How an Anne Rice novel became a Hollywood saga involving Aaliyah and the guy from Korn.
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To some, thats exactly how the movie plays.
And yetQueen of the Damneddeveloped a cult following, buoyed by Aaliyahs passionate admirers and the plots goth-kitsch absurdity.
Aaliyah is, after all, the highlight ofDamned.
Twenty years have passed since Aaliyahs death.
Her legacy is surging now that her music catalogue isfinally availableon streaming platforms.
I had met Aaliyah.
She came into my office for a general meeting that our music guys had set up.
After, I called [producer] Joel Silver and I said, We should doRomeo Must Diewith Aaliyah.
She obviously sparked in that movie, and so we were looking to put another one together with her.
I read it, and I go,Okay, now I see why the movie hasnt been made.
Its because theres really no movie in that book.
You cant distill it into two hours.
If I could do anything in the world, I would like to remakeDuneor doThe Vampire Lestat.
So I got a deal at Warner Bros. to develop it.
It was always a fuzzy possibility, discussed by everyone at virtually every stage.
Wed rather just do theQueen of the Damned.
And I went, How can you do the third book if you havent done the second?
These books should be a huge miniseries.
They dont have any meaning if you jam them all together.
Anyway, I lost that fight.
Im releasing a new book, and Ill be signing autographs in a coffin.
She was carrying a tiny cooler, which she kept Tab in.
She only drank Tab.
Abbott:Anne Rice wasnt involved at all with the writing process.
He and I share credit.
Doug Frank, former president of music operations at Warner Bros.:The studio emphasized the soundtrack.
The singer from Korn is interested in getting into film scoring.
Would you meet with him?
Jonathan Davis, composer and Korn front man:Then this opportunity forQueen of the Damnedcame around.
Im always trying to learn new things.
They wanted the songs before they even cast the movie.
Gibbs:John and I show up for this meeting on the Warner Bros. lot to pitch our idea.
We said, We dont want to just write the songs.
We want to write the score.
The screenplay called for five songs.
We wanted the themes from the songs to be integrated within the score.
I like writing that Middle Eastern, dark vibe.
Its like dark vampire music.
There are no keyboards.
Abbott:My Lestat was probably a little more somewhere between Elvis and George Michael and Led Zeppelin.
I guess Im a much more traditional rock-and-roller.
But they took it to more of a 90s-era grunge.
I had a number of meetings with actresses,including Cher.
I drove out to her Malibu house and went through this vast series of Spanish Colonial rooms.
There she is sitting in this chair, and she really was already quite a viable Akasha.
They happened to have Aaliyah in Vancouver shootingRomeo Must Die.They were very excited about her as a burgeoning actress.
Rymer:I flew to Vancouver and had a lovely time.
Will you go through a process with me before I say to the studio that I think itll work?
And she said, Absolutely.
So I put that poor girl through the wringer.
I got her to learn a monologue from Oscar WildesSalomeand then I had her separately working on Egyptian accents.
I was like,All right, you are such a trooper.Youre gonna go the distance.
There was talk about Wes Bentley as Lestat.
Rymer:Sam Mendes invited me in to look at footage beforeAmerican Beautywas released.
We knew that he was going to be very hot off that film.
Lee Daniels was his manager at the time.
He was very proactive and really wanted this to happen.
Saralegui:We met with Ryan Reynolds and Heath Ledger.
Heath Ledger actually made sense.
Hed been in10 Things I Hate About You, but the studio decided he wasnt quite big enough.
Rymer:Id gone to see Stuart Townsend inOrpheus Descendingwith Helen Mirren, and he was just riveting.
And more important, he had this effect on women.
It was quite palpable.
Thats something you cant really manufacture.
Gibbs:He was supposed to be Aragorn inLord of the Rings, but there was some fallout.
Di Bonaventura:A lot of us around town in Hollywood were talking about him.
We tested him, and he was great.
Saralegui:With Jesse, we met with a million people more than we did for Lestat.
Tara Reid, Jordana Brewster, Shannyn Sossamon.
I dont know where that comes from.
There wasnt nearly the kind of crossover between movies and television back then as there is today.
That didnt get picked up.
The Haunting
Production onQueen of the Damnedbegan in October 2000,lasting almost five months.
Most of the shoot took place in Australia with some scenes filmed in Los Angeles.
The budget totaled half that ofInterview With the Vampire.
I think thats the part of the movie we got right.
All that music had to be conceptualized to be part of the story.
Saralegui:Its a fairly ambitious movie for $30 million,in terms of the concert and effects.
Michael had never done an effects movie before, so it was hard.
But it wasnt brutal.
Di Bonaventura:It went very well.
One might even argue that Melbourne invented it.
It was treated as a fairly big mainstream event: Come be in a real Hollywood movie.
These kids just went crazy.
We were in a quarry 20 kilometers from Melbourne.
I think we had about 5,000.
It was a spectacle.
Gibbs:I had to rehearse [the actors who played Lestats bandmates].
Were in this funky, abandoned warehouse outside of Melbourne.
And Stuart is supposed to lip-sync along with us while the band is playing along with the tracks.
Not once did he stand at the microphone and lip-sync a single word.
I was starting to really hate Stuart Townsend.
The first day of shooting the concert scene, Stuarts just kind of standing there hanging on the mic.
We dont know whats going to happen.
He fucking killed it.
He had all the rock-star moves down.
It was actually very smart of him to surprise everybody.
Moreau:The whole shoot was very hard technically.
Youve got flying vampires and scenes with five people shooting in the round.
Youve got crazy makeup, crazy hair, music.
I had these knobs on my head that I called my little buttons.
I actually wanted them way bigger, but they were like,We cant reproduce that in continuity.
Saralegui:Stuart Townsend didnt have blond hair.
We tried the blond hair on Stuart.
But we also agreed that he didnt look great, so we let him have his own hair.
Moreau:The best part was just hanging withLena Olin.
I would just follow her around and ask her questions, like, What skin care do you use?
She was so classy and incredible.
Gibbs:Aaliyah was very sweet the first person on set, the last to leave.
And then Michael called cut and she broke character and was just so lovely and charming and warm.
She was completely professional.
Rymer:Aaliyah was quite a homebody.
She threw a party for the crew, but then she left early from the party.
Moreau:I have snatches of memory of us going out dancing.
She has such a generous heart and spirit.
She kept saying, Come to the studio, come to the studio!
She let me play the music the whole time.
Gibbs:In Australia, there wasnt any song for Aaliyah to sing in the movie.
We were exactly halfway through the shoot, because they threw a half-wrap party at some club in Melbourne.
I hadnt met Aaliyah.
She saw the look of puzzlement on my face.
I wouldnt have seen that coming given the style of music that she does.
And she goes, No, no, you dont understand.
Would you guys write a song for me?
Thatll be the end-credits song.
Thats gonna be amazing.
Davis:I never got to meet her.
I wish I could have.
Gibbs:We finished the shoot.
John and I were really excited.
I was deep in postproduction.
Aaliyah goes off to the Bahamas to shoot a video for one of her own songs.
And then we all know what happened.
She was due to come back that week.
We never got to write that song with her.
The movie debuted at No.
1 but topped out at an unimpressive$30.4 millionin domestic grosses.
Rymer:Its not the movie I set out to make.
I think its fun on its own terms.
I think its entertaining.
I think its colorful.
There are some original things about it.
Most of the acting is good.
But we were so busy jamming in all thoseancient vampires that show up.
It was too busy.
The script did not have enough substance to justify all these characters and plot.
[The movie] wasnt scary.
I dont think visually I got quite the world that I was trying to create.
It ended up being a bit more glam.
Di Bonaventura:The disappointment was really the box office.
We probably made a mistake in not taking advantage of the movies connection toInterview With the Vampire.
I cant believe Lestat isnt blond.
This movie is going to suck.
Abbott:In terms of the bisexuality, that was never discussed or debated.
I always wanted more of that material, but it was tricky.
I apologized to Anne Rice when I went to send a cut of the film to her.
I said, I dont think Ive got your book on film at all.
She was a bit shell-shocked by how many changes wed made to the story.
They said, Well, he can sing in the movie, but not on the soundtrack.
I go, Are you fucking kidding?
Then Warner Bros. came up with an idea: Lets use our artists and theyll sing your tunes.
Rymer:We saw the news that Aaliyahs plane crashed.
It happened on a Saturday night.
She speaks from hundreds of years and hundreds of births.
It was nice to have Rashad be able to help finish the film for her.
Di Bonaventura:I dont remember Aaliyahs death having an impact on the marketing strategy.
Moreau:The thing that really pops for me in the movie is how sexy it is.
I really enjoyed that.
Where is all that in movies now?
But youre dealing with this megalith-size company with chains of command and layers.
Theres just a lot of restrictions about No, you cant do it that way.
Theres a directors cut that I think is marginally better.
Its longer and less fragmented, and theres a lot less voice-over.
Davis:Was it a perfect movie?
I think they pulled it off nicely, and you got a great soundtrack out of it.
In the movie, Lestats on that crazy couch, and he wipes his mouth off from the blood.
I bought that couch.
Its in my studio.
I had to ship that fucker all the way from Australia.
Frank:A gold record hangs on my wall, so I would say the album was successful.
Rymer:I gotBattlestar Galacticabecause ofQueen of the Damned.
The head of SyFy, Bonnie Hammer, was a fan of the film.
You cant regret anything, really.
I was lucky to have that experience, and we had a good time making it.
Youre just fighting a battle to make a good film every day.
