Film maker Neil Jordan has reinvented the vampire genre in Byzantium, dispensing with fangs and coffins and adopting a more feminine approach. Steve Pratt reports

GROWING up in Dublin, Neil Jordan had to walk past the house that Dracula author Bram Stoker lived in. He recalls it as a semi-circular Edwardian terrace with a small communal garden at the front.

“I remember all the houses being particularly creepy. I would get chills walking by. That really began my love affair with vampires,” he says.

“I saw my first vampire movie when I was a kid, and I don’t know which one it was, but it was black-and-white, so it must have been quite old.

It was the sound design that really stuck with me though.”

Playwright and screenwriter Moira Buffini became similarly hooked on vampires, always wanting to write a vampire story. “I was probably about eight or nine and I did that thing of creeping down and watching Christopher Lee in one of those Hammer horrors, and I was so terrified that I wouldn’t go to the loo in the night on my own for years afterwards,” she recalls. “Then vampires went from being this object of horror to this object of fascination as I grew up.”

Buffini’s drawn to the Gothic generally, reading all the early vampire stories, including the John Polidori story, The Vampyre – which was huge in its day – Byron’s fragment Augustus Darvell and Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story Carmilla, the first female vampire story.

“They are fantastic,” she adds, “and I was thinking a lot about Carmilla and a lot in general about these Gothic vampires because they are quite different from Bram Stoker.

“They don’t turn into dust in daylight, they don’t need coffins to sleep in, they don’t become bats, they don’t have visible fangs, they are much more invisible and they just move through society like everyone else.”

In 2007, Buffini finally wrote one of her own called A Vampire Story, aiming it at teenagers and writing it as a play. That led to joining forces with Irish film-maker Jordan to make a film of the play, Byzantium.

Vampires aren’t exactly unknown to the director who made Company Of Wolves, Mona Lisa and The Crying Game. He was responsible for Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt necking in his film of Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire.

Not that he’s replaying his old movies with Byzantium, dubbed (with fang in cheek perhaps) by Jordan as “the first historically accurate vampire movie”.

These vampires don’t employ fangs in their blood transfusion service, but drain their victims using razor-sharp thumbnails. And they don’t turn into vampires after being bitten, but after taking part in an ancient ritual on a remote island.

When the director says, “There have been too many vampire films lately”, you don’t need your arm twisting to agree. Cinema and TV screens have been awash with vampire blood of late what with Twilight and its many anaemic spin-offs on the big screen and True Blood on the small screen.

With Byzantium, he wanted to do something different with the genre. “I’ve never liked the idea of there being a set of rules that you have to adhere to when making a vampire movie. Stoker’s Dracula walked around in the daytime, and there was no mention of mirrors,” he says.

Buffini’s script enabled him to reinvent the vampire, to refashion and feminise the creature. “It was important for me to be able to do this, especially because of how much the genre has changed in recent years, and how familiar audiences are with it now. It’s become cuddly and silly.”

At the heart of both play and film is a motherdaughter relationship between Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan). The difference is that they’re both vampires and both immortal.

It’s different because the vast majority of vampire stories focus on men. Women are usually the prey.

Each has become immortal at different stages of life, leaving a mother in her mid-twenties and a daughter in her mid-teens. The central conceit of a mother-daughter vampire relationship, where they are only a few years apart in age, also excited another producer Elizabeth Karlsen. “A mother’s relationship with her teenage daughter is raw with emotion of the best and worst kind,” she says.

“There’s adolescent angst and loathing, which competes with parental despair and longing for the innocence of youth. When the child is 16 and the mother a beautiful 24-year-old, the natural order is turned on its head. A fantastic, twisted and confused relationship takes its place. It is at once familiar, yet totally alien.”

The title of Buffini’s original work was altered when adapting it into a screenplay, as well as changing some of the themes. “It just deepened,”

she says. “Having a second go at anything always makes it better. The tone of the play was deliberately humorous in places. The tone of the film has become much darker.

“The world on view in the film is now this marriage between a gritty, realistic, modern world and what we hope is a view of the past which doesn’t quite feel like costume drama.”

Jordan saw the story of “two people that have to live together forever” as a wonderful opportunity for a reinvention of all vampire films.

“I made a vampire movie before with Interview With The Vampire and since then there’s been the Twilight franchise, and the comedy vampire stuff coming up everywhere. It’s almost become child’s play. And with those kinds of films, vampires have these supernatural qualities that they just develop for convenience and thrilling storytelling.

Today’s vampires can run fast and fly.

“The vampires in Byzantium are just two women who bond, because they’ve survived their cross with death. I just thought this was a great opportunity to bring vampires to life again, to make them real because the story was rooted in realism. It actually feels like it could happen.”

JORDAN’S vampires are called soucriants in the script. He wanted to avoid the word vampire in the movie because those in the film don’t conform to any of the traditional rules of the vampire genre.

“They can go out into the sunlight, they don’t have the sharp teeth. Initially Moira had them kill people with a long thin knife, but I introduced the idea of their thumbnail growing into a talon when they get hungry and they use that to slit their victim’s throat. They’re different creatures from traditional vampires.”

Gemma Arterton, who plays Clara, previously starred in the Buffini scripted Tamara Drew, another film with a strong female protagonist. She’s not only one of the few female screenwriters, but also writes films for women.

“Continually I read scripts where the woman is there to serve the man in some way, or to make him look better, his support,” he says. “In this it is total subversion. Totally. The men are the prey, the weak ones.”

􀁧 Byzantium (15) is now showing