Last month, it was announced that an eight-part adaptation of the Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire will be coming to AMC and the AMC+ streaming service sometime in 2022. Now AMC has hired Alan Taylor to direct the first two of those eight episodes. Taylor will also be executive producing this show, which is just the beginning of AMC's plan to build a television franchise on the foundation of the books in Rice's The Vampire Chronicles series, as well as the books in her Mayfair Witches series. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul producer Mark Johnson is overseeing this franchise.
Rolin Jones, co-creator and showrunner on the first season of the HBO series Perry Mason, is the creator, showrunner, and writer of the Interview with the Vampire series. Jones and Johnson will executive produce the show alongside Taylor, with Anne Rice and her son Christopher Rice also on board as executive producers.
Taylor previously directed multiple episodes of Mad Men for AMC, including that show's pilot. His other TV credits include episodes of Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Boardwalk Empire, The West Wing, Lost, and The Sopranos. He even won an Emmy for his work on The Sopranos. His work in feature films hasn't been quite so celebrated. He directed Terminator: Genisys and Thor: The Dark World, which is widely considered to be one of the lesser entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He has also directed the upcoming Sopranos prequel film The Many Saints of Newark, which looks like it will go over better than his Terminator and Thor movies did.
AMC's Dan McDermott had this to say about Taylor being hired to work on Interview with the Vampire:
Alan Taylor is a legendary director and someone we have real history with, going back to the first episode of Mad Men, an hour of exquisitely crafted television that propelled our company in a new direction to become a force in original programming. We are assembling a true dream team of talent on Interview with the Vampire, from Rolin Jones to Mark Johnson and now with the addition of Alan, a director with a body of work that could basically break IMDb, not to mention Anne Rice’s extraordinary stories and characters, which have captivated so many millions of fans from around the world. We are so excited to be where we are on this series, and there is so much more to come."
Terminator: Genisys and Thor: The Dark World are my main points of reference when it comes to Taylor's work, so I can't say I was hyped to see that he'll be the director behind the first two episodes of Interview with the Vampire. But maybe he'll win me over with this.