Entretien avec un vampire (1994)
Brad Pitt: Louis
Photos
Quotes
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Armand : They had forgotten the first lesson, that we are to be powerful, beautiful, and without regret.
Louis : And you can teach me this?
Armand : Yes.
Louis : To be without regret?
Armand : Yes.
Louis : Then what a pair we could make, but what if it's a lesson I don't care to learn?
Armand : What do you mean?
Louis : What if all I have is my suffering, my regret?
Armand : Don't you want to lose it?
Louis : Why? So you can have that too? The heart that mourns her, her that you burnt to a cinder.
Armand : Louis, I swear that I...
Louis : Ah, but I know you did. I know. You, who regrets nothing, you, who feels nothing. If that's all I have left to learn, I can do that on my own.
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Louis : 1791 was the year it happened. I was 24, younger than you are now. But times were different then, I was a man at that age: the master of a large plantation just south of New Orleans. I had lost my wife in childbirth, and she and the infant had been buried less than half a year. I would have been happy to join them. I couldn't bear the pain of their loss. I longed to be released from it. I wanted to lose it all... my wealth, my estate, my sanity. Most of all, I longed for death. I know that now. I invited it. A release from the pain of living. My invitation was open to anyone. To the whore at my side. To the pimp that followed. But it was a vampire that accepted it.
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Lestat : The trick is not to think about it. See that one there? Widow St. Clair. She had the gorgeous young fop murder her husband.
Louis : How do you know?
Lestat : Read her thoughts.
[Louis looks at him inquisitively]
Lestat : *Read* her thoughts.
Louis : [attempts to read her thoughts] I can't.
Lestat : The dark gift is different for each of us. But one thing is true for us all, we grow stronger as we go along. Just take my word for it. She blamed a slave for his murder. Imagine what they did to him. Evildoers are easier, and they taste better.
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Louis : That morning I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it. I watched the whole magnificence of the dawn for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sunlight, and set out to become what I became.
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Louis : Where are we?
Lestat : Where do you think, my idiot friend? We're in a nice, filthy cemetery. Does this make you happy? Is this fitting, proper enough?
Louis : We belong in hell.
Lestat : And what if there is no hell, or they don't want us there? Ever think of that?
Louis : But there was a hell, and no matter where we moved to, I was in it.
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Louis : Her blood coursed through my veins, sweeter than life itself. And as it did, Lestat's words made sense to me. I knew peace only when I killed and when I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm, I knew again what peace could be.
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Louis : How do we seem to you? Do you find us beautiful, magical? Our white skin, our fierce eyes? "Drink", you ask me, do you have any idea of the thing you will become?
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Claudia : Where's mama?
Lestat : Mama... mama has gone to heaven, Chérie, like that sweet lady right there. They all go to heaven.
Louis : All but us.
Lestat : Shh. Do you want to frighten our little daughter?
Claudia : I'm not your daughter.
Lestat : Oh, yes, you are. You're mine and Louis' daughter now. You see, Louis was going to leave us, he was going to go away, but now he's not. Now, he's going to stay and make you happy.
Claudia : Louis.
Louis : You fiend.
Lestat : One happy family.
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Louis : In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard. I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.
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Claudia : Which one of you did it? One of you did it! Which on of you made me the way I am?
Lestat : What you are? A vampire gone insane that pollutes its own bed?
Claudia : And if I cut my hair again?
Lestat : It will grow back again.
Claudia : But it wasn't always so. I had a mother once, and Louis, he had a wife. He was mortal the same as she and so was I.
Louis : Claudia!
Claudia : You made us what we are, didn't you?
Lestat : Stop her, Louis.
Claudia : Did you do it to me?
[slashes Lestat's face, and it heals immediately]
Claudia : How did you do it?
Lestat : Why should I tell you? It's in my power.
Claudia : Why yours alone? Tell me how it was done.
Lestat : Be glad I made you what you are. You'd be dead now if I hadn't, just like that damned corpse. Now, get rid of it!
Claudia : You get rid of it.
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Daniel Molloy : What about crucifixes?
Louis : Crucifixes?
Daniel Molloy : Yes, can you look at them?
Louis : Actually I am quite fond of looking at crucifixes.
Daniel Molloy : What about the old stake through the heart?
Louis : Nonsense
Daniel Molloy : Coffins? What about coffins?
Louis : Coffins. Coffins, I'm afraid, are a necessity.
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Louis : I'm flesh and blood, but not human. I haven't been human for two hundred years.
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Louis : The statue seemed to move, but didn't. The world had changed, yet stayed the same. I was a newborn vampire weeping at the beauty of the night.
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Louis : So it was, when I'd given up the search for vampires, that a vampire found me.
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Claudia : You... fed on me.
Louis : Yes. And he found me with you, and he cut his wrist and fed you from it, and you were a vampire and have been every night thereafter.
Claudia : You both did it.
Louis : [crying] I took your life... He gave you another one.
Claudia : And here it is, and I hate you both.
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Claudia : Madeleine, Louis is shy.
Madeleine : Drink.
Claudia : Do it, Louis, because I cannot, I haven't the strength. You saw to that when you made me.
Louis : You haven't the vaguest conception under God what you ask.
Madeleine : Au contraire, Monsieur, I have.
Claudia : You have found your new companion, Louis. You will make me mine.
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Daniel Molloy : So there are no vampires in Transylvania? No Count Dracula?
Louis : Fictions, my friend. The vulgar fictions of a demented Irishman.
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Louis : But the world was a tomb to me, a graveyard of broken statues, and each of those statues resembled her face.
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Daniel Molloy : So a vampire can cry.
Louis : Once, maybe twice in his own eternity. Maybe it was to quench those tears forever that I took such revenge on them.
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Louis : Then out of curiosity, boredom, who knows what, I left the old world and came back to my America. And there, a mechanical wonder allowed me to see the sun rise for the first time in two hundred years. And what sunrises, seen as the human eye could never see them: silver at first, then, as the years progressed, in tones of purple, red, and my long lost blue.
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Louis : We reached the Mediterranean. I wanted those waters to be blue, but they were black, nighttime waters, and how I suffered then, straining to recall the color that in my youth I had taken for granted.
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Louis : Thirty years had passed, yet her body remained that of an eternal child. Her eyes alone told the story of her age, staring out from under her doll-like curls, with a questioning that will one day need an answer.
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Louis : We searched village after village, country after country. And always we found nothing. I began to believe we were the only ones. There was a strange comfort in that thought. For what could the damned really have to say to the damned?
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Yvette : Ummm... Monsieur Louis. You don't want any supper ,no?
Louis : No, ma chère.
Yvette : We're worried about you, master. Why is it that you don't go riding in the field? And how long since you've been to the slave quarter? Everywhere there is death. Are you still our master at all?
Louis : That will be all, Yvette!
Yvette : I will not go unless you listen to me! You must, you must send away this friend of yours. The slaves, they are all frightened of him... and they are frightened of you.
[touches Louis's hand]
Louis : I'm frightened of myself.
[indulges in close contact with Yvette. Then begins to bite her wrist. She starts to scream out. For a moment he is too caught up in biting her. She cries out louder and he snaps into reality. He puts his hand over her mouth, wrestles her to the floor and kills her]
Louis : [Louis walks outside carrying Yvette's lifeless body. He speaks to the slaves who have come to see what all the screaming was about] Hear me now! This place is cursed, damned, and yes, your master is the devil! Get out while you can! You are all free men! You hear me?
[Louis gives Yvette to a nearby slave and takes hold of a torch]
Louis : Run, flee, save yourselves!
[waves torch wildly at slaves to make them leave and then goes inside to set the house on fire]
-
Daniel Molloy : So, what do you do?
Louis : I'm a vampire.
Daniel Molloy : Hmm. That's something I've never heard before. You mean this literally, I take it?
Louis : Absolutely. I was waiting for you in that alleyway: watching you watching me. And then you began to speak.
Daniel Molloy : What a lucky break for me.
Louis : Perhaps lucky for the both of us.
Daniel Molloy : You said you were waiting for me. What were you going to do? Kill me, drink my blood, all that stuff?
Louis : Yes, but you needn't be concerned with that now.
Daniel Molloy : You really believe this, don't you, that you're a vampire?
Louis : We can't begin this way. Let me turn on the light.
Daniel Molloy : I thought vampires didn't like the light.
Louis : We love it. I only wanted to prepare you.
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Lestat : There's nothing in the world now that doesn't hold some sort of...
Louis : Fascination.
Lestat : Yes. I'm bored of this prattle.
Louis : But if we can live without taking human life? It's possible.
Lestat : Anything's possible. Just try it for a week. Come to New Orleans. Let me show you some real sport.
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Louis : For 30 years I had avoided that place. Yet I found my way back there with hardly an upward glance.
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Daniel Molloy : What did you see?
Louis : No words can describe it. May as well ask Heaven what it sees; no human can know.
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Louis : We kept to ourselves, pondering the mystery of each other.
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Louis : Though the fire seemed to spread through the quarter, I stood on that deck, fearful he would come out again from the very river, like some monster, to destroy us both. And all the while, I thought, 'Lestat, you deserve your vengeance. You gave me the dark gift, and I delivered you into the hands of death for the second time.'
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New Orleans Whore : [fearful whispering] It's a coffin, it's a coffin.
Lestat : What's that, my love?
New Orleans Whore : It's a coffin.
Lestat : Why, so it is. You must be dead.
New Orleans Whore : I'm not dead, am I?
Louis : No, you are not dead.
Lestat : Not yet.
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Louis : A little child she was, but also a fierce killer, now capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child's demanding.
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[first lines]
Louis : So you want me to tell you the story of my life?
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Louis : I walked all night, I walked as I had walked years before when my mind swam with guilt at the thought of killing. I had thought of all the things I had done, and couldn't undo. And I longed for a moment's peace.
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Louis : Blood, I was to find, was a necessity as well. I woke the next evening with a hunger I had never felt.
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Louis : Perhaps you'd like another cigarette?
Daniel Molloy : Yeah, I suppose I would. It's not bothering you, is it?
Louis : No.
Daniel Molloy : No, I don't assume that it would be, I mean, it's not like you're gonna die from cancer or anything, is it?
Louis : No, I don't think so.
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Louis : Whatever happened to Lestat I do not know. I go on, night after night. I feed on those who cross my path. But all my passion went with her golden hair. I'm a spirit of preternatural flesh. Detached. Unchangeable. Empty.
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Louis : Lestat killed two, sometimes three a night. A fresh young girl, that was his favorite for the first of the evening. For seconds, he preferred a gilded beautiful youth. But the snob in him loved to hunt in society, and the blood of the aristocrat thrilled him best of all.
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Louis : My God, I've failed again.
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Lestat : Louie... I'm so glad you're here. I've dreamed... of this moment. She never should've been... one of us.
Louis : It's all past, isn't it?
Lestat : Yes. Past.
[He slowly turns around in his chair to face Louis, now a mere shadow of his former self]
Lestat : Still beautiful, Louie. You always were the strong one.
Louis : [Lestat jumps back in fear as Louis approaches him] Don't be frightened. I mean you no harm.
Lestat : You've come home to me then?
[Louis gently shakes his head]
Lestat : You remember how I was? The vampire that I was?
Louis : Yes, I remember.
Lestat : [sighs] No one could refuse me. Not even you, Louie.
Louis : I tried.
Lestat : [Gently laughing] Yes, you tried. And the more you tried...
[laughing]
Lestat : ... the more I wanted you.
[as a helicopter hovers over with Lestat frightened]
Lestat : Oh, I can't. Stop it, Louie! I hate such lights. And that noise! They make the night brighter than the day!
Louis : [Kneeling down in front of Lestat] Lestat... It's false light. It can't harm you.
Lestat : [Whispered] If you stay with me, I could venture out again... become the old Lestat.
Louis : I must leave now.
[He leaves Lestat]
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Louis : You lack the courage of your convictions, sir. Do it!
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Louis : They know about us. They watch us dine on empty plates and drink from empty glasses.
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Louis : Forgive me if I have a lingering respect for life.
