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INTERVIEW
WITH VICTOR SALVA,
WRITER-DIRECTOR OF JEEPERS CREEPERS
When
the US box office figures are tallied on Sunday night, three-week champ
American Pie 2 will, barring accidents, surrender its crown to
a new movie that’s neither a big-budget blockbuster, a remake, nor a sequel.
Jeepers Creepers is a cheap horror movie starring Gina Phillips
and Justin Long as a sister and brother pursued by an unstoppable psychopath.
Hardly big names : while Phillips has popped up in Ally McBeal
and Long in GalaxyQuest, writer-director Victor Salva has been,
until now, better known in the US for his off-camera activities…
In
1989 he pleaded guilty to having oral sex with the 12-year-old star of
his debut film, Clownhouse – an act he recorded on videotape. Sentenced
to three years in prison, he served 15 months and was paroled in 1992.
Certain family-values groups view Salva is one of American film’s most
notorious figures – in the Washington Post’s phrase, he ‘poses
an interesting moral question over the right of artists with criminal
records to work.’
Details
of Salva’s past became big news with the release of Powder in 1995,
a project produced by a Disney Organisation, and again caused problems
during Jeepers’ Florida shoot, when local school officials
prohibited students from visiting the set or appearing as extras on learning
of Salva’s record. Early rave review on internet websites ignited a ferocious
‘flame war’ between those outraged that a ‘convicted padeophile’ should
be allowed to work and have his films distributed, and calmer voices who
argued that Salva had discharged his debt to society, had attempted to
make amends, and was entitled to make a living. And if Salva’s films were
to be boycotted, what about Roman Polanski, who fled the US rather than
face trial on underage-sex charges?
 Speaking
from his Los Angeles home, the 43-year-old Salva remains philosophical:
“I’ve never made any effort to hide what happened. I served my time, I’ve
tried to learn and move on. I knew making Powder for Disney was
like throwing gasoline on the fire – a very volatile combination that
was going to erupt at some point. This has followed me around ever since
it all happened, but once people meet me the phantoms kind of go away,
and they realise I just made a stupid mistake, years ago.”
Salva
is grateful to industry figures who’ve given him a second chance – especially
Francis Ford Coppola, producer of both Clownhouse and Jeepers
Creepers, the first release under Coppola distribution deal with United
Artists. According to Salva, “Francis has always been my champion. He
knew I made a terrible mistake, but he also knew who I really was, and
I was capable of doing. He’s stuck with me all the way, through all the
thick and all the thin, sinced he saw my short Something in the Basement
that I made in my own backyard. I entered it for this competition
for movies made only with home-video equipment, and Francis was one of
the judges. He gave it first prize in the fiction category, and he asked
me if I had any feature ideas.
“I
showed him the Clownhouse script and he was setting up a company
called Commercial Pictures to make ten low-budget movies for $10m each,
and he wanted mine to be the fist one. Commercial Pictures didn’t work
out, but now it’s over a decade later and he’s got a similar operation
called Zoetrope, which is another ten $10m movies, and again mine’s the
first. That’s pretty flattering, and there’s a real symmetry about it.”
Providing further symmetry – and perhaps explaining the Godfather auteur’s
enthusiasm for Salva’s movies – is the fact that his own directorial debut
was itself a horror cheapie, Dementia 13, shot in Ireland in 1963
under the auspices of legendary producer Roger Corman.
But
Salva was, nevertheless, initially wary of showing Coppola the Jeepers
script: “I thought he saw me potentially as more of an intellectual
type of film-maker, and here was this genre picture. But eventually I
sent him the script and he said he wanted it to be the first movie for
the Zoetrope deal. When he saw a rough cut, he said it was ‘a dark work
of art,’ and not just some piece of trash.”
Coppola’s
enthusiasm has been shared by critics and preview audiences alike – one
German commentator raved about what he called Salva’s ‘Horrorkompetenz’
- but the mounting hype has its downside: “It does work better if
you know nothing about it beforehand,” says Salva, “I’m worried that expectations
are going to be raised so high, and then they see what’s really just a
little horror movie, and they’ve been led to believe it’s something really
amazing.” Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘little horror movies,’
of course - growing up in a small town outside San Francisco, Salva and
his brother would watch fright movies every Saturday on the TV ‘Creature
Feature,’ absorbing themselves in ‘sleeper’ classics such as Carnival
of Souls: “they made it for, like, a dollar ninety-eight, and it’s
so atmospheric, bits of it are really terrifying, and it isn’t really
graphic at all.
“My
favourites were fifties monster movies, especially Creature From the
Black Lagoon, but we also loved all the Universal classics and things
like Dead of Night and Night of the Demon. I’m a fan of
suspense, and I see Jeepers as really a kind of a campfire tale
– I was very serious about writing it, but the movie itself isn’t supposed
to be totally straight faced. But not like the Scream films – they
poke fun at the horror and somehow tear it down. This was more an attempt
to recapture all the things I love about real scary movies, but also to
have some very black humour to take the edge off some of the despicable,
monstrous things that are going on.”
It’s
a winning formula, and while Salva says he’s “as nervous as a cat in a
room full’o’ rockin’ chairs” in anticipation of the big national release,
he’s also ready if success leads to the re-opening of old wounds. “There
are always going to be people who wonder how anyone can make that big
a mistake,” he says. “But I’ll never let it stop my career as a film-maker.
Francis told me to look for the positives, that getting through the tough
times might even make me a better artist. I was too upset to listen to
him at the time, but now I know what he means. In a way, it derailed me
from my ambition to be Spielberg. It made me realise that I wanted to
know what kind of films I was going to make. After everything that’s
happened, I’m still going to make movies – to make Victor Salva movies."
For
the full transcript of this interview click
here
For our review of Jeepers Creepers click
here
29th
August, 2001
by Neil
Young
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