” based on a best-selling novel by Alessandra Torre about a Southern woman who finds romance with a Hollywood star when he comes to her small town to film a movie.

“During that shooting of that movie, we were struggling,” Musk says. “Are we going to get money? Are we going to be able to finish it? We were not really sure. We basically were just sort of piecing the dollars together.”

In May 2017, Musk played a trailer of the movie at a romance novel convention and asked attendees to prepay $100, as founding members, for a two-year Passionflix subscription. About 4,000 people signed up, Musk says, and she and Kane used that to show potential investors they were onto something.

“Trying to raise money for a female-driven platform on romance was just not high on anybody’s priority list at the time,” she says. “But as soon as we showed there was that many people that would come on board, the investors just started flying in.”

Passionflix has since produced more than two dozen feature-length and short films, according to the Internet Movie Database.

The company remains lean – it has a core team of seven people who each wear a lot of hats. In addition to producing its own content, Passionflix also licenses films for its platform.

“I think the biggest challenge for Passionflix is we can’t produce enough content to satiate the fans,” Musk says. “It’s a struggle with so many streaming platforms, when people want original content all the time.”

With more than 200 streaming services now competing for viewers, such niche markets face a myriad of challenges, says Dan Rayburn, a streaming media expert and consultant.

Creating, licensing and marketing content is very costly, he said. And while romance is the biggest-selling genre of books in the US, that doesn’t necessarily mean its popularity translates to movies.

“That’s comparing apples to oranges. Books are different,” Rayburn says. “This business is beyond tough. It’s highly competitive and requires an absolute large sum of money.”

Passionflix charges a subscription fee of $5.99 a month. The company does not disclose its subscriber numbers. Musk says subscribers are in the “six figures,” but declines to offer specifics.

Rayburn says it’s hard to determine the company’s profitability without knowing its expenses, including production and licensing costs.

“OK, if you don’t have subscriber numbers, what’s the usage? How many hours per month do people watch it? How much are you spending on content licensing?”

A deep dive into Passionflix’s online movie catalog reveals a mix of contemporary romance, fantasy romance, paranormal romance, erotic fan fiction and related sub-genres.

The films, which stream on the Passionflix site and on Amazon Prime Video, are rated on an escalating steaminess scale Musk calls a “barometer of naughtiness.”

The five categories: Oh So Vanilla, for wholesome romcoms; Mildly Titillating; Passion and Romance; Toe Curling Yumminess; and NSFW (Not Safe for Work). The latter category has risque plot lines and more sex – think “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

But Musk says that even the naughtiest Passionflix movies don’t reach the soft-core porn threshold.

“When we first started Passionflix, somebody asked us if we’re going to rate using MPAA,” she says, referring to the Motion Picture Association of America’s movie ratings such as PG-13, R, etc. “I don’t actually like any of those ratings. They’re not specific to women. I wanted something that could rate our shows and create more of a tongue-in-cheek conversation.”

Musk says she’s a romantic at heart and is a big fan of the genre.

“Love is amazing, it’s incredibly powerful. I love to tell stories of love, all kinds of love,” she says. “So parental love, friend love, family love, and love between any kind of couple.”

That broad range of romantic genres, and its sexy content, are what sets Passionflix apart from channels such as Hallmark and Lifetime Movie Network, says romance novelist Tamara Lush. She believes the romance genre has been especially popular during the pandemic because people seek comfort in stories with happy-ever-after endings.

“Hallmark is romance-centered but the stories are very, very sweet. Passionflix tells a wider range of stories, and the ones romance readers want to watch,” Lush says.

“The popularity of ‘Bridgerton,’ ‘After’ and ’365 Days’ on Netflix should tell streaming services all they need to know: that romance is a lucrative and sure bet for viewers.”

Passionflix’s original subscribers, known as founding members, get access to movie premieres and filming sets.

Last month in Atlanta, about four dozen of them piled into the Regal theater for the premiere of “Torn.” Following the movie, Musk hosted a question-and-answer session with the lead actors, followed by an after-party at a bar across the street. Fans and actors mingled over drinks.

Debbie Parziale, 67, says she flew in from Boston for the event. One of the founding members, she says she spent the pandemic years curled up on her couch, watching Passionflix movies.

“I love Tosca’s premise of empowering women and making sex not such a taboo subject,” she says. “She’s so true to the romance novels. When you read a book and watch one of her movies, it’s the book you read.”

Amanda Cromer, 32, says she signed up for Passionflix at a romance book convention. She loves the camaraderie that comes with being part of the Passionistas. The group has a virtual book club, called Passion Squad.

As one of the original members, Cromer can visit sets and interact with the actors. Cromer, who lives in a suburb of Atlanta, says that during a visit to the set of “Torn” she became an extra in a cafe scene.

“I love the empowerment the movies bring,” says Cromer, who attended last month’s “Torn” premiere with her mother.

“They choose books with strong female leads. They’ve done such a good job of portraying the female persona as a strong independent female, and not a timid person.”

Back on the set of her latest romance movie, Tosca Musk moves from one sparsely furnished room to another.

Musk lives in suburban Atlanta with her two children, 9-year-old twins who were conceived through in vitro fertilization using an anonymous sperm donor.

She’s getting ready to fly to Italy with the twins to film “Gabriel’s Redemption,” the third book in a series by Sylvain Reynard about a Dante scholar and his passionate affair with a younger graduate student. She says they plan to enjoy lots of gelato in Florence and visit Oxford, England, so the kids can see some of the locations where the Harry Potter movies were filmed.

As a single mother, Musk says she marvels at the path that led her to a job she loves.

She hopes Passionflix will help convince the film industry’s big names that adopting romance novels into movies is a worthy investment.

“The entertainment world is controlled mostly by men. At the end of the day, the decisions tend to sway toward the male audience as opposed to the female audience,” she says. “They also tend to be more about the victimization of women than they are about sexually free or sexually empowered stories about women.”

And for Musk, there’s also a simpler reason for her filmmaking ventures.

“I’m a storyteller at heart,” she says. “I just want to be able to tell stories.”

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November 20, 2022
‘Interview with the Vampire’ has an undying legacy. Look inside its TV rebirth | CNN

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CNN
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It’s been nearly half a century since “Interview with the Vampire” was published, leaving its mark on popular culture. Penned by the late Anne Rice, the book became the first of the “Vampire Chronicles,” which include 12 follow-up novels. “Interview” itself was adapted into a 1994 feature film starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, while a loose “Queen of the Damned” adaptation hit theaters in 2002.

Now TV audiences can revisit “Interview with the Vampire” in a new series on AMC Sunday night. Beloved characters like Louis, Lestat and Claudia are back – albeit with some updates to their stories.

“We have these books that have literally been played in everybody’s head a million times, and then there’s this movie that has grafted that onto another generation of people,” said executive producer and writer Rolin Jones, who acknowledged feeling a “push and pull of how to be reverential and how to make sure that you’re not going to be boring for the people that already know these stories quite well.”

Jones and production designer Mara LePere-Schloop spoke with CNN about reimagining “Interview with the Vampire” for television and keeping the adaptation supernatural, sensual and sumptuous, in line with the source material.

Bringing “Interview with the Vampire” to TV involved building a “universe,” said Jones, who kept the other “Vampire Chronicles” in mind while planning everything from character details to the bigger picture. (Lestat, played by Sam Reid, saw some “rewriting” in the later books, as Jones observed – starting with a more fleshed out backstory in the second novel, 1985’s “The Vampire Lestat.”)

The titular interview takes place in the present day; the 1994 film, its screenplay written by Rice, also placed the interview in then-modern times. Like the novel, the new “Interview with the Vampire” is centered on Louis, who shares how he became a vampire with Daniel Molloy, a character first introduced to readers as an unnamed young reporter.

This Daniel, portrayed by Eric Bogosian, is an older seasoned journalist, but he’s essentially “the same guy,” Jones said. The show alludes to an earlier interview between Daniel and Louis from the ’70s – a callback to the novel.

Louis, played by Jacob Anderson, has some new origins. In previous iterations, he was the owner of a plantation near New Orleans in the late 1700s, which is when he met Lestat. The new Louis, still prone to periods of melancholy, guilt and self-loathing, is a Black brothel owner in early 20th century New Orleans when his story begins.

The changes made were partially the result of wanting to focus on a “time period that was as exciting aesthetically as the 18th century was without digging into a plantation story that nobody really wanted to hear now,” said Jones. He noted that the character’s lineage can still be traced back to “plantation money” and that his original occupation did not particularly come up as a point of “self-reflection” in the novels.

Another significant character update involves Claudia – just 5 years old when she was made into a vampire in the novel, though she was portrayed by an 11-year-old Kirsten Dunst in the film. AMC’s adaptation ages Claudia further by making her 14 at the time of her transformation. This doesn’t make her any more prepared for the internal turmoil that sets in.

As actor Bailey Bass said in a featurette shared on the show’s Twitter account, this Claudia has to “deal with the emotions of a 19-year-old, then a 30-year-old, then 40-year-old, while still being stuck in this 14-year-old young body.”

The decision to age Claudia was made in part due to concerns about filming certain scenes, especially those with more “adult” connotations. Child labor laws were another factor.

“If I wanted to make Claudia on this show, I need as many hours of shooting with the actor who plays that as possible,” Jones said. “And if I put anybody that was younger than 18 in there, I would have limited hours.”

For LePere-Schloop, who read Rice’s novels as a teen and credits them somewhat with drawing her to New Orleans, her home of two decades, the changes in the TV series are not antithetical to the author’s work. After Rice died, her assets were donated to an archive at Tulane University in New Orleans, said LePere-Schloop, who met with the archivist while the series was filming.

“Some of the things she was discovering was that Anne was writing short stories and other interpretations of the ‘Chronicles’ where Louis was a woman, or there are other fluidity things happening,” she said. “Even within Anne’s own writing, there’s a history of kind of playing with time, place and person.”

The series was filmed in New Orleans, once Rice’s longtime home and an integral part of “Interview with the Vampire.” Immersing the viewer in the updated setting required a good amount of research.

“We’re now talking about a period of New Orleans that has been talked about a lot, but isn’t very well documented in images or hasn’t been captured in film and television, and that’s the period of Storyville (the red-light district),” LePere-Schloop said. “Culturally, it’s had such an impact on the city.”

As a New Orleans resident, she knew that “when a place is done wrong, you hear it in town.” So she relied on various resources, including the expertise of local historian Richard Campanella.

“He worked with us to capture things that he knew from oral histories and anecdotal stories that he had documented through time of elements of Storyville,” LePere-Schloop said.

The production incorporated New Orleans’ very real history, as well as key locations within the city, in addition to building new sets – like the one for Storyville – to bring viewers into this version of Louis’ and Lestat’s world.

“Anne used the city as research and reference,” LePere-Schloop said. “We were lucky enough to be able to film at the actual house that Anne wrote Lestat’s townhouse to be in the novels. Her inspiration for that house is a living museum and we got to use that as the exterior house.”

Creating the inside of the house, albeit on a stage, was also great fun, she said, noting that the original source of inspiration has “really incredible design details” like a skylight (which was worked into the script) and crown molding.

Different design aesthetics were used to show the passage of time while the vampires remain unchanged. The sets also served as a reflection of the characters, from the art Lestat brings over to New Orleans from Europe to the depressed state the vampires’ home falls into when things go awry.

“It’s an emotional landscape as much as a physical one,” Jones said.

LePere-Schloop wanted to avoid depicting a cliché New Orleans onscreen – and similarly, she wanted to avoid vampire clichés, opting against painting everything “bordello red” or putting Gothic arches everywhere. But for all the historical details adopted by the behind-the-scenes team, there are touches (including added saturation during the final coloring process, Jones said) that feel less natural.

While thinking up the palette for the show, LePere-Schloop turned to a book from her childhood – “The Rainbow Goblins” – which contained “beautiful, oversaturated” illustrations and helped her land on a more dynamic backdrop. The world Louis and Lestat occupy is “sexier” and “vivacious,” she said, compared to early depictions of vampires in film, which tended to be understated and “crumbling.”

Even with some changes to the original storylines, the “Interview with the Vampire” team did not ignore the source material – rereading and “seeing what was in the crevices and the cracks” helped them make the show, Jones said.

There are subtle references to characters from later novels and even a quick shoutout to Rice’s Mayfair witches (also the subject of an upcoming AMC series). Characters that did not appear in the film do appear here. And – perhaps the most important detail for the diehard fans – Lestat and Louis are lovers, in a move that takes the famed subtext of Rice’s earlier vampire novels and simply turns it into text.

What “Interview with the Vampire” hinted at in the ’70s was progressive for its time, Jones said, adding that by the “later books, it’s as if there was this great romance that was never really written, but we all kind of agree it happened.”

While Jones did not sugarcoat some of the more toxic “dish-throwing” aspects of the vampires’ relationship, he saw tremendous opportunity in how he could depict it in an updated adaptation.

Between Rice’s writings and the 1994 film, which has its fans and critics alike, Jones acknowledged that the series’ main cast “had big ghosts behind them.” But he praised Anderson – who he pointed out is in nearly every scene – and Reid for their stamina, as well as the range of their performances.

As far as the viewers are concerned?

“I’d like them to be surprised. For those who know it really well and love it, I want them to stick with it for seven (episodes) and if they’re still angry, that’s cool,” Jones said. “But hopefully, I made something exciting and thrilling for them.”

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October 2, 2022