When Luc Besson was casting his version of “Dracula,” he didn’t hesitate when casting.
Caleb Landry Jones, his “Dogman” star, was the man.
“He’s a genius,” Besson says. “He’s the actor of the decade — so generous, so gentle. I want to do all my films with him.”
Jones is equally smitten. “It’s not hard to get in the body of the (character) with Luc,” Jones says. “When he’s needing a more chaotic energy or more of a visceral energy, he creates that on set and it usually mirrors what he’s looking for. So when we are in the throes of something fast-paced, it usually is.”
Besson, the director of “La Femme Nikita” and “The Fifth Element,” admits his version isn’t an action film “where it goes at 200 kilometers per hour,” but his Dracula’s emotion is so strong, “you always want to know what’s going to happen next. How are you going to find her? So it’s more about the suspense.”
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Besides, “I don’t want to get bored, even me. So, on the editing, I’m pretty hard with myself.” Besson had a first version that ran two hours and 20 minutes. “And I was like, ‘Nah.’ And we cut. There’s always a moment where you say, ‘That’s good timing.’”
What propels his “Dracula” is a desire to lean into the vampire’s quest to find his wife.
“It was something I totally forgot,” Besson says. “It’s the romanticism. (Other directors) go through the blood and the vampires and things but the main course is a man will wait 400 years to see his wife again. That was the movie I wanted to do. The rest — the blood and the teeth and the neck thing — is almost something extra.”
While reading Bram Stoker’s novel, Besson wondered who tended the castle while Dracula was dormant.
“Who is going to clean it?” he asks. “At this time, we had this reportage in France about Notre Dame and I saw gargoyles and I say, ‘I found the cleaners.”
Those gargoyles race around the castle repeatedly and give “Dracula” even more momentum.
To play the love of Dracula’s life, Besson cast newcomer Zoe Bleu.
“Caleb introduced me to her and I never realized she was the daughter of Rosanna Arquette.” He remembers Bleu when she was a child. “Now, suddenly, she’s grown up and she’s in the front of my camera. I can see sometimes her mother in it but it was her first time in a movie like this and she’s really, really good.”
Besson’s speed, Bleu says, “was on beat, for sure. He had a pace in mind and you’re literally on it. In every scene.”
While a 400-year-old vampire isn’t the most attractive partner in the world, Bleu says she never judged. “Love is blind,” she says.
“It truly is a love story,” she says of Besson’s “Dracula.” “I love the Francis Ford Coppola ‘Dracula.’ I was inspired by that as a teenager but what’s nice about our ‘Dracula’ is it’s a different world. You can’t compare it to the others.”
