Aaliyah by Christopher John Farley

Author:Christopher John Farley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MTV Books

8 | the queen of the damned

She was so good at manipulating her image in photographs and videos and in film. But dealing with her on a day to day basis, she was completely without artifice.

—MICHAEL RYMER, DIRECTOR, THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED

people can get obsessive about the books they love. That’s a good thing. The Queen of the Damned the movie, was based on a book of the same name by horror writer Anne Rice, the same author who wrote Interview With a Vampire. Rice, of course, has legions of fussy, obsessed fans who are protective of her work and have encyclopedic knowledge about her characters, her descriptions, and all the little ins and outs of the vampire–filled universe which she has created. Around the same time that The Queen of the Damned geared up to go into production, two other major works of fantasy, The Fellowship of the Ring (based on the series by J.R.R. Tolkien) and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (based on the children’s books by J.K. Rowling) were also making their way to the big screen. The Tolkien and Potter adaptations put the word out to watchful, anxious fans that they were making movies that would be dutifully faithful to the original texts. The filmmakers behind The Queen of the Damned, however, planned to live dangerously.

A bad movie adaptation can be worse than a bad cover song. When some no-talent destroys a classic song, there’s an easy solution for any offended listener: Slide the original into the CD player or download it off the Web and let the bad new version wash away. With a bad adaptation of a book, however, the situation is somewhat different. When we read a book we create our own images of the characters, of the setting, how it looks, the colors, the textures. Once we see a movie, it’s hard to hold on to those original images. Cinema can be stronger than the imagination and even re-reading the book in question can’t free us from the tyranny of its vision. The James Bond movies were based on a fictional character from the printed page. But when most people think of Bond, the ideas in their head come not from the printed page, but from the series of actors who have portrayed him on screen, from Sean Connery to Pierce Brosnan.

So Michael Rymer, the Melbourne, Australia-born director of The Queen of the Damned had his work cut out for him as he began to bring the Anne Rice book to life as a movie. The first Anne Rice book that was brought to the big screen, Interview with a Vampire, starred Brad Pitt as the vampire “Louis de Point du Lac” and Tom Cruise as “Lestat de Lioncourt.” In the new movie, “Lestat” is played by Irish actor Stuart Townsend and Aaliyah plays his opposite, “Akasha.” The basic plot is this: “Lestat” has remade himself into a rock star, and his music ends up awakening the queen of all vampires, “Akasha.

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