INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE

LOUIS
And yet you knew what I would o.

ARMAND
I knew. I rescued you, didn't I? From the terrible dawn.

LOUIS
You were their leader. They trusted you.

ARMAND
You made me see their failings, Louis. You made me look at them with your eyes.

He looks at Louis affectionately.

ARMAND
Your melancholy eyes...

LOUIS
What a pair we are. We deserve each other, don't we?

ARMAND
We are a pair, and that's what counts.

Armand and Louis walk slowly through the Louvre together. Camera follows them for a while, then comes to rest on a sunrise by Turner.

LOUIS (VO)
We left Paris shortly after. For years we wandered. Greece, Egypt, all the ancient lands. Then, out of curiosity, perhaps, boredom, who knows what, I took him home, to my America...

INT. MOVIE THEATRE. NIGHT.

A deco cinema of the twenties. Louis and Armand, dressed in the style of the period walk down the aisle through the crowded seats.

LOUIS (VO)
And there, a technological wonder allowed me see sunrise, for the first time in two hundred years...

On the screen, Murnau's SUNRISE, in black and white. We see a montage of sunrises, from a whole range of movies, in black and white.

LOUIS (VO)
And what sunrises! Seen as the human eye could never see them. We would sit in the dark, night after night among nameless humans, entranced with the miracle of light. Silver at first, then as the years progressed in tones of purple, red and my long-lost blue...

The SUNRISES continue, in colour now, and the backgrounds in them change to the fifties.

LOUIS (VO)
And in time parted. We had become so alike, we both wanted the certainties of loneliness once more.

The lights come up in a different theatre. Louis sitting there, alone, in a half empty theatre, dressed in the clothes of the fifties. He rises, exits with the others.

EXT. NEW ORLEANS STREET. NIGHT.

Cars rushing by, twentieth-century madness. Louis emerges from the theatre, walks through the streets.

LOUIS (VO)
I had returned to new Orleans. As soon as I smelt the air, I knew I was home. There was sadness there, rich, almost sweet, like the fragrance of jasmine. I walked the streets, savouring it like a long lost perfume...

EXT. GARDEN DISTRICT. NIGHT.

Louis walks past the many Greek Revival Mansions.

LOUIS (VO)
And then on Prytania Street, only blocks from the Lafayette cemetery I caught the scent of death and it wasn't coming from the graves...

CAMERA PANS OVER white-walled Lafayette cemetery and its surrounding mansions.

LOUIS (VO)
The scent grew stronger as I walked. Old death. A scent too faint for mortals to detect.

Louis sees rats darting across the street. They rush into a great overgrown garden surrounding a ruined mansion. No lights.

Louis stops at a rusted gate. He forces it open and enters --

A VERITABLE JUNGLE of overgrown rose and oak tree and wisteria. he sees a faint glimmer of light coming from a distant glass window of a huge Greek Revival house. He approaches then he sees --

OLD SHRIVELLED CORPSE of a man, long dead and dried up, snagged in the thorny rosevines.

LOUIS looks around. Walks on. Sees another corpse, almost nothing but bones, sinking into the wet earth, the roots of an oak overgrowing it.

He looks up at the distant light.

He passes a third corpse, caught in wisteria and rose vine, only bones and clothes.

LOUIS (VO)
They were like the doomed princess caught in the thorny vines of Sleeping Beauty's castle. I knew what it meant. A vampire had lured them here, but had benn to weak to get rid of them.

Louis sees dead rats lying near the steps.