Production designer Mara LePere-Schloop confesses ‘I hate coffins’ about working on ‘Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire’
“I hate coffins,” confesses Mara LePere-Schloop, who is the production designer on “Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” She continues, “Shooting with coffins is a nightmare. It’s really hard to get them to work on camera, and they are heavy, and you have to build like 400 different kind of coffins for every camera position. And vampires love to destroy things, so nothing is safe.” She joined our recent “Meet the Experts” panel for production design awards contenders (watch above).
The AMC series, based on Rice’s iconic novel, follows the life of Louis de Pointe’s (Jacob Anderson) as told to journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). The perils of immortality are explored in the epic story of love and blood. The designer explains, “From my initial meeting from the first season, we all decided to approach the show as a period piece and not a fantasy. We’re trying to get an accurate depiction of time period and place with a little romanticism added. It just so happens to be inhabited by vampires. It isn’t a fictional universe, it’s a piece of time.”
In Season 2 of the series, Louis recounts leaving behind New Orleans for post World War 2 Europe as he looked for fellow vampires. This took the show’s production to Prague. LePere-Schloop says, “the consistency is about honoring the characters and where they are in their emotional journey. Sure, it’s a story about vampires, but it’s also these questions about mortality, partnership, companionship, and evolutions of relationships that are dysfunctional. Even though from a design perspective there’s these amazing opportunities to showcase different time periods, at the heart of it we really wanted to show how these people live within them. And where they are on their personal journey.”
In the 5th episode of the season, Daniel and Louis revisit their first interview from in 1973 San Francisco. LePere-Schloop reveals, “for the fans we want to create as many Easter eggs as possible. In the books the original interview took place in San Francisco at a specific intersection and house. Episode 5 was suppose to be a bottle episode where we never went outside. It just felt claustrophobic. So we had some photographers go to San Francisco and shoot backing plates and we built a postage stamp set on our stage. It literally is the house from the books. It was this very a simple solution, but it is honoring this desire for as much connectivity to the books as possible.”