For those who are not familiar with the making of the book, can you explain it to us in a few words ?
__Ian__ : I had been working with the Professor Radu Florescu who was the Prince Dracula's actual descendant and Raymond McNally who wrote the book In Search of Dracula. Through my connection with them, I was invited to Dracula 97 in L.A. which was a celebration of the hundredth release of Dacre's great-great uncle's book, Dracula. When I was there, I met Bella Lugosi Jr. and we started talking how the character his father played and the character it was based on had kind of been lost because once the copyright was lost in the 1920s, Dracula fell in the public domain and everyone could make their own version of Dracula. Every one was different, some good some bad, comme-ci comme-ça, but none of them were like what Bram wrote, not the themes, not the characters, not even the advance of the book, how things happened. Even the scariest scene in Dracula, when a wolf attacks an old woman had only been filmed once in all the versions that had been done.
So I looked around and I saw all these books, those sequels and none of them were from the Stokers and I remembered that Florence Stoker had worked with the creative team on Bella Lugosi's Dracula, so there was a precedent for the Stoker family protecting Bram's legacy and I wondered : If I called the Stokers today could we do a sequel, a real sequel, reestablishing the copyright and bring back Bram his legacy.
After a couple of years and a couple of Stokers who heard I was a Hollywood screenwriter and hung up on me saying ^^Do you know what Hollywood has done to us?^^ I finally met Dacre through a mutual friend. I told him : ^^I know the copyright is gone but sometimes you can change history^^. I told him about my idea and the first thing he said was that I should be a little crazy and then we continue to speak, luckily he did not hang up on me because as part of the younger generation he was more open. In the end he said that he can't believe that this simple idea hasn't been done before, it's so crazy it might just work. And that's how we started.
Thank you. What a story, and it was just a simple idea that you could spark a whole new story and a whole new adventure …
__Dacre__ : A continued adventure, not so much a new story. We prefer to say that it's a continuing adventure of the same characters in a similar style to what Bram would do if he were still alive. We did not write in a style of 1897 we write in the style of 2009 so the modern reader, especially younger readers, would have an easier time with it.
__Ian__ : Yeah, because unfortunately every one knows the movies but more people have seen the movies than read the book. We knew that the younger reader was probably forced to read Bram's book in school and by today's standard it's probably something of a slow read. By 1897 standards it was considered as a Pulp book and a fast read but by today's standards it is slow so we wanted to reassure the young readers and people who haven't read the books or were afraid to read the book because of the style so we wanted to say ^^it's safe to come and read our book, you'll have fun!^^
__Dacre__: We've had some good reviews, saying the book was fast-paced, energetic …
You decided to write together. How did you work together ? Did you have specific roles?
__Dacre__ : Part of my strength makes up for my weaknesses. I've never written a book before but my strength is organisation. Being a school teacher and an athletic coach I was trained to plan year-long teaching sessions year-long training sessions, and when we discussed over a period of a few months discussing what we wanted to write in the books, plots and sub-plots, characters, I laid up this organizational chart that put us into the good position to say : ^^I'm gonna write about this, Ian's gonna write about this and then we'll melt it together^^. To get to that point though Ian said that first of all I had to go to the Rosenbach Museum and find Bram's notes. He told me that in those notes I had to look for things that did not make it into Bram's book and one of the key things was the list of characters that actually appears at the back of the book that shows this Dectective Cotford. Once I looked at that I realized that there's no policemen in Dracula and that we've got to pull him into ours. Two things help us realize how to develop that plot line to create this sort of a mystery of Detective Cotford to investigating the Jack the Ripper murders and combining those with searching for a vampire killer. I'll let Ian tell about one of these element. The one I'll talk about is Alexander Galant who is a very critical part of our story. He is a researcher for us and helped us figure out the right advance in history on what was going on between Bram's book and 1920 when we placed the story and he said ^^hey guys, this is the time when Jack the Ripper is going on^^ and Bram knew about that as well.
__Ian__ : Yeah. First of all, Dacre is always very modest but the fun story for all of this fits right in it. Bram worked for the famous actor Henry Irving who was hell of a wild child : drinking, women... a very gregarious, lively and also a little dark man. Bram was always taking care of him : be there, at this time etc... He kept journals, he had all these dates, times, notes, moving around the whole company and all of that. When we started Dacre asked ^^How can I write a book? Can I do this?^^ And I said to him ^^don't worry^^ because I have already saw his particular nature, being able to plot everything like Bram used to. With one of those things we will look at each other and say^^I'm a little bit Henry Irving and you've got Bram's genes^^ and it really work out.
So the Jack the Ripper story. Our researcher, Alexander Galant, is incredible,. It would have taken us another three years, maybe more, if ever, to complete what we did in the time frame to write the book with Alex. After he mentioned Jack the Ripper, I knew of the 1907 Icelandic edition of Dracula. The only edition for which Bram wrote a preface, a foreword. And in that preface he said that the events of his book were real, that they resembled the Jack the Ripper murders and that they may be connected. So from that line, with what we found out in the notes and what Alex told us … that become the basis of the book. And Dracula is such a well known name like MacDonald or whatever. You cannot really go back and say nobody knows who Dracula is because it takes you out of the reality of the situation so we were like ^^Ok, Dracula is real, the events in Bram's book really happened, those were real people and Jack the Ripper is connected to it^^. We just didn't pull Jack the Ripper out of our own heads …
__Dacre__ : We pulled him out of Bram's head !
__Ian__ : That's right and an other add on to what Dacre said. It's our opinion and there are conflicting opinions but from the stories we heard in the family and how we know Bram, our understanding of him, which is our non-historical understanding but it is our feeling that the characters Bram did not cross out cause there were some things Bram did cross out and we can tell which one he crossed because he used them, like a check, and some he crossed out because he didn't want to use them. So the characters we chose to the best of our understanding are characters that he wanted in the story. But he ended with a thousand pages approximately, with debates on that too, but a long manuscript and the editor and publisher cut it. So we believe the characters we use for our story were the characters he wanted in but were cut out and now are lost to history. Maybe some day we'll find those pages but all these were Bram's intentions, Jack the Ripper and all of that.
__Dacre__ : To simplify, what we're getting at is : My job was to write the Cotford and Jack the Ripper subplots and also the Bram Stoker subplot. One of the main thing I wanted in the story was the presence of Bram Stoker. When I went to my family members and wanted their approval and support, I've told them that I would be putting in Bram Stoker and that we wanted to make sure that Bram was painted in a realistic picture because he was quite a tragic figure in life. He's known better for Dracula than for anything he really ever did other than Irving. So we have these two story-lines that Ian said ^^Dacre you go off and you do these^^ and Ian goes off with Quincey and the emerging of the Draculas. So it made it easier for both of us to work independently cause we ended up having our own plans and the really difficult part was when we had to weave them back together again. You tell them about Quincey and the Draculas !
__Ian__ : Well for starters, Dracula, the real Dracula, was a horror Prince, a chivalrous knight, ordained by the Pope as Captain of the Crusades to protect all of Christendom. Only 4,000 men beat back a 300,000 men part of an invasion force. He was a real swordsman, a general. He created a gruesome tactics. The Russian retreat in WWII scorched earth, he was the first to do that. To scare the Ottomans he would sneak into tents at night. Two men slept in each tents and he would slit the throat of one, leaving the other alive, so when he woke up he would find his mate dead, blood all over the place. They were terrified. He poisoned the wells, he was just a real video-game action hero !
Because he died young, his enemies were able to write the story a lot. His name got translated from ^^son of the Dragon^^ to ^^son of the Devil^^ which gave him more mythical press. The funny thing is that up to Dracula you were only impaled through the belly and it would take you weeks to die. Dracula, seeing himself as a good orthodox Christian was more merciful and impaled through the anus and out of the mouth so you died within an hour. So it was a merciful impalement ! So these kinds of that, you have to look at it as part of his period. Now you have Buffy, Twilight and Coppola's Dracula, so we wanted to modernize Dracula a little bit so he's more in line with today but you don't wanna change what Bram wrote. So we found a way of merging Bram's Dracula as he wrote him and the historical Dracula. Not changing a word of what Bram wrote but updating him a little. A little modernization. You'll see it in the book, that's the trick, Dracula got to get that big swords fight you know, you saw him as the general and hero he was.
__Dacre__ : There's also an element of romance. He's sort of a more sympathetic and real person with a voice he didn't have in Bram's novel. He gets to tell his side of the story.
Yeah because in your book, you've made of Dracula a much more likeable character especially when dealing with Mina or regarding the story of Lucy. On the other side, Van Helsing is much more darker. So I wanted to know what were your motives behind that ?
__Ian__ : Shake up the story, make it interesting again. Again without changing anything Bram wrote but as the story was told and told and told... we wanted a little twist, to surprise the reader.
__Dacre__ : Not challenge you like an history book but make you think that Van Helsing could have been this way. And also regarding Dracula, he has been put in certain roles so let's get him this more sympathetic, human side and lets him explain a little bit about what he thinks : ^^What about me ? I've been misunderstood^^. A little bit like Bram has so he gets his chance to tell his side of the story.
__Ian__ : And you know, the younger readers today, the young fans that are coming to us. They love vampires. They almost want to be vampires if they could, if vampires were real. Sleep all day, party all night, never grow old, never die ! It's fun to be a vampire, right ! And we thought, wouldn't it be interesting … we have this great vampire slayer we all know about, Van Helsing. He's so quick to kill everyone that becomes a vampire, stop people from becoming a vampire. In the first book he was already 50, he's 75 in the second, people usually did not live that long then. What would he now be thinking about vampires and getting to live longer now that he faces is own mortality. Would he be so judgmental ? So we tried to introduce that struggle because one of the reasons we love vampires is because they transcend Death. So you know it is one thing to go quickly in the heat of battle. When they were fighting Dracula, it was over for Quincey very quickly. But suffering from illnesses, as many of us do when we get older, when life gets harder, does a vampire life become more appealing ? What would happen ?
Now I have a question about Bram Stoker as a character. We already mentioned that earlier but I was quite surprised to find Bram Stoker as a character in the book, especially as he is not described in a very favorable light. He's screaming all the time, calling Irving an idiot … but I thought, from my readings, that they were good friends. In the book, what we see is not really a friendly relationship, it is rather a working relationship that was quite hard because of the difficulties Bram Stoker had dealing with Irving. So I wanted to know where the truth lies.
__Dacre__ : First, that's very observing. Bram, in real life, never really had an opportunity to speak back to his boss. Again this is some hear-say, some family situation. They had a very good relationship, as men do, back and forth. They really understand each other, they could say what they really mean.
But people think there was hero worship but in fact it was very equal, they could really tell how they felt. And if Irving needed a kick in the ass to come back to rehearsal or to stop seeing another woman, Bram would do it. So I wanted people to know that Bram was not only subservient to Irving all the time, that he actually had some backbone.
__Ian__ : He was a tough person and he needed to be because Irving was hard to deal with. I come from acting training so I learned to speak from the diaphragm, I'm usually loud without even trying and Dacre is always like ^^Shh... Shhh^^ So it's a little bit of the same relationship (laugh)
__Dacre__ : Painting a realistic picture, rather than the one that comes out all the time, and again realizing that his life was always a struggle, he did not have a great relationship with his wife because he was so devoted to his job and to Irving. He had a pretty good relationship with his son, he brought him to the Lyceum from time to time and actually the man who created the sets was always taking care of the young Noel because Bram who was so busy couldn't. He wanted to be more of a better father but he was just so devoted to the job and to the people running the Lyceum. So again, a struggled man of whom we see only the outworld side of Bram, from his writing and he obviously produced some strange writings ! Not just Dracula ! Everybody who has read the full biography and other people who loved to analyze Bram have all these theories on oh yes he was abused as a child, Irving was so dominate of him …
___Ian__ : or that there was a gay relationship between Bram and Irving. Because the word “love” is used differently today. When he said he loved Irving he meant he loved his work, his art and him as a person but he never meant “in love”.
__Dacre__ : So I just wanted to paint a picture that shows that Stoker was a complex person. And that sometimes he had rage. That's ok, he was always being pushed down.
__Ian__ : and he was an Irishman so he had a bit of a temper (laugh)
You've got also these references with Cotford who often addressed to as ^^the Bloody Irishman^^. At the time, it was quite difficult between the Irish and the English.
__Ian__ : Just then ? (laugh)
__Dacre__ : Politically, Bram was a big proponent of Home Rule. For the Irish to rule themselves.
__Ian__ : You could look at Dracula, the aristocrat, part of the Monarchy. He created a vampire royalty so maybe in a way the royalty was bloodsucking on the Irish people, we don't know. These are theories that scholars debate over and over …
__Dacre__ : and that's a wonderful thing about this book. It created so much debate, so much discussion, people get degrees about it, people write books about it and it will go on because there's nowhere that Bram has ever written “this is why I wrote Dracula”. And I'm glad he didn't because that's why the mystery builds on forever and it will continue to. If we were to find in some hidden place where he said “this is what I really meant”, that will be sad.
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