I t was a dreary November in London and Brad Pitt was tired of hanging upside down. So he called his friend and, later, employer – studio mogul David Geffen. How much would it cost to step away from his commitments and take the next flight home? Geffen smiled like an affable shark. “Forty million,” he replied. This would include the lawsuit that would inevitably come the actor’s way when he walked out on the job. Pitt groaned. But he stayed.

Interview with the Vampire, with a budget of $60m (£47m), was one of the biggest productions the then 30-year-old heartthrob had ever taken on. However, the Neil Jordan adaptation of Anne Rice’s bloody bonkbuster, which turns 25 today, was to prove more challenging than Pitt had ever suspected. For the first and last time in his career, he was on the brink of quitting.

Rice and Jordan had collaborated on the script and were determined to do justice to this sprawling tale of a glum bloodsucker (Pitt) unburdening himself to a curious reporter (Christian Slater, a last-minute replacement for the late River Phoenix). And yes, it’s true: to ensure Pitt and his co-star Tom Cruise looked as if they’d been reposing in coffins, they were required to hang upside down for 30 minutes at a time. That was the length required for the blood to drain from their faces and a vampiric pallor to seep through.

It wasn’t just the ridiculous contortions that were getting to Pitt. As vampires cannot abide sunlight, the entire film was assembled at night. During the New Orleans segment of the production, this wasn’t a deal breaker. Sad Brad had zipped around the French Quarter during the day on his motorbike, soaking up the swampy Louisiana rays. Then came winter in London and endless wee hours shoots at Pinewood Studios.

“Six months in the f***ing dark,” Pitt later lamented to Entertainment Weekly. “We got to London, and London was f***ing dark. London was dead of winter. We’re shooting in Pinewood (Studios), which is an old institution – all the James Bond films.

20 directors who hate their own films Show all 20 1 /20 20 directors who hate their own films 20 directors who hate their own films American History X – Tony Kaye There are few directors who have gone so actively out of their way to discourage people from watching their film as Tony Kaye. Unhappy with the way the studio, New Line, had re-cut American History X, the filmmaker wrote multiple open letters – published by the trade press – telling people to not watch the final version. He even had the film pulled from Toronto Film Festival. “I had tried to get my name taken off it, and replaced with various pseudonyms,” Kaye wrote in The Guardian, three years after the release. “One was ‘Humpty Dumpty’. Another was ‘Ralph Coates’, who played for Tottenham in the 1970s.” The Directors Guild of America would not allow Kaye to change his name, and he has bitterly lived with the accolade of directing the cult classic ever since. 20 directors who hate their own films Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – Michael Bay The first Transformers was a decent-enough popcorn flick. Critics may not have been enamoured by the CGI blockbuster, but there’s no denying watching robots beating each other up is mindless entertainment of the highest order. Yet, Michael Bay managed to make a mess of that simple winning formula in the sequel, Revenge of the Fallen, something he later admitted. "When I look back at it, that was crap,” he said of the film in 2011. “The writers' strike was coming hard and fast. It was just terrible to do a movie where you've got to have a story in three weeks. I was prepping a movie for months where I only had 14 pages of some idea of what the movie was. It's a BS way to make a movie.” 20 directors who hate their own films The Snowman – Tomas Alfredson While Swedish director Tomas Alfredson received acclaim for the Oscar-nominated Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, his follow-up film, the mystery thriller The Snowman, was ripped apart by critics. “Our shoot time in Norway was way too short,” he explained following the film’s release. “We didn’t get the whole story with us and when we started cutting we discovered that a lot was missing.” Alfredson added that, despite The Snowman being in development for years, with Martin Scorsese once attached as director, around 10 to 15 per cent of the script was not filmed. “It’s like when you’re making a big jigsaw puzzle and a few pieces are missing so you don’t see the whole picture,” he added. 20 directors who hate their own films Avengers: Age of Ultron – Joss Whedon Joss Whedon changed cinema with The Avengers. The ensemble film brought a host of disparate superheroes together, and in the process made over $1.5 billion (£1.15 billion) at the box-office. Balancing all those characters was tough, and come the sequel, Age of Ultron, the director was worn down. Whedon apparently couldn’t muster the ability to watch the entire film after completion, saying: “I’m tied and I had a terrible time.” A year later, in 2016, the filmmaker clarified his comments. “I was so beaten down by the process. Some of that was conflicting with Marvel, which is inevitable. A lot of it was about my own work, and I was also exhausted.” Whedon added that he remains “proud” of the film, yet there are still things about the film that “frustrate” him hugely. 20 directors who hate their own films Annie Hall, Hannah And Her Sisters, Manhattan – Woody Allen Annie Hall is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time. Hannah And Her Sisters won an Oscar for best screenplay. Manhattan is often heralded as a comedy masterpiece. Woody Allen, though, believes his other films are better. “For some reason [Annie Hall] is very likeable. I’ve made better films than that. Match Point is a better film, Purple Rose of Cairo is a better film, the French one – Midnight in Paris – is a better film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is as good. I mean, I’ve made films that were as good, but for some reason that’s got some charismatic, inexplicable hold on people. That and Manhattan too. [On] Manhattan, I missed what I was going for. Same thing with Hannah and Her Sisters. I’m not saying it’s a terrible film or a bad – I’m not here to knock my films. But for me personally, I missed. It was too treacly at the end, too bailed-out.” 20 directors who hate their own films Highball – Noah Baumbach Noah Baumbach is now a beloved indie filmmaker (thanks to The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha, and The Meyerowitz Stories). Yet he was not always an acclaimed director. Baumbach despised his second film, Highball, so much that his directing credit was changed to Ernie Fusco and his writer’s one to Jesse Carter. “It was just too ambitious,” he said of the film, which concerns a newly married couple who end up inviting too many people to their Brooklyn flat for a party. “We didn't have enough time, we didn't finish it, it didn't look good, it was just a whole ... mess. We couldn't get it done, and I had a falling out with the producer. He abandoned it, and I had no money to finish it, to go back and maybe get two more days or something. Then later, it was put out on DVD without my approval.” 20 directors who hate their own films Babylon AD – Mathieu Kassovitz Before Babylon AD – a futuristic sci-fi flick about a mercenary who has to escort a woman from Russia to America – reached cinemas in the UK, the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, was trying to distance himself from the Vin Diesel-led project. "The movie is supposed to teach us that the education of our children will mean the future of our planet,” he said. “All the action scenes had a goal: they were supposed to be driven by either a metaphysical point of view or experience for the characters... instead parts of the movie are like a bad episode of 24." Kassovitz later added the film was "pure violence and stupidity". 20 directors who hate their own films Catchfire – Dennis Hopper In 1992, Dennis Hopper joined the ranks of directors who released their film under the pseudonym Alan Smithee (famously used when filmmakers disown their own film). Originally called Catchfire, the Jodie Foster-starring thriller about a woman who enters witness protection was later retitled Backtrack, and 20 minutes were cut for the straight-to-VHS release. Hopper rarely spoke about the film; he wanted to distance himself as much as possible from the doomed project. 20 directors who hate their own films The Underneath – Steven Soderbergh “I think it’s a beautiful film to look at and I think the score is beautiful,” Steven Soderberg said of The Underneath, “but 15 seconds in I know we’re in trouble because of how f***ing long it takes to get through those opening credits. That’s just an indication of what’s wrong with this thing: it’s just totally sleepy.” The film, about a recovering gambling addict, was an unsurprising box-office flop. “I can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone,” Soderbergh added, “other than to look at in the context of someone’s career”. 20 directors who hate their own films Thor: The Dark World – Alan Taylor Alan Taylor – of Game of Thrones and Sopranos fame – seemed a perfect fit for Thor, the heroic God of Thunder who spoke in Shakespearean prose. When the sequel was released, many were disappointed with the film, which somehow wasted Christopher Eccleston, who played the villain. Taylor later criticised the project, saying: “The Marvel experience was particularly wrenching because I was sort of given absolute freedom while we were shooting, and then in post it turned into a different movie. So, that is something I hope never to repeat and don’t wish upon anybody else.” Marvel 20 directors who hate their own films Fear and Desire – Stanley Kubrick Few filmmakers have spotless filmographies. Stanley Kubrick believed the blotch on his was Fear and Desire – the renowned-perfectionist’s cinematic debut. As his stature as a director grew, Kubrick was said to grow ever-more disgruntled with Fear and Desire, an anti-war film about four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines. Reports emerged in the Sixties that Kubrick had destroyed the original negative print, and was hoping to destroy all leftover prints. In 1964, Kubrick called the film “a serious effort, ineptly done”. 20 directors who hate their own films Batman and Robin – Joel Schumacher Almost everyone involved with Batman & Robin seems to hate the final product. George Clooney has apologised for his Bat-nippled version of the Caped Crusader, while director Joel Schumacher has said sorry multiple times. “Look, I apologise,” he said in 2017. “I want to apologise to every fan that was disappointed because I think I owe them that.” After the widely maligned film reached cinemas, Schumacher said he was treated like “scum”. “It was like I had murdered a baby,” he continued. 20 directors who hate their own films The Day the Clown Cried – Jerry Lewis Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried has never been released. The director, who also starred as the leading character, locked the film – about a clown arrested in Nazi Germany for drunkenly defaming Hitler – in a private vault after completion. Lewis thought the film was so “bad, bad, bad” that he often refused to discuss the project, only commenting very occasionally. "I was ashamed of the work and I was grateful I had the power to contain it all and never let anyone see it. It could have been wonderful but I slipped up – I didn't quite get it,” he said in 2013. AFP 20 directors who hate their own films Fantastic Four – Josh Trank Everything was looking good for Fantastic Four before filming began. Some of Hollywood’s most promising actors were playing the eponymous characters – Michael B Jordan, Miles Teller, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell – while Josh Trank, coming off the back of runaway success Chronicle, was hired to direct. During post-production, though, everything fell apart. Trank was forced by the studio, Fox, to do extensive reshoots (you can tell which scenes were reshot because Mara’s wig looks awful and Teller has varying lengths of stubble). The month before the film’s release, the director spoke out on Twitter. “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this,” he wrote. “And it would’ve received great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.” The film bombed at the box office, with Trank’s tweet reportedly costing Fox between $5m and $10m (£3.8m and £7.6m). 20 directors who hate their own films Woman Wanted – Kiefer Sutherland During the Nineties, Kiefer Sutherland wanted to progress from acting to directing. Although his feature-film debut as director, 1997’s Truth or Consequences, was not exactly a critical success, he persevered, directing the 2000 flick Woman Wanted. Sutherland was so disappointed with the results, he released the film under the pseudonym Alan Smithee – becoming the last person to ever use the famed name. He has not directed a film since. 20 directors who hate their own films An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn – Alan Smithee/Arthur Hiller A film about the pseudonym Alan Smithee that ironically ended up being an Alan Smithee film. Arthur Hiller had no intention of disowning Burn Hollywood Burn, which aimed to lampoon the Hollywood system. The film centred on a director, named Alan Smithee (played by Eric Idle), who hands in a cut of a film, only for the studio to recut the entire thing. Life mirrored art as the studio behind Burn Hollywood Burn took the film away from Hiller, who ended up using the Smithee pseudonym on the release. 20 directors who hate their own films Dune – David Lynch Following the success of Oscar Best Picture winner The Elephant Man, David Lynch could have done almost anything. Despite having not read the book, Lynch agreed to adapt Dune, choosing the project over the third Star Wars, Return of the Jedi. Lynch soon started work on turning Frank Herbert’s epic novel into a screenplay, turning in over five drafts. Yet, despite the preparation time, the final results were less than satisfactory for the director. “I started selling out on Dune,” he said. “Looking back, it's no one's fault but my own. I probably shouldn't have done that picture, but I saw tons and tons of possibilities for things I loved, and this was the structure to do them in.” 20 directors who hate their own films Alien 3 – David Fincher David Fincher was just 28 years old when the producers of Alien decided to bring the upstart on board their second sequel. With just five weeks’ preparation time, an unfinished script, and no real clout behind his name, Fincher struggled with the film. “Oh, it was just awful,” he later said. “This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.” In 2009, promoting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fincher elaborated: “I had to work on it for two years, got fired off it three times and I had to fight for every single thing. No one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me.” 20 directors who hate their own films Hellraiser: Bloodline – Kevin Yagher The fourth film in the horror series Hellraiser had a troubled production. Original director Kevin Yagher was ordered by the studio to reshoot scenes, which he refused to do. Joe Chappelle stepped in, leading to Yagher demanding the Alan Smithee pseudonym be used. The final film – which acted as both a prequel and a sequel to the other three films – was not screened for critics, and was dismissed by many fans. 20 directors who hate their own films Accidental Love – David O Russell David O Russell began working on Nailed in 2008. Envisioning the film as a romantic comedy with political undertones, the director cast Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal in leading roles, and was awarded $26 million (£20 million) to make it. And still, somehow, the entire filming process was a mess. The set was shutdown a reported 14 times after cast and crew complained about not being paid. Eventually, after key scenes were not filmed during production, the entire thing was abandoned. After Russell started drawing Oscars attention for The Fighter and American Hustle, though, the studio wanted to get Nailed out in cinemas. Work continued on the film without Russell’s involvement. The film was then retitled Accidental Love and released in cinemas, with the director’s name changed to Stephen Greene. Critics hated the results.

“There are no windows in there. It hasn’t been refabbed in decades. You leave for work in the dark – you go into this cauldron, this mausoleum – and then you come out and it’s dark. I’m telling you, one day it broke me. It was like, ‘Life’s too short for this quality of life’.”

But, while Pitt languished in despair, for Tom Cruise things were looking up. The world’s biggest movie star was delighted to discover that making Interview with the Vampire was considerably more straightforward than the hype that had preceded it. It is easily forgotten today just how much of a phenomenon the Rice novels were through the the Eighties and Nineties. She was a sort of sexually overheated JK Rowling, with Cruise’s degenerate character of Lestat de Lioncourt fulfilling the Harry Potter role (Louis was more a Hermione and Ron Weasley rolled into one).

Lestat ostensibly had a supporting part in the film as the vampire whose bite bestows immortality on the perpetually crestfallen Louis. But he was the true rock star in Rice’s universe: a swish European monster modelled on the Dutch actor Rutger Hauer.

Nobody would confuse Tom Cruise for a degenerate Riviera sophisticate – not even on a dimly lit sound-stage outside Slough. And there had been outrage when the all-American flyboy was unveiled in the role.

Cruise seemingly enjoyed filming more than his co-star (Warner Bros)

Front and centre of the backlash was Rice herself. In the months before filming, she undertook a public campaign distancing herself from Cruise. Bad enough that her first preference, Daniel Day-Lewis, had turned down the part, reportedly because he’d had enough of costume drama. The real insult lay in the studio’s refusal to entertain her suggestion of Jeremy Irons and to instead go straight to the star of such baroque epics as Top Gun and Cocktail.

Day-Lewis wasn’t the only one to give a polite “fangs but no fangs” to Interview with the Vampire. Ridley Scott and David Cronenberg were approached with view to directing but politely declined. And so Geffen came knocking on the door of third choice Neil Jordan, whose mastery of the sexually fluid Crying Game was seen as the perfect qualification for wrangling randy vampires.

All of this was breathlessly reported in the press, leading to mutterings that the project was doomed before it even began. So by the time Cruise and Pitt got to London, the former was simply glad to be working. In the isolation of Pinewood, he no longer had to deal with pitch-fork wielding fans demanding he be replaced.

Interview With The Vampire - trailer

The outcry had stunned him, without question. Cruise has rarely deviated from his public persona of chipper A-type. Yet the pushback to his Lestat casting came as a jolt, as he openly admitted at the time.

“When it first hit, it really hurt my feelings, to be candid about it,” he told Esquire. “Her [Rice’s] venom hurt… You don’t usually start a movie with someone not wanting you to do it. That’s unusual.”

David Geffen, who had campaigned for years to bring the novel to the screen, had led the counter-offensive against Rice. “Anne is a difficult woman at best, and what her motives are remains somewhat beyond me,” he said. “But for her to attack this movie for her own self-importance, when she has been paid $2m (£1.5m) [in rights] and stands to make a lot more money selling her books, is just capricious. It lacks kindness. It lacks discretion. And it lacks professionalism.”

In Rice’s defence, Tom Cruise playing a decadent Euro-trash vampire was at the time generally received as one of the mis-castings of the century. How wrong she and we all were. Twenty-five years on, Interview with the Vampire is an indisputable hoot.

Yes, the plot is all over the place. We join Pitt’s miserable Louis as he recounts to Slater’s interviewer his tragic progress from the realm of the living to the undead in 18th-century Louisiana, and the endless decades he since spent wandering the earth. It isn’t much of a story, more a sequence of loosely interconnected set-pieces.

Louis is bitten by Lestat, who asks whether he wishes to die or become a vampire. In a pathetic attempt to bring meaning to their hollow lives, they “adopt” 11-year -old-vampire Claudia (Kirsten Dunst in her first screen performance). Later, the unhappy family is split violently apart and there is a run-in in Paris with Antonio Banderas’s A-typer vamp, Armand.

Louis stumbles through it all passively and glumly. You can see genuine horror in Pitt’s eyes as he is forced to deliver his lines in a cadaverous monotone, so that he sounds like a Sisters Of Mercy fan desperately needing a decent night’s sleep.

Yet Interview with the Vampire is also gloriously barking and that’s largely due to Cruise’s wild performance. You truly would have to be as dead inside as Louis is to not enjoy a film that culminates with Tom Cruise in a vampire wig ripping Christian Slater’s throat out and driving into the night to the strains of Guns N’ Roses covering “Sympathy for the Devil”. It is one of the ultimate Cruise moments.

Rice was the first to recognise the error of her ways. The instant she clapped eyes on Cruise as Lestat she saw the light. Later, she even took out ads in the Hollywood trade magazines acknowledging her error. But if she had taken the film incredibly personally, it was for understandable reasons. Rice had started the novel in 1973 from the bottom of an ocean of grief following the death of her five-year-old daughter from leukaemia.

It would spawn endless fan fiction, which is appropriate as, in a way, Rice was writing a fan fiction version of her own life. Louis and Claudia were her and her daughter. In truth, though, the popularity of the book owed less to its autobiographical ache than to the homo-erotic pulsations between Louis and Lestat.

Vampirism has long been served as metaphor for all sorts of forbidden passions. Rice amped the subtext all the way up. This carried through to the movie: there’s a weird charge as Cruise, as Lestat, begins nibbling on Pitt’s neck and offers to either end his suffering or sweep Louis away to life everlasting. He does so both tenderly and ravenously.

Rice was, however, a canny business person as well as heartbroken author. The novel was optioned before publication, but languished for decades. Her suspicion was that the erotic tingle between Lestat and Louis was putting producers off. So she suggested gender-flipping either or both characters.

Cher and Anjelica Houston were her suggestions for the Louis part. But when Geffen asked her to write the screenplay, she instead settled on giving Louis a wife, to make clear his heterosexuality.

Oddly, her radical changes were met with resistance. Geffen and Jordan wanted to be more, not less, faithful to the novel. In the end, Jordan re-wrote Rice’s re-write, putting back in chunks of the book (and was miffed subsequently not to receive a screenwriting credit). He had restored, he said, “the little girl, and the blood, and the sex”.

He wasn’t the only one who seemed to understand, almost better than Rice, where the appeal of Interview with the Vampire lay. It was Cruise who understood that although Lestat was in many ways the villain of the piece – unlike the guilt-ridden Louis, he preys with impunity on humans – the character did not perceive his actions in those terms. Asked how it felt to play a bad guy for the first time, Cruise would shake his head. Lestat saw himself as the hero – saviour to Louis and protector of their “daughter” Claudia. It’s one of his smartest performances.

“I used the book as a reference for me,” Cruise said. “You have to read [it]... very carefully to find the clues to who Lestat is… his loneliness and his personal struggle. He recognises that Louis is a unique being. Lestat gives him the choice: that’s something I felt very strongly about. He’s really asking Louis, ‘Do you still want to die.. ?’”

Pitt had to hang upside down for 30 minutes to achieve his pale appearance (Warner Bros)

Outside Rice’s considerable fanbase, nobody quite knew what to make of Interview with the Vampire when it flapped its way to cinemas on 11 November 1994 (it would reach the UK the following January). The era of the all-conquering franchises was still decades away. So the film was received as a curio, albeit a sumptuous one starring Hollywood’s two biggest male leads.

Still, the murmurings were generally positive. It was bonkers – but it felt like the right sort of bonkers. “Interview with the Vampire promises a constantly surprising vampire story, and it keeps that promise,” said The New York Times. Rice loved it too. “I was lucky I had Neil Jordan, and the movie was incredibly faithful to the book.”

It was a decent-sized hit, to boot. The film grossed $224m (£175m) globally on its $60m (£47m) budget. Still, the lingering perception was that everyone involved was slumming it slightly. Pitt, as fast as his little A-lister legs would carry him, fled London to make Seven with David Fincher. Tom Cruise sought reinvention as an action hero in the original Mission: Impossible. By unspoken agreement, neither ever mentioned Interview with the Vampire again. Figuratively, they tossed it in a coffin and bunged it in a hole.

And yet, a quarter of a century on, it glitters gaudily in both their CVs. The film is ridiculous but such a blast. It furthermore functions as ghostly foreshadowing of the superhero craze. Here are two of the great idols of the age giving themselves utterly, without irony, to a tale of caped weirdos defying the laws of the universe. They should be prouder of it and of the splash it created.

“Vampires are metaphors for all the uneasiness we have about other things,” Jordan pondered later. “The week this movie opened there were about 40 people across the United States who cut somebody else and drank their blood. They seem to believe in them.”

“Cruise gave Lestat life,” says Erin Chapman, of the Vampire Studies Association, which has at its mission to “establish vampire studies as a multidisciplinary field by promoting, disseminating and publishing contributions to vampire scholarship”.