In Anne Rice's original novel, Claudia was only 5 years old when she was first orphaned and transformed into a vampire by Lestat. He sired her not at Louis's request, but in spite of Louis's protests. Lestat did so in order to keep Louis from leaving him and rendering him alone.
At 20:33 where Daniel and Rashid are talking, the painting hanging on the far wall is called "Slave Auction" by the painter and musician Jean Michel Basquiat
"Asr namozi" , a phrase intoned by Rashid, is an Islamic prayer recited in Uzbekistan.
Lestat, Claudia, and Louis attend a movie and laugh uproariously through it. The movie they see, F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, is today considered a seminal classic of the vampire genre, but it is not a comedy. Presumably the trio found some aspects of the movie's depiction of vampirism comically inaccurate. The movie was an unauthorized adaptation of the ur-vampire novel, Dracula by Bram Stoker, but because the filmmakers didn't acquire the rights to adapt it, they were sued by Stoker's widow and obliged to destroy all known prints of the film; luckily, copies of the masterpiece did survive. In the 1994 movie Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles, Louis (Brad Pitt) spends much of the twentieth century watching movies; the montage depicting this starts with Nosferatu.
Ashura is a day of commemoration amongst Muslims. In general, Muslims observe this as a voluntary day of fasting which commemorates the day Noah left the Ark, and the day that Moses was saved from the Egyptians by God. For Shia Muslims, Ashura is a solemn day of mourning the martyrdom of Hussein, grandson of the founder of Islam, Muhammad, in 680 AD at Karbala in modern-day Iraq. He was martyred because he would not rubberstamp the new decree by the Ummayd Caliph (political and religious ruler) Yazid. Under threat of Yazid army and a prolonged blockade of needed supplies, Hussein and his followers would have to acquiesce or pay the ultimate price for his defiance.