When Neil Jordan first considered a film adaptation of the play “A Vampire Story,” his friends and colleagues were dubious.
“Everyone said, ‘Do we need another vampire movie?’ ” Jordan recalls. Including him.
“I was a little unwilling,” he admits, to revisit the genre he jump-started in 1994 with his film of Anne Rice’s “Interview with the Vampire,” which preceded “Buffy,” “Twilight” and “True Blood” and scores of other bloodsucker titles that have since dominated movies, TV and young-adult books.
But the script for what would become “Byzantium,” adapted from Moira Buffini’s 2004 play, introduces a new perspective, starting with the gender of its monsters. Played by Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton, the mother-and-daughter vamps begin the film in the 18th century and struggle to make their way into the present day.
Clara, Arterton’s fierce vampire, uses her feminine wiles to make ends meet financially, and to sate her appetite. Ronan, as her introverted daughter Eleanor, is reluctant to take lives and prefers her own company.
“It’s time to see women inhabiting these roles, isn’t it?” says the Irish director. “Especially if you bring up the sexuality of vampires. It was a thrill to work with Gemma and just go for it with this lustful, blood-soaked creature. A woman wrote that character. I wouldn’t have dared.”
Aside from the fact that most leading vamps in movies and TV are men, there’s the lock step of the rules: They have fangs, they can’t go out in daylight, they’re turned into creatures of the night by a bite.
“This gave me the opportunity to kind of rewrite the rule book a little bit,” says Jordan. “These creatures need a bit of an overhaul, don’t you think? They’re a little predictable, a little bland.”
Jordan was also struck by Buffini’s use of motifs that are frequently seen in his own work.
“If I was to be egotistical, I’d think she was making reference to them,” he says. “It’s set in an abandoned seaside town, and I’ve made many movies in those environments. It’s set in the present and the past. It’s [also] about story telling. The story is told through different people.”
Drawn inexorably to those familiar angles, Jordan says he enjoyed tinkering with classic fanger fables, including the manner in which one is turned into a vampire.
A single bite no longer does the trick. Instead, a would-be Dracula must make a pilgrimage to a remote island — the film was shot on a craggy Irish peninsula 100 miles from Cork — and make a perilous climb to a lonely, tomb-like structure.
“It’s [actually] a monk’s stone hut,” Jordan says, “but you get the feeling it’s built over a pagan burial ground.”
Also, don’t assume that the film’s big special effect, in which the waterfalls on the island turn scarlet red when someone is “turned,” is computer-generated.
“Why does everyone think that?” says Jordan. “We did that for real! We had very valiant climbers who climbed to the top of the waterfalls and dumped tons of vegetable dye in the lake above.”
The director also liked that Ronan’s character had a more complicated relationship with immortality than most vampires.
“What if you had to live forever . . . with your mother?” he says. “And experience teen angst for 200 years? What if you hated to kill, and haunted hospitals and put sweet little old ladies out of their misery?”
Ronan, described by Jordan as “a teenage Meryl Streep,” shares a certain youthful innocence with one of the stars of Jordan’s first vampire pic: Kirsten Dunst, who was only 12 when she played Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt’s young companion in “Interview with the Vampire.”
Did Jordan look back on that film at all when pondering the new one?
“I didn’t,” he says, but he regards that movie as a singular experience in the career of a decidedly indie filmmaker. “I got to make a big Hollywood movie as if it was an art film.”
He says he’s not too well-versed in the vampire tales that followed.
“The best of the recent vampire movies,” he says, “was ‘Let the Right One In,’ that Swedish film.”
He says he also caught a bit of the latest “Twilight” movie: “I was in a theater, and I walked into the wrong one, where that last movie was playing. The theater was packed with young girls; I couldn’t believe it. They all started to scream every time some guy was on the screen.”
He didn’t stay, though.
“I hadn’t bought a ticket. I didn’t think I was justified.”
sstewart@nypost.com