#A PROPER INTERVIEW

[cazzyf1]

Peter Collins interviewed by Lynne Reid Banks in 1957

[mirrorhouse]

annoying4annoying (insp)

[yilinglaozuhot]

- HOZIER, Francesca

[portraitoflestatonfire]

In no universe should Louis de Pointe du Lac be lighting his own cigarettes❗️

[aquarines]

this scene being right after louis' transformation has me wondering if lestat had those capes hidden away in a mausoleum or stole/bought them quickly and made louis wait for him at the graveyard but didn't use the time to clean himself up properly

but what the most important thing is that lestat wanted to make louis feel like a proper vampire by getting him a cape, and during that time the most popular vampirical influence was, which is so beautiful to me

[gojobait]

i need claudia to haunt lestat but not in the overt, in your face way that dreamstat haunted louis. i need claudia to sit quietly just barely in sight. blurred in the background of every shot lestat is in. even if we don't always see her, he does. but if he tries to look at her directly she moves out of sight. she's gone. he has no chance to fix things with her because she's dead so he doesn't get to look her in the eyes anymore

[donnapalude]

i find something very interesting in what the show has done with claudia's ambivalent relationship with truthfulness, honesty, narrativisation, and storytelling.

claudia is, by and large, depicted as someone that feels some distaste at the idea of embellishing emotional truths by providing too much context, reasoning, or justifications for them. she is not blind to the existence of these things and in fact she is quite a good judge of character. but i believe she perceives it as a weakness to feel the need to organize them in a self-created narrative in order to give some meaning to life events. it feels deliberate that she enjoyed storytelling when she was younger (see, her semi-mythology about angels and devils) and then stopped after her father made her stare at the boy (who called her an angel!) she loved and killed while he was burning. i think she knows, from then on, that a story has no power and it changes nothing. to keep telling it would feel like intolerable self-deception. she would not disrespect what happened by painting a pretty picture about it and, from that point, she never does again.

this mindset, i believe, is also compounded by growing up around two parents extremely inclined to narrativisation as a method of obfuscation. she is perceptive enough to correctly guess this tendency stems from a fundamental inability to face their respective realities, although in almost opposite ways. lestat seeks to control his internal reality by attempting to warp his external one. which is to say, he lies to others to manage their perception of him because he is unable to deal with feelings of insecurity and rejection. louis seeks to control his external reality by attempting to warp his internal one. which is to say, he lies to himself to manage his own self-perception because it's the only way to survive the awareness of the coercions that society (and his various families) put on him. regardless, i think claudia sees how vacuous their attempts are in avoiding pain to themselves and others and she despises them for it. both for lacking the courage to do away with the attempts and for not being able to make them work (secretly, maybe unconsciously, it would be good to have some faith back).

at the same time, claudia keeps writing multiple diaries, loves theatre and loves acting. the diaries seem to become less cinematic over time and she is aware that when she watches a play or she is on stage there is no truth being tarnished, the story is all that exists. still, her intense search for these alternative forms of narration reads to me as a residual longing for the power of storytelling. it's no coincidence, i think, that in order to kill lestat, who had been initially responsible for destroying that belief and who she feels all-powerful, she needs and dares to tell herself one more story: the one about the vampires in europe that will love her, if she can just get through this. apart from that, i think theatre and her diaries represent the last refuge where she can relive the illusion that telling stories has some meaning and some impact. which makes it particularly cruel that the stage is then used as a place where stories become powerful again and they are deployed to first trap her and then kill her.

given all this. i think it's fair to say that claudia usually strives to be both truthful and honest: even the lies she concedes to telling are usually not flights of fancy but stick close to the truth. and they are borne out of a pragmatic need for self-preservation, not a desire to avoid uncomfortable realisations. she makes, overall, an heroic attempt to bear both her internal and her external reality, without trying (unless it's a matter of survival) to forcibly control them, but just accepting them and doing her best with them. the issue with her reasoning i feel, is that, while narrativisation can be a form of deception, it is also in many ways the only mean of creation of a sense of identity. i guess this point is debatable according to the philosophical tradition one draws from, but i would personally argue there is no ontological stable self that exists outside of our own perception. what exists are our thoughts and actions. and "identity" is the net that ties them together, created by the dialogue between the narrative we weave over them and our own reactions to that narrative. the moment the self begins a self-referential recounting, it is already in the realm of intrepretation. which does not mean truth and honesty don't have a role in this: there is, i believe, honesty in recognizing and accepting our actual thoughts and feelings and actions. but after that, their interpretation is always a truth created.

there are two consequence to this for me. the first, is that it becomes evident at some point that an abandonment of any recounting leaves you bereft of lies but also berefts of truths. claudia has no real tools to make sense of her interiority. in the few brief scenes where she explictly talks about her feelings regarding her traumatic experiences, she is merely able to make a list of facts and stark sensations. her conclusion about the "collision" in her, her sense of brokeness, being "i don't know". her conclusion over the retelling of her assault being simply "it fucked me up". i see in her a deep difficulty in re-elaborating her feelings and connecting them in a unitary vision, which deprives her of the possibility to consolidate an assessment over the impact of events on her identity and build something new on it. the second, is that her diaries by nature cannot escape being a form of narrativision. at least to some extent. even if she tries to describe "reality" as close as possible, the moment she puts pen on paper and decides which stories to tell and how, she is creating her own intrepretation. so yes the diaries are technically a truthful source, but the concept of truthfulness is not so uncomplicated that we can equate it to mean "objectively reliable".

as a final consideration i will say that i find claudia profoundly moving and brave in her decision to never close her eyes before life, and in the end, even before death. and even more so because hers is not a meek, passive stance. surrounded by liars and cowards, she is smart enough to see that truth is a very powerful weapon against people that can't bear it. when these people hurt her, she has no need to warp reality to hurt them back: she just puts them before themselves and lets them macerate in their own reflection. and this commitment to the truth stays with her until her final act and then transcends her in some way: as she fades, for once, it's lestat that cannot close his eyes.

[armungentum]

some devil's minion sketches while i procrastinate working on a more complicated piece

[manynarrators]

Armand has the worst prophet Cassandra vibes to him. He says things, people say “oh no, I don’t like that” and then he’s right!

Like, in the books he says to Lestat that he and Gabrielle will come in ways to resent one another, that they will separate, etc. Gabrielle and Lestat say “maybe eventually, but no that won’t happen in the short term”. And then literally pages later, Lestat is forced to go like “okay so maybe Armand was right” when he and Gabrielle do inevitably go their own ways because they want such polar opposite things!

Armand warns for when Lestat’s fledglings come to hate him, and what do Claudia and Louis do about few decades down the line??? They try to kill him.

Armand in the show says “what will do about this book? When the vampires of the world read it and come to besiege the apartment?” And what happens at the end of s2??? The book gets published and Louis challenges then to come to the Dubai apartment.

[toriangeli]

*creepy humming*

Can be purchased here.

[probablymoons]

Description below the cut. seeing that it was included in the trial animation made me smile so. here is a compilation of the background raccoon in iwtv :}

edit: 1. just wanted to say that Daniel reads off one of Armand's stage notes in s2e8, "We need an animation here. It's not clear how extreme the hoarding was." 2. added a bts photo from the director below!

Animated during the trial [s2e7]: Walking from right to left. Head pops out from under newspapers. Lestat presents it on a silver platter.

Original shot [s1e5]: Seen stepping on hat box and statue while the camera pans from the dirty stairwell to Lestat and Louis.

Cast diary from Jacob Anderson [s1e5]: “Episode 5, also known as “the raccoon episode”. There is a scene-stealing raccoon. I was going to say you might notice- you will definitely notice her. She is adorable and she put in such a brilliant performance... We were told, like, under no circumstances should you look at the raccoon. Under no circumstances do you approach the raccoon. She basically ran this set for that entire scene. It was that kind of vibe. She was cool. She’s a consummate professional.”

edit: Tweet by @ImmortalUpdates (Oct. 24, 2022) that has behind-the-scenes images from Levan Akin's instagram stories. The one currently in the carousel view says "bts, scoonie the racoon smelling my hair 😭❤️ @MillikensMovieAnimals" the photo shows Levan looking down while someone holds the raccoon over his head to let it sniff him.

[vampire-dove]

I love Daniel, but calling Armand both Amadeo and Arun was a CHOICE

[tarsusingkirk]

you were fucking loaded

[raventriquolist]

armand's part of the argument is stuck in my head man its on loop. new vocal stim unlocked

[saintarmand]

that's literally his boyfriend 🥰

[tolkiens]

JUSTICE Apple Music Interview, 2024.

"On that first night we had a lot of fun. We spent the night in the kitchen giggling." — on meeting each other for the first time.