Bram Stoker’s Dracula – The Radio Times Website

This version of the Dracula story was adapted from the original 1897 Bram Stoker novel, not the more popular source, John L Balderston’s successful stage adaptation. The new screenplay, initially entitled Dracula: the Untold Story, was by James V Hart, who had written Hook.

It was originally destined to be a TV movie directed by Michael Apted. But Winona Ryder gave the script to Francis Ford Coppola at a reconciliatory meeting after The Godfather Part III (which she had pulled out of owing to exhaustion). Columbia assented to green-light the project if Coppola would direct. He agreed, mostly for financial reasons, hoping to resurrect his beleaguered production company, American Zoetrope.

Apted stayed on as executive producer, and the budget was set at $40 million, with the entire film shot on Columbia’s sound stages in California. Coppola threw himself into it, considering all sorts of weird approaches: using old-fashioned special effects and scrapping the sets and using slide projections (he was dissuaded from this by the studio).

Coppola would refer to his cast by their character names on set, including Anthony Hopkins, who played Van Helsing with a duelling scar on his face that the actor himself devised, and Gary Oldman, who never really hit it off with Coppola. Allergic reactions to the heavy makeup Oldman was forced to wear to portray Dracula did not help his mood.

According to his journals, Coppola went through elation and depression during test-screening (“It just might be a potentially great film”, “We are on the cusp of disaster”). It was recut 37 times before release, and the director claimed he was only 60 per cent happy with the finished product.

Released in November 1992, it was a surprise hit, more than doubling its money in the US alone.