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For those who are not too familiar with the scenes of Hollywood, with who really creates those television series and programs that end up stealing our hearts, the name of Rolin Jones (USA, 1972) will not tell you much. But his resume speaks for itself: Weeds“Friday Night Lights”, “Boardwalk Empire”, “Smash” or the latest and successful adaptation of “Perry Mason” bear his name. Now, this writer-producer, one of those Yale graduate wonder kids who, just out of adolescence, was already taking his works to the alternative scene on Broadway, attends LA RAZÓN from his home in Los Angeles to talk about “Interview with the Vampire”. From the original saga of books by Anne Rice, from the new series in which she adapts them for AMC and which will premiere in Spain on January 12 and, of course, also from that mythical 1994 film starring Tom Cruise, Brad PittChristian Slater or Antonio Banderas.
A three-time Emmy nominee, Jones was hired by the “Mad Men” and “The Walking Dead” under a million-dollar exclusivity clause, only being able to create content for AMC. And that deal, in addition to the birth of his daughter -which is taking away the few hours of sleep that she was able to muster, she confesses with a smile-, coincided with the acquisition by the chain of all the written works of Anne Rice. From the “Vampire Chronicles” themselves, from which “Interview with the Vampire” or “Lestat the Vampire” starts, to “Ramesses the Damned” or “The Mayfair Witches”, which will also have a series with Alexandra Daddario in front of the project. And here, Jones updates the writer’s account and resurrects it, moving between 2022 and the times before the Great Depression, with Jacob Anderson (“Game of Thrones”) as the protagonist and in a brilliant exercise in a museum of the most primal desires. Elegant and sadistic, intelligent and sexy, “Interview with the Vampire” will premiere on AMC Spain on January 12.
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-How did you get on the project? Was it something sought after or an offer from the AMC team?
It was all a wonderful coincidence in time. They had bought all the Anne Rice material, including “Interview with the Vampire” and just then hired me exclusively, just to create series and television formats for them. We sat down to talk in a meeting, about the projects that I wanted to carry out and, when we finished, they asked me about it, because they did not think that I would be interested. Almost at the last minute they told me it was Anne Rice and I was like, “What? Really?”. So I sat back in the meeting and she was immediately interested. I asked, yes, that they let me read the book first. They were just as surprised as I was, I think. I knew that they were going to invest a lot of resources and, first of all, I wanted to write a love story again. By the time I had finished the first three books I was fully into the project. And above all, it was something completely new in my career.
-Did you have a direct relationship with the work of Anne Rice? She has said on occasion that she should be part of the literary canon.
-No, no, it has been a discovery coupled with reading the novels to prepare this project. For me, it was all the books that the interesting girls in high school read. They caught my attention, but from afar, like something alien. At that time I only dedicated myself to playing basketball, so I wasn’t up to that either. Trying to raise the series I have gone and returned to them, also developing an adaptation of “Wuthering Heights”, also for AMC. And suddenly you have two books at home. One that is considered high literature and another that is pulp fiction. And, damn, you can’t tell me that they aren’t books, at least at the same level. I even think Rice’s are better. If we open the literary canon, we also have to open it in the sense of the genre. The idea of the great books, if they exist, must be diversified, analyzed under new focuses of sex, gender or race. But also themes. The first “Interview with the Vampire” book, above all, should be considered an American classic.
-Since the beginning of the century, almost, the stories of vampires in the mainstream they have been teen niche products. We can talk about “Vampire Chronicles”, for example. And don’t get me wrong, I love the cringe of “Twilight”, but don’t you think its success could have alienated more adult audiences from everything related to vampires?
-It may be, it’s as if they had stopped making them. Perhaps we could also talk about “True Blood”, but it is true that its target audience was still young. But I think the darkest secret in Hollywood is that the target audiences are never set by the creators. They are given by people in suits, by an accountant who works in a skyscraper. And it is certainly reactionary, of course, because it gives us back a timorous industry. Who really pulls the strings to set the trends? I don’t think it comes from the creators. Like, I, Rolin Jones, decide that vampires are cool again, that they can be prestigious television. Not at all. Everything starts from an idea and then you look for someone to help you put that idea into action. Here, more than the vampiric itself, we were very attracted to the idea of immortality. And how sexy it can be.
-When it was clear that you would do the series, did you return to the 1994 film? It is impossible for there to be a more iconic cast in a more specific era…
-If I’m honest, I saw her very early and then I never saw her again. And it couldn’t be more obvious that it’s a 1994 movie. It’s probably the most nineties movie I’ve ever seen in my life. And I remembered the promotion perfectly, for example. But it was clear to me and AMC that it was absurd to try to do the same thing again. We wanted to return to the book, to what the novel tells. With our licenses and adapting it to 2022, to how difficult it is to hide nowadays. I think you can like both without conflicting.
How did you find the right tone for the series? Sometimes it’s a journalism series, sometimes it’s a period film and, above all, it’s a tale about desire…
-It’s all in the book! He goes from one place to another all the time, almost in a frenzy, being many things, and all very good, at the same time. I liked that a lot, how ambitious the book is. From the beginning, together with the rest of the scriptwriters, we were clear that we should not over-intellectualize the story. There are vampires. They suck people’s blood. They are not going to give us a lot of prizes. But, nevertheless, we had the opportunity to connect with the most basic desires of the people. Showing our characters and their baseness, I think, is more difficult than what is done in “The Crown”, to give an example. Showing the constraints of an era with an opera scene is easy, but doing it after killing a lot of people requires a bit more of a left hand. And above all, we wanted an entertaining series. Less talk, more action.
-At times, the series is very explicit. With respect to gore and blood, for example. But only at very specific moments. AMC is famous for the freedom it gives its creators in that regard, is that something that was in their scripts?
-Well… That’s a great question. Voucher. Yes. I’m not particularly crazy about fucking gore. I don’t care much. But let me think of the more political answer. Voucher. I think it has to do with expectations. It is still the chain of “The Walking Dead”, for example. But it’s also the one from “Breaking Bad,” which is why I was interested in working with them. It must always be clear that vampires are a predatory species and the viewer cannot forget about it. They are not creatures of light, they are monsters. Look, I’m going to tell you honestly, I don’t like the bloody punch to the head in the first chapter. I have hated him with all my soul. But of course, as the series progresses, that violence makes a lot of sense. And whoever thinks that Rice’s vampires should be neat, not spill a single drop of blood on the floor, hasn’t read the books. But it doesn’t seem like a bad ideal to me either, to reach.
-Lastly, and almost as a fan and teenager who grew up with the series more than as a journalist, I have to ask you about the times of “Friday Night Lights”. How do you remember the experience? How important was your time in the series?
-It was incredible, because I came to the series at a time that I remember with great love. I had the opportunity to write in the last three seasons, when they were already exploring that other part of the city that we had not been told much about. The most beautiful thing about all this, yes, was being able to develop personal relationships between the characters, because we knew that even screwing up we would have time to correct mistakes. Having that support from a chain is the host. And if you think about that writers room, you only see people who are now showrunnerIt was an incredible quarry. I keep many friends, because the maxim was that no one was an asshole with the other’s ideas. And that was always respected.
In addition, I think that the series connected with a different and little explored sensibility, that of half of the United States. It is always written from, by and for the coasts, Los Angeles or New York, and that piece, until our appearance, seemed forgotten. Sure, damn it, it was a romantic, idealized series from that part of the country, but in the end it was just about telling a story about the ability to articulate as human beings, from teenagers to adults. Of learning to express feelings in an explicitly macho world. They tell you to hold on, to hold on, to hold on, but sometimes you have to let go, you have to let go. And I am going to tell you a detail, and that is that one of the interns from that series was with me in “Perry Mason”, and will continue in the second season and the daughter of another of my classmates there, without my knowing it, got a positioned as an assistant in “Interview with the Vampire”. It’s like closing the circle.
