00:00You
00:31I am the Vampire Lestat.
00:38I am a god.
00:46First thing to ask is, I mean, there's so much layering in terms of what the show as the Vampire
00:52Lestat is.
00:54Just sort of from the inkling, actually, Hannah, I'll ask you this first.
00:57You know, looking at the relationships Lestat has and how those sort of fuel his psychology.
01:05Could you talk about looking at the story in that way with some of the scripts, obviously, you were involved
01:11in?
01:11And then that'll key into Daniel in terms of writing the music to sort of key into that ideal of
01:18the psychology of Lestat.
01:19Oh, well, and I should say a lot of it went in reverse.
01:22So Daniel would have written a song and we would key into the psychology or the feel or tone of
01:29an episode via Daniel's music.
01:31So it was like a it was a process of creation in which we were all working at the same
01:37time in tandem.
01:38Keep in mind that Daniel was in the writer's room.
01:41So, yeah, speaking, just writing the songs.
01:45Yeah.
01:45So we were sometimes well, actually, honestly, often responding to Daniel's music rather than the other way around.
01:52But, yeah, like he would write something amazing and be like, damn it.
01:57What the now we have to figure out how to create an episode around this song and this psychology or
02:04the psychology suggested by this song.
02:07But, yeah, I think, you know, a lot of the season is about, you know, what happens when you have
02:12265 years of life or unlife and and you go relentlessly forward as a human being or as a vampire.
02:24And you don't think about what it is that you have lived or done because there's been a necessity to
02:32just go forward.
02:33And so what happens, of course, is that it all catches up with him this season.
02:39And he's sort of forced to reckon with all of the people who made him and how he was made.
02:46You've been alive and undead for 265 years.
02:52You witnessed the French Revolution.
02:56Electric light.
02:58Atomic bomb.
03:03I am the vampire Lestat.
03:06It's my era.
03:09I'm a rock star now.
03:11Can you go and start talking about that in terms of the songs?
03:14Because, I mean, the first one here is Lawn Face.
03:16But as the, I mean, the six episodes that I've seen, you know, it's about that progression of, you know,
03:22existential angst in a way for him.
03:24But then also the idea of regret versus power versus there's so many things that he's sort of looking at
03:32himself and yet looking what he could be.
03:35He gave me a lot to work with.
03:36Lestat gave me a lot of material to work with in terms of writing songs from his perspective.
03:41And I actually found it quite easy to write songs from his perspective.
03:44I'm not sure why that is.
03:47Maybe I'm an existential narcissist of sorts myself.
03:51But, yeah, I had a lot of discussions with our showrunner, Roland Jones, before the writer's room started back in
04:00the summer of 2024.
04:02And we talked about vampire themes in general.
04:05And we talked about Lestat specifically and what kinds of things it might make sense to write about.
04:11And then I read the book and then that gave me even more data to pull from.
04:17And then I just started in.
04:18I started in on a few songs.
04:20And I think some of my very first ideas before the writer's room started sort of got scrapped because as
04:28soon as we started talking around the writer's table, it became clear that they weren't necessary.
04:32Those kinds of songs that I started out with weren't necessary.
04:35But for the most part, everything that I wrote from the beginning of the writer's room on in terms of
04:40the songs, we ended up in the show.
04:44Maybe a couple of rejects, but almost all the songs ended up in the show in one place or another.
04:48Many of them ended up somewhere else than I had intended them to go.
04:52But there was a lot of back and forth.
04:54I would bring a song idea to Hannah and Roland and sometimes to the whole table.
04:59And then we would talk about how to make sense of a scene or an episode within the context of
05:05what that song was saying from Lestat's perspective.
05:09And then based on that discussion that we had about how to make sense of that song, that would give
05:14me more fuel.
05:15That would tell me more of the things that I needed to know to go write the next song.
05:19It was very synergetic that way.
05:32Thousands of fans, Lunya.
05:34I want millions.
05:37Billions.
05:40By music.
05:41Why now?
05:44We're doing a rewrite.
05:46As we progress, they're all different genres.
05:49I mean, and yet they flow sort of like what I had heard about Lestat being like Jim Morrison.
05:55You know, you could always have him flow in different ways.
06:00Actually, the thematic, if I could ask you, Mark, with all your experience, you know, the thing is that this
06:05season sort of defies genre.
06:07Because it uses a different structure.
06:10It uses a different approach.
06:12Can you talk about looking at, you know, the universe as a whole from your perspective and how stories need
06:19to be told today for the modern audiences now?
06:23Well, that's a good question.
06:25Broad crap question.
06:28I had, I don't think I've admitted this before.
06:32I had really struggled with this episode understanding, and not this episode, this season, understanding it because it is not
06:42narratively driven.
06:43So it's very hard for me to understand from the beginning as it was being written, as we talked about
06:49it with Rollin and Hannah and Daniel.
06:52Well, where are we going?
06:55And it's much more, the themes really take over, and it's so much more about this is what, this question
07:03that Lestat's asking himself.
07:05This is what got him here.
07:07And so it was, what's wonderful in watching it, especially last night at our premiere, and realizing how captivating it
07:15is.
07:16Once again, it's not, it's always characters.
07:20It's damn, damn it, it's characters, you know.
07:22And so if you have compelling, conflicted, you know, troubled, at times really, really stricken characters, that's all you need
07:37from a story standpoint.
07:38And not that a lot doesn't happen.
07:40A lot does happen in this season, and there are lots of places to go, and there's all kinds of
07:45forward momentum.
07:46But it really is these themes that have taken over the show, and that's what's so interesting about storytelling, because
07:54you can, you can, you can completely fuel an entire season of a show with not a lot of what
08:04happens, but a lot of this is what is the character's experience.
08:11Everything dies.
08:13You die, I die.
08:15I'm immortal.
08:16No one seems to give a shit about you.
08:19I've been a monster!
08:22This is my reckoning!
08:24He's going to get us all killed.
08:27You kill people.
08:29I'm people.
08:30We are people.
08:31And so was I.
08:33My last question, and Hannah or Daniel, if you want to chime in on this one, the aspect of, you
08:40know, the thing is, empathy for Lestat, you know, he makes mistakes, but he also makes mistakes.
08:46And what Mark was just talking about, the characters and the way they interact, you know, the way that Louis
08:51interacts this season.
08:53Sophia, obviously, is such a big, big thing, you know, without giving too much away.
08:57But all these things make you think, you know, how are the decisions made?
09:01How much do you want to tell the audience versus what Lestat might be feeling in a certain moment?
09:08Could you talk about that?
09:09Because the show is right now very experiential in this season.
09:14It's sort of like you're experiencing this wave of euphoria with Lestat.
09:19Could you talk about that in terms of tone, both musically and from the story structure point of view?
09:25Sure.
09:26Well, I think, you know, it is a subjective point of view.
09:29So we're with Lestat and we're in his mind.
09:32So you get interiority because you're with him, with him.
09:35And so you're seeing the whole world as he sees it.
09:39I mean, and we force that.
09:40It's like a forced perspective.
09:41You're only with him and you're only seeing what he wants to see.
09:45You're in Lestat's world now.
09:47But yeah, I mean, the show, I think, you know, this year has upped the level at which we're
09:53doing a tonal carnival.
09:55Like we're really doing like operatic grounded.
09:58We're doing whimsical and off kilter and every level of humor and we're doing dark and we're
10:03doing hilarious and like we're doing bitchy, but we're also doing like existential.
10:09So we like just, we're like, we're believing in maximalism.
10:13We're believing in like all the tones all the time happening.
10:18But I think that that is Lestat.
10:21He is kind of a hot hurricane.
10:22Like he is all the things happening all at once.
10:26And he's a hot mess, you know.
10:29And so the show has to like go there and do that and be all of those things, like be
10:34raunchy
10:34with him and be like a rock star with him and also like be in an emotional crisis with
10:40him.
10:40So what you said earlier about how the music is moving through many genres throughout the
10:45season, it's exactly following exact.
10:48It's what Hannah just said.
10:49It's we're following his journey of self-discovery.
10:52Right.
10:52And that I don't think that could be bound to glam rock.
10:55And I don't think it could be bound to 90s alt rock.
11:00And I don't think it could be bound to 2016 dance metal.
11:05You know, it just felt like he needed to move.
11:09It would be my personal preference anyway, because I like doing different things.
11:12But I think Lestat needed to move through genres as he was discovering himself.
11:16So musically, we tried to follow that hot hurricane as well.
11:22I love you, Lestat.
11:24Christ.
11:26Another face, another year, another place, another tear.
11:30Pick up the pace, rack up the fears.
11:33Now we're having fun.
11:40I have some work to do on myself.
11:42Yeah, we're having fun.
Comments