Down in the Valley director David Jacobson

It was a very strange, long, circuitous and organic search for a story but it started with me writing just some scenes about some kids growing up in the San Fernando Valley, like I did. I was thinking about writing a story slightly based on my life there. Then as I was doing that, I was doing rewrites of Dahmer [laughs]. Also I was inundated and immersed in a series of classic Western films and then somehow those Western films and their stories and those characters started to bleed into my story of growing up in the valley.

Yeah I’m like Lonnie and my sister is like Tobe. My situation wasn’t as bleak or severe as theirs was, but it was nice to be able to draw on a lot of little experiences and feelings I had growing up.

Well that’s the thing that I don’t do. I don’t totally outline a story but I do think about an overall arc in a very vague way and that provides a little bit of guidance. It’s just very much like this slow process of development. At a certain point very early in the process the ending was quite different. You write certain scenes and then out of those scenes certain themes and ideas start to come out. Then those themes spawn other scenes so I let it develop like that.

I felt very fortunate with the casting because for other films I’ve made I’ve cast unknown actors, which I always find very exciting and interesting. But in this case me and the producer decided to go for some known actors. Somehow I was able to get this set of known actors who are able to make themselves new each time.

Well I had the script and then we went to Edward. He was, at the time, writing his own story so his agent said that he wasn’t reading anything. So my expectations were pretty low about getting him involved. We were about to give up and then low and behold they called and said Edward would read it. It was just very fortunate to get our first choice. Once Edward was on board it really helped us because he’s an actor that other actors want to work with.

Then why even bother? [laughs] Bruce Dern is just so wonderful. The odd thing was that it just came to me in the casting process. Of course when I heard he wanted to do it I was overjoyed because he was the guy in every great 70’s movie, especially all the cult movies. He would regale me often of all the stories of working with Roger Corman and Alfred Hitchcock and Walter Hill.

Yes. Well barely. By name and culture I would say. [laughs]

The film is very much about me growing up in the valley and feeling a cultural displacement. I didn’t get a Bar Mitzvah. In the early 70’s when parents were liberal my Mom told me that if I wanted to have a Bar Mitzvah I would have to go to Hebrew school everyday. I said, “No, I didn’t want to go to Hebrew school everyday.” So I said, “Mom, no. I would just do it for the money anyway.” In a weird way, I regret it now. I didn’t have even that religious community that you have if you go to Temple. We were just living out there in the prairie of the San Fernando Valley. So I think it is that disconnection from the past that I share with Lonnie and Tobe and even Harlan. That sense of loss made me think of that connection to Judaism. In Harlan’s case, even though his parents were Jewish he certainly didn’t have any Jewish upbringing.

That was one of the constants throughout the writing. I never was interested in the age difference in their relationship. That came out more in the casting because when I was writing it I pictured Harlan being around 27 and Tobe around 17. In my experience that happens quite a lot. But it certainly was not Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain at 13.

I’m glad that you caught that. The shootout in the western town is like man versus car.

I know I’ve seen people who write and they go, “Well, it can go a little bit over the top and far fetched when they end up on the Western set.” Those are people who don’t live in LA because I can tell you there’s like five of those sets all on the outskirts of LA which is where they were riding. There is a level of realism.

Thank you. Write that stuff. What’s really weird is that Geoffrey Lewis was in so many Clint Eastwood movies. That’s another connection and then his daughter is Juliette Lewis.

Yeah, isn’t that weird?

I like the John Ford ones like My Darling Clementine. Also I like Shane by George Stevens and Red River by Howard Hawks.

I like that level of like play acting and role playing. One of the themes I actually remember talking with Edward about early on was this whole sense of how fantasy and imagination could be creative but it also could be very destructive if taken too far.

Exactly, he wanted his life to be a movie.

Yeah, that was all a weird coincidence.

No, it was weird. First of all, I was not a serial killer fanatic. I just heard about a book written by Dahmer’s father. That was my entry into that world. I wrote the script and then made it. But as we were producing it in 2001 it turned out there was another producer, named Hamish McAlpine, who was doing a trilogy of serial killer films. They were going to do Dahmer but when they heard we were doing Dahmer they just picked another serial killer. That’s how thought out that was. But then my producer went on to produce a film on John Wayne Gacy. I was upset by that and I told him so. To me Dahmer is a movie about a very strange character. Very similarly, suddenly there’s like four Westerns coming out now. When I did this I thought no one was doing Westerns. Then there’s suddenly Brokeback Mountain, The Proposition and the Tommy Lee Jones one [The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada].

Yeah I’m now writing one based on a true story about this guy who was convicted of first degree murder. He was robbing a liquor store and he killed the clerk and ended up in Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana. He was there in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s when it was the most violent prison in America. He goes from this uneducated poor white trash guy to where he learns a lot and becomes an advocate for the prisoners. He actually ends up helping integrating the prison in the 70’s and then, while still in prison, he became a journalist and won all these national journalism awards. Then he met a journalist who was doing a story on the death penalty in the 80’s and they got married. They fell in love and got married and even there are no conjugal visits, they stayed married for 25 years. He just got out of jail last week.

The only one that I was actually considering because I remember loving it when I was a kid was a remake of Soylent Green. Granted that movie is not an incredible movie but I thought you could make a really cool remake. But the script they gave me was terrible.

That was the issue. Since we know it’s people we got to take it further. But in the script they end up going into the desert and it just becomes like seven other movies. You know how they do that, they just go take a bunch of different movies that we’ve seen and then mash and sew them together into this Frankenstein. They should remake the bad ones. Those movies that had a great concept but they just fucked the film up. I hate when they remake a Hitchcock movie. Like when they did Psycho, even though Gus Van Sant has done some good movies I was so upset by that. It felt like it was blasphemy.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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