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Neil
Young meets VICTOR SALVA,
writer-director of JEEPERS CREEPERS
WARNING : CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS
NY
: There’s been a lot of press attention in advance of Jeepers Creepers’
release, including the covers of Shivers and Fangoria magazines.
VS
: In a way, the coverage the movie has been receiving is unsettling,
because it does work better if you know nothing about it beforehand. I
wouldn’t care, but on Shivers it’s not even a good picture of the
Creeper! The whole point is that you watch without knowing what’s happening
and who this figure is. There’s a specific order to events, a series of
gradual reveals. I was of course thrilled to get the cover, but they said
they’d only put it on the cover if they could choose any image from the
movie they wanted. There were plenty of other scary images that didn’t
show the Creeper full face.I’m worried that expectations are going to
be raised so high, and then they see what’s really just a little horror
movie, when they’ve been led to believe it’s something really amazing.
NY
: How do you think the movie will do?
VS
: I’d really love JEEPERS CREEPERS to have legs, as we call it.
The summer’s been full of these huge blockbusters that have all opened
big then fallen away really quickly. People have said that’s just the
way it is with the public and the media blitzkrieg these days, but maybe
it’s because the films aren’t really very good. Nobody’s dared to suggest
that, but two years ago The Sixth Sense opened and it wasn’t huge
but it was a good film and it generated word of mouth, so it had great
legs, and people went back to see it again. I kind of hope that something
like that might just happen with JEEPERS CREEPERS, that it might
have legs that are just that little bit longer.
NY
: It seems to have fallen quite well for the film, what with Jay and
Silent Bob and Ghosts of Mars underperforming last week, and
Mariah Carey’s film Glitter being put back. The only other new
wide release is Tim Blake Nelson’s high-school Othello movie O.
VS
: Tim is a really good friend, one of the very few I’ve made in the business
here in LA – it’s a very strange irony, we were sitting about a year ago
and saying how funny it would be if O and JEEPERS CREEPERS
opened the same weekend, and that’s how it’s turned out. In a way it’s
put us both in a very awkward position, because we both want to open really
big – it’s so weird being up against a buddy’s movie. To be honest, I’m
sitting here just nervous as anything at the minute. My grandfather used
to say ‘nervous as a cat in a roomful o’rockin’ chairs.
NY
: What I liked about the film was that you expect these two kids to be
killed straight away, then we’ll move on to the main plot. And that isn’t
what happens.
VS
: When I first sent the script around the criticism was often that it
didn’t open with a ‘hook,’ in which something horrible happens to these
characters, then the story really starts. JEEPERS CREEPERS isn’t
really like many other horror movies – it’s five whole minutes until the
truck shows up. The studio was really worried about this, but I said,
well, if the audience can’t wait five lousy goddam minutes, then who needs
them? But of course that’s not the way studios think about audiences!
NY
: What’s your background?
VS
: I grew up in a really small town about 30 miles out of San Francisco
called Martinez. Me and my brother would watch the horror movies on a
show called the ‘Creature Feature,’ and each area had its own host. I’m
still a horror fan but now I’m addicted to British sitcoms we get via
a 24-hour satellite channel, things like Father Ted, Blackadder,
Ab Fab, even Vicar of Dibley, and I’m impressed by League
of Gentlemen, which is very dark, kind of like a sitcom by Roman Polanski.
But I don’t think Fawlty Towers has ever been surpassed. Movies-wise,
I’ve liked some weird horror movies – The Changeling with George
C Scott, and more recently The Gift.
NY
: Jeepers reminds me of some older types of ‘sleeper’ movie like
Carnival of Souls…
VS
: I saw it when I was a teenager, it has so many indelible images in it,
and they made it for, like a dollar 98. It’s so atmospheric, and bits
of it are really terrifying, and it isn’t graphic at all. I loved Blair
Witch, and that was one of the few horror movies where they never
showed the monster. That works as a one-off, but really the lesson is
that we have to show the monster. It’s one of the criticisms of the movie
that the second half isn’t as scary as the first, but, like, d’oh – you
have to reveal your monster. I look back on Night of the Demon
and there was such a fuss about whether they were going to show the monster
or not, but it’s fantastic.
NY
: How did you get involved with Francis Ford Coppola, who’s producing
Jeepers – is it just a coincidence that he started out with a cheap
horror movie, Dementia 13?
VS
: Francis produced my first movie, Clownhouse, and that was more
similar to Dementia 13 than JEEPERS CREEPERS. In Clownhouse
three boys are watching the Creature Feature on TV, and the movie
they’re watching is Dementia 13. I think there is a kind of total
symmetry, though Francis was younger when he did his first movie. He saw
a short of mine called Something in the Basement that I made in
my own backyard. It did the rounds of the Festivals, and in one of them
Francis was a judge. It was only for movies that were made on home video
equipment, and Francis gave me the top prize in the fiction category.
A few years later Francis set up a company called Commercial Pictures
to make ten low-budget movies, and Clownhouse was the first one.
Now he’s set up Zoetrope, and he’s got the money for another ten low-budget
movies, and JEEPERS CREEPERS is the first, so there’s again a real
symmetry. Francis has always been my champion, and he’s stuck with me
all the way through the thick and the thin.
To
be honest, for a long time I avoided showing Francis the JEEPERS CREEPERS
script, because I thought he saw me as more of an intellectual type of
moviemaker, and here was this genre horror film. But then my agent said,
if you’re sending it around all these producers and you’re not sending
it to Francis. he’s going to be offended, so we sent him the script and
he loved it.
NY
: What did he make of the finished film?
VS
: He saw the rough cut and he e-mailed me, and the first three words of
the e-mail were ‘Oh my God,’ which of course can mean all kinds of different
things. But he went on to say that the movie had a ‘powerful vision’ and
that it was ‘a dark work of art.’ He knew it wasn’t just a piece of trash,
that it was in a way a horror version of Powder. He tried to instil
in me the idea that there’s no reason to approach a genre movie like this
with any less style.
NY
: Is it fair to say the movie owes as much to spooky stories by the likes
of M R James and Saki, as it does to movies?
VS
: I’m not especially well read – I’ve read some stories by H P Lovecraft
and Melville, but I’ve never even read anything by Poe.
NY
: I see the movie as a kind of fireside tale, or perhaps something like
what might be told around a campfire.
VS
: I’ve never mentioned this before, but that’s exactly what both
JEEPERS CREEPERS and Clownhouse are supposed to be. Amospheric
and macabre, with no happy endings, but not to be taken totally seriously.
I spent a long time over it, and I was serious about writing it, but in
a way the film is supposed to be a very black joke. At the end when you
get the song, and those visuals, you can see it’s a very dark humour.
There’s the license plate he gets made for himself, and when he’s eating
the tongue out of the guy’s head there’s a big ad behind him for a meat-market.
I did all those things on purpose – they’re not really Wes Craven type
asides, when it kind of pokes fun at the horror and somehow tears it down.
It was more an attempt to recapture all the things I love about those
kinds of scary movies. And the humour is there, and it takes the edge
of what are some pretty despicable and monstrous things going on.
NY
: A bit like that story John Houseman tells at the start of The Fog.
VS
: That sequence captures exactly what I was talking about. I only wish
the rest of the movie was like that. Apart from Halloween, which
I thought was genius, and The Thing, I must admit I’m not a big
fan of Carpenter’s. I remember seeing the British movie Dead of Night
when I was in college, and that had the same kind of creepy mood
I tried to get in JEEPERS CREEPERS. There are certain movies that
people always mention when they talk about JEEPERS CREEPERS, and
the funny thing is I haven’t even seen some of them – like Texas Chain
Saw Massacre, for instance. But of course the opening’s very like
Duel.
I’ve
always been a horror fan, but I do have very unusual tastes. I’m not a
big gorehound, for instance, and one of the scariest films I’ve seen is
Picnic at Hanging Rock, it’s enough to give me goosepimples because
it’s all so powerful and mysterious. I’m a big fan of suspense, and there
don’t seem to be many of that kind of movie made any more. I like all
those Universal horror movies of the thirties and forties, but me and
my brother loved the movies from the 50s, with the giant bugs and things.
My all-time favourite monster movie is still The Creature from the
Black Lagoon, and there’s a moment in JEEPERS CREEPERS, where
the Creeper’s on one side of the two-way mirror and Gina Phillips is on
the other, that’s a nod to the moment in Black Lagoon where the
girl’s swimming and he’s underwater following her movements, and she’s
totally unaware. They’ve been talking about doing a remake and I tried
to get involved, but they’re taking it in a totally different direction
from the original, apparently, and we could never work anything out.
NY
: Did shooting go as planned?
 VS
: A week before we were ready to shoot one of the producers came to me
and said, Victor, we’re a million dollars over budget. The completion
bond company came in and asked if we could make changes, in order to meet
the new budget. So we took 20 pages out of the script, and scaled parts
of it way down – the ending, and also the second-act climax. There was
a whole other reel at the end of the interrogation-room scene, but we
ended up with this much more intimate finale. It was the most thinking-on-my-feet
thing I’ve every had to do. The original ending was much bigger and pyrotechnic,
but Francis said that maybe the more personal and intimate way to end
the story was better in any case, and he’s right. Originally they escape
from the police station in the Creeper van – providing a pay-off for the
van intro which the movie doesn’t have at all now. The Creeper flies after
them and comes down on top of the van – the similar scene earlier with
the cop car was meant to foreshadow this, but again this doesn’t happen
now. The Creeper pulls Trish out of the van, sniffs her, then throws her
off the van. A freight train arrives on the scene just as the Creeper’s
trying to reach in and get to Darius, and there’s a huge explosion that
Trish sees from the distance. Then we cut to the actual ending, which
is exactly the same as the actual version.
The
freight train finale was a real aerobic exercise, it was like I was asking
myself, “Can I do an action sequence?” I’ve got a very childlike love
of movies, and so far I’ve been very good on the emotional side, flexing
the emotional muscles. With this sequence I wanted to test myself alongside
guys like Jim Cameron and Spielberg and see if I could flex my physical
muscles as well. But in a way, it might actually turn out for the best
that we couldn’t just do anything and everything we originally wanted
to do. That might have to wait for the sequel, we’ll see.
NY
: I hear you’ve already signed for a sequel.
VS
: That’s a rather severe exaggeration. There are some very slow negotiations
going on right now, they’re taking plenty of time. Francis and the other
producers aren’t stupid, they want to see how the movie does before they
get anything concrete sorted out. My idea for the sequel is that it starts
off the very next day, kind of like Halloween 2, and I’ve got some
ideas in mind. The funny thing is, to be perfectly honest I thought I’d
written it to be ‘sequel proof’ with all that stuff about the Creeper
only being active for 23 days every 23 years. Then Francis pointed out
that he’s active for 23 days and JEEPERS CREEPERS only covers one
day, so there’s still 22 left. I had to admit I’d never thought of it
like that. I’m not sure where the 23 came from, but my room-mate tells
me he noticed that on the noticeboard across from my desk when I was writing
the script there was a big number 23, kind of like in The Usual Suspects,
with a red circle around it, and it was the poster for the 23rd
Annual Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, so perhaps that was a subliminal
influence. But I think 23 is also a kind of scary number, though I’m not
sure why.
NY
: How do you now feel about the controversy that sprang up while you were
making Powder, when your prison time for a child sex offence came
to light?
VS
: Well, I’ve never made any effort to hide this. Making Powder for
Disney was, I knew, like throwing gasoline on the fire, and I knew it
was going to erupt at some point. It was a very volatile combination,
but I didn’t feel as though I had any choice, because they were the only
studio who wanted to make the movie. This has followed me around ever
since it happened, but once people meet me the phantoms go away and they
realise I made a stupid mistake, years ago. Francis knew I made a mistake,
but he also knew who I was and what I was capable of doing.
My
past is going to follow me around for as long as people want to talk about
it. JEEPERS CREEPERS is a high-profile movie but I think there’ll
be less controversy this time because it isn’t Disney who’s made it. It
did hamper us a little bit when we had some difficulty with the schools
in Florida when we were shooting the movie, but really, everybody’s heard
the story now and I’m not sure how much juice there is left in it. Then
again, there are always going to be people who wonder how anyone can make
that big a mistake. It’s like Einstein said, going back to Powder,
people make big mistakes and they make little mistakes, and all we can
do is learn from them.
I’ll
never let it stop my career as a film-maker. Francis said he knew how
hard it was for me to get through the hard times, but he told me to try
to look for the positives, and that it might even make me a better artist
because I’d come through the tough parts. I was too upset to listen to
him at the time, but I know what he means. I have learned a lot of lessons.
It derailed me from my ambition to be Spielberg – it made me realise I
wanted to know what kind of films Victor Salva was going to make. I’m
keeping busy, working hard on another genre script that will hopefully
be finished by the first week of September, by when we’ll know how JEEPERS
CREEPERS has done. It’s a ghost story, but I’m trying to do something
new with it – the ghost is a kind of massively destructive force, like
a freight train, he’s got so much anger. I’ve got a couple of projects
ready to go, the most likely one to get made first is something I’ve been
working on since Powder. It’s about fathers and sons, and extraterrestrials
among us on the Earth. It’s kind of an action thriller drama. After everything
that’s happened, I’m still going to make movies, to make Victor Salva
movies.
For
the shorter article based on this interview click
here
For the review of Jeepers Creepers click
here
2nd
September, 2001
by Neil
Young
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