12
Fright Night
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
A man digs his own grave and should, presumably, lie in it.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
For me the past is forever.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Because Winona Ryder had had to bow out of Godfather III because of illness, she was anxious to work with Coppola in another film. When she read James Hart’s screen adaptation of Dracula, based on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, she not only wanted to play the heroine in the film, but she also asked Coppola to direct it. She passed the script on to him, and Coppola was immediately interested. What especially impressed him about Hart’s screenplay was that it followed the novel so closely, for all of the previous movie adaptations had tossed out large sections of the book.
Abraham Stoker (1847–1912) was born in Dublin, but he eventually moved to London, where he managed the Lyceum Theater for the famed actor Sir Henry Irving. But he still found time to write novels. There was a vogue in England at the time for the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and a number of Gothic horror novels enjoyed great popularity. So Stoker decided to cash in on the craze for Gothic fiction and composed Dracula. Although a few horror novels about legendary vampires had already been published in the nineteenth century, Stoker was the first to give his tale a historical foundation by grounding his main character in the bloodthirsty fifteenth-century prince Vlad Tepes, who was born in Transylvania, a province of Romania. The manner in which Stoker merges authentic history with folklore distinguishes his Dracula from the stories about vampires that preceded it, writes literary historian Leonard Wolf. Moreover, says Wolf, “Stoker’s achievement is that he created an adventure story whose chief image—an undead creature who drinks the blood of attractive young women—shimmers with erotic meaning.” Dracula, as Stoker conceived him, at first seems to be elderly and therefore an embodiment of ancient evil. Then, as he is nourished by his victims’ blood, he is transformed into a dashing young seducer.
In addition to eroticism, Wolf continues, Stoker’s novel possesses a religious component, for the vampire, after all, has lost his soul. In turn, “the vampire, taking the blood of his victim,” is a threat to the soul of the victim, who may likewise become one of the undead. The story, as Stoker tells it, therefore takes on “the larger meaning of a fight between the cohorts of God and those of Satan.”1 That is why the vampire hunters, who are on the side of the angels, employ as defenses against the fiendish vampires such sacramental objects of Catholic ritual as crucifixes and blessed holy water. Since Stoker was a Dublin-born Irishman, it was not surprising that his novel would be infused with elements of his Catholic religion. In brief, Stoker’s novel is a tale for the ages, portraying the struggle between the forces of good and evil, light and darkness, day and night. Indeed, Dracula represents the dark side of our own natures—which is why we want to see him vanquished.
Stoker cast the novel in the epistolary format, a narrative form dating back to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1741). In Dracula, the narrator, an English gentleman, employs letters and diary entries as documentation in order to lend credibility to his bizarre account of preternatural horror.
The great German filmmaker F. W. Murnau made the first film adaptation of Stoker’s book in 1922, ten years after the novelist’s death. Murnau had been denied permission to film Dracula by the Stoker estate because Stoker’s widow deemed the silent cinema a primitive art form, less dignified than the theater. Undeterred, Murnau went ahead with the film. He changed the title of the movie to Nosferatu, an archaic Slavonic term used in the novel to refer to the undead. In addition, he altered Dracula’s name to Count Orlok and transferred the setting from Dracula’s native Transylvania to Bremen, Germany. Moreover, Murnau omitted some incidents from the book and added others. Thus, in the film the vampire (Max Schreck), a cadaverous creature with a batlike visage, unleashes a plague of rodents on Bremen, an episode not in the book. “It’s a free retelling of the story,” says Coppola, “with many plot elements that differ from the novel.”2 Nevertheless, despite the various departures from the novel, the film was recognizable as an adaptation of Stoker’s book, and the Stoker estate sued the film’s producers for making an unauthorized film of the book. The estate’s legal action limited the movie’s initial release, but it eventually became widely available in the 1990s.
Stoker’s widow approved a stage dramatization by Hamilton Deane, since she respected the theater as a legitimate art form. Deane simplified the action by eliminating the historical prologue involving Vlad Tepes and the closing scene in Dracula’s castle in Transylvania in which Dracula is confronted by the vampire hunters. He kept only the central section of the novel, which is set in London, where Dracula pursues fresh victims. The play opened in February 1927 in London and was successful enough to warrant a New York production. John Balderston reworked Deane’s play for the Broadway premiere, which took place in October. The New York production ran for thirty-three weeks and made a star of Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi (who was actually born in Transylvania). Unlike Max Schreck’s grotesque vampire in Nosferatu, Lugosi came across as suave and cultured, impeccably attired in evening clothes, a tuxedo, and cape. He thus conveyed the fatal attraction of evil. Lugosi was asked by Universal Pictures to repeat the role in Tod Browning’s 1931 film version.
It is important to note that Browning’s film was derived for the most part from the Deane-Balderston play and not directly from Stoker’s novel. The same can be said of the subsequent movie versions of Stoker’s story. Indeed, one of the things in Hart’s screenplay that most appealed to Coppola was the fact that Hart had gone back to the original novel as the source of his script and did not use the stage play. Indeed, Coppola noted approvingly that Hart had even worked into the screenplay the collection of letters and journal entries by which the story is told in the book.
Coppola had been a fan of horror movies since childhood, and he had enjoyed going to horror flicks with his older brother August when he was a youngster. “When I was a boy, Dracula was one of my favorite scary movies,” he remarks. He was enthralled by this weird creature who sucked his victim’s blood. “Because I was so obsessed with how scary Dracula was, I looked him up in the Encyclopedia Britannica that our family had, and I was very struck that Dracula was based on a real person, that he once lived, an historical figure: Vlad Tepes, the champion of the Romanians against the invasion of the infidel Turks.”
Although Vlad Tepes was born in Transylvania, a region in Romania, he actually reigned in southern Romania, in the principality of Wallachia on the banks of the Danube. Nevertheless, Stoker consistently referred to Dracula as a native of Transylvania, and to this day it is Transylvania that is associated with the Dracula legend. This fierce leader of the Romanian crusaders protected Romania, which was the gateway to Christian Europe, against the invasion of the Turkish sultan’s Muslim hordes. He earned the epithet Vlad the Impaler from impaling slaughtered enemy warriors on stakes and displaying them in full view of the advancing Turkish army. Even in that barbarous era, Vlad the Impaler’s blood lust was thought to be excessive. His enemies called him Vlad Dracul—which means “devil.”
Still, young Francis Coppola was fascinated by Vlad: “I was maybe twelve when I read about him, but I remember that Vlad had impaled a lot of people on stakes and the invading Turks saw this and just turned around and left rather than tangle with this guy.” He still thinks that historians have judged Vlad too harshly. As a ruler, Coppola explains, “Vlad Dracula was an enlightened despot.” He was evenhanded in the way he meted out justice: “he impaled and tortured even some of his own people, regardless of their standing in the community.” Stoker employed the real historical figure of Vlad Dracula in his novel, “and then invented the idea of this person becoming a vampire.”
Dracula’s first wife was Princess Elisabeta, who, because of a Turkish ruse, was falsely informed that Vlad had been killed in battle. The grief-stricken young woman jumped off the to
wer of Castle Dracula and drowned in the river below. “So the seeds of the story of the beloved woman, Dracula’s long-lost love, also lie in actual history,” Coppola points out. And Stoker worked her into the novel as well.3
For the record, the historical Vlad Dracula was slain in battle outside the city of Bucharest some years later, in 1476, at the age of forty-five. He was decapitated and his head was sent by his Turkish foes to the sultan in Constantinople as evidence that the ferocious Vlad Dracula had finally bitten the dust. It was Stoker’s genius to turn this historical figure into a vampire.
In the novel, however, Dracula renounces God and embraces Satan in the wake of his wife’s suicide. He becomes Dracula the vampire, and, as one of the undead, he searches through the centuries for his beloved Elisabeta. She turns up four hundred years later, reincarnated as Mina, an English girl, and he vows to make Mina his vampire bride.
Coppola was first exposed to Stoker’s novel when he was in his teens. “When I was thirteen or fourteen,” he recalls, “I was a drama counselor at a camp in upstate New York; I would read aloud to the kids at night, and one summer we read the entire original version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula The boys found it a chilling experience. It was around this time that Coppola saw the Browning version of the Stoker story with Bela Lugosi: “I loved Lugosi,” he recalls, but he was disappointed that the Lugosi picture, like all of the other previous adaptations of Stoker’s story that depended on the stage play, were so different from the original book.4
“I was amazed how much they held back from what was written in Stoker’s novel,” he recalls in his production journal. The whole last section of the novel, “when the vampire killers pursue Dracula back to his castle in Transylvania, and the whole thing climaxes in an enormous John Ford shootout—no one had ever portrayed that” in a Dracula movie.5 “I knew enough about the authentic Dracula to realize that it had never been made as a movie,” he concludes.6
With Dracula, Coppola returned to the horror genre for the first time since Dementia 13, his very first feature. Soon after Coppola examined James Hart’s screenplay, he issued a press release, announcing that he would film Dracula for American Zoetrope, his independent production unit, and that the picture would be financed and distributed by Columbia Pictures. Coppola had pitched the property to Columbia not only as a horror flick but as “an erotic dream” in which he planned to star several attractive young actors. He thereby convinced Columbia that the project was marketable, and they gave it the go-ahead.
Bram Stoker’s Draoula (1992)
In November 1990 Hart was invited to meet with Coppola at his home in the Napa Valley, the original Inglenook estate near the original Inglenook winery, which Coppola now operated as the Niebaum-Coppola winery. On the estate grounds is a bungalow where Coppola holds conferences during the preproduction phase of a film—the same cottage where he met with Dean Tavoularis and Vittorio Storaro when they were planning Tucker. Although Hart had composed the original draft of his script, which had been entitled Dracula: The Untold Story, as early as 1977, he found discussing the revised screenplay with Coppola a revelation.
Coppola smiled at him over his glasses like a mischievous professor, Hart remembers. Then he opened the screenplay, “a conductor about to commence a symphony. For the next two-and-a-half hours I sat at the Master’s feet as he went through my screenplay page by page, mesmerizing me, telling me with images ‘the erotic fever dream of a movie’ he would turn those words into.”7
Coppola was intent on giving Bram Stoker’s Dracula the look of a sumptuous horror film along the lines of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and still stay within the stipulated budget of $40 million—which was modest for a top-level costume picture. He hit upon the idea of cutting back on expensive sets so that he could afford to devote more money for lavish-looking costumes. If the costumes were eye-filling, he reasoned, filmgoers would not notice that he had skimped on the sets. He accordingly brought in Eiko Ishioka, the Japanese designer who had collaborated with him on his telefilm “Rip Van Winkle.” In hiring Eiko, Coppola explains, he was confident that at least one element of the film’s design, the costumes, would be totally unique and original.
Eiko’s dazzling costumes were exotic, stunning creations, all exquisite silks and brocades, worthy of a museum. Since red often symbolizes blood in films, she dressed Dracula primarily in red (the red cloak Dracula wears when Jonathan Harker, a young attorney, comes to visit him at his castle demonstrates this technique). The enormous train, which trails behind Dracula as he walks, “is conspicuous when Dracula rushes about his castle like a bat. It was designed to undulate like a sea of blood.”8
Coppola selected German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus as director of photography. Ballhaus, a favorite of German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder before coming to Hollywood, had recently shot GoodFellows for Martin Scorsese. Since Coppola was not in the market for the kind of elaborate sets favored by Dean Tavoularis for previous Coppola films, Coppola turned to a young production designer, Thomas Sanders.
Because many of the scenes take place at night, Coppola had Ballhaus photograph these scenes in deep, jarring shadows. Therefore, Coppola was often able to get by with simple settings, because they were shrouded in shadows. In this fashion he was spared the cost of having Sanders build lavish sets and was therefore able to stay within the budget.
Coppola states that he opted to shoot Dracula entirely in the studio, rather than on location as he had done Tucker and some other films. In the studio “we could control the settings in an artistic and unusual way.” That simply was not possible on real locations, where weather conditions could spoil a scene.9 As another money-saving device, Coppola commandeered some sets built for Steven Spielberg’s Hook, which were still standing at the studio.
Eleanor Coppola was amazed when she visited the studio during shooting to see what marvels Sanders could produce with paint and plaster. One of Sanders’s principal sets was “a grand Victorian mansion,” with a front room that “opened onto a terrace overlooking a garden with a fountain and a pond.”10 The sumptuous-looking garden was actually cobbled together from an old wooden set, colored lights, and potted palms.
Coppola commissioned Peter Ramsey and his team of artists to produce nearly one thousand storyboard drawings for individual shots. He instructed Ramsey and his artists to draw not only on their research but on their own nightmares in designing the storyboards. When complete, the storyboards were correlated with the script, page by page, to produce a detailed shooting guide, which accordingly became the bible for the whole film.
Coppola wanted an impressive musical score, on a par with those Sergei Prokofieff composed for Sergei Eisenstein’s Russian epics like Alexander Nevsky (1938). He imported Wojciech Kilar from Poland to give the underscore an Eastern European flavor. Kilar obliged him with one of the scariest film scores ever. This ghastly, frightening music, states musicologist Larry Timm, “has a certain satanic aura that leaves the listener with an uneasy, eerie feeling” since it comprises several themes scored in a variety of minor keys.11
When it came to casting the title role, Coppola selected the young British actor Gary Oldman. The actor rightly saw Stoker’s Dracula as a fallen angel, a tortured soul. “Vampires are selfish, destructive creatures who half despise what they’re doing, yet can’t avoid doing it,” says Oldman. “So I don’t play Dracula as out-and-out evil.”12
Winona Ryder, of course, was to play Vlad’s first wife, Elisabeta, as well as Mina Murray, the later reincarnation of Elisabeta. Mina at that point is the fiancée of Jonathan Harker, played by Keanu Reeves. Anthony Hopkins, who had recently won an Academy Award for The Silence of the Lambs, was tagged to play Professor Abraham Van Helsing, a physician and metaphysician who dabbles in the occult and who is also the namesake of Abraham Stoker. Hopkins also was to play a Romanian priest who clashes with Vlad in the film’s prologue.
Coppola assembled the actors at Castle Coppola in Napa for the customary week of pre
production rehearsals. The cast spent two days taking turns reading selections from Stoker’s novel. This dramatic reading of passages from the book recalls a similar dramatic reading of excerpts from the novel that Stoker himself staged at the Lyceum Theater in London, for one performance only, shortly after it was published.
Coppola transferred the storyboards to videotape and had the script read as a voice-over to accompany the drawings on the tape. So Coppola already had a tape that told the whole story, which he could refer to during rehearsals. The movie’s cast also did walk-throughs of all the scenes in the script. Hopkins, who normally frowns on extended rehearsals, found them helpful this time around. Coppola creates a great atmosphere to work in, he said afterward. The director sets up a scene and then improvises within that framework, “and talks you through the scene.” He concludes, “The only way to work with somebody like him is just learn your lines, show up, and don’t ask questions, because he seems to know what he wants to do.”13 Coppola then arranged for some run-throughs of the script before live audiences, a technique he had originated way back when he was making his first mainstream studio film, You’re a Big Boy Now. These “dress rehearsals” were videotaped, and they served, Coppola notes, as his version of trying out a Broadway play in Boston.
Principal photography commenced on October 14, 1991, on the former MGM sound stages, which Columbia had taken over. Oldman chose to stay in character between takes, so he came across as morose and disagreeable when dealing with the cast and the director. Admittedly, Oldman had an abundance of helpful hints on how each scene should be played, but both Coppola and the other actors found him too bossy in seeking to impose his ideas on them. Coppola thought that Oldman was the most temperamental actor he had had to cope with since Marlon Brando on Apocalypse Now. When Coppola attempted to reason with him, Oldman replied that he was under a great deal of pressure, endeavoring to play such a demanding role: “I’m four hundred years old and dead; how the fuck do I get into character?”14 One way he found was to shrewdly modify his voice so that he purred with “the perverse timbre of Bela Lugosi’s inhuman intonations.”15
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