The following is an interview with the director of The Manson Family, Jim VanBebber.

INTERVIEWER: This is a story people know from the famous book Helter Skelter and the TV movie of the same name. What first drew you to this project?
JIM VAN BEBBER: Well, I’d always been fascinated with the case, and the media’s embracing the case as a sure fire ratings booster. But probably what made me and my partner Mike King decide at the time to go for it was this: We were just finishing up Deadbeat at Dawn in 1988 and Geraldo Rivera had a special on called "Murder in America" and the lynchpin of this special was an interview that he had conducted with Charles Manson, which he interspersed throughout the two-hour special. And we were just kind of appalled at Geraldo’s obviously just trotting this guy out to demonize him and to secure his ratings. And it just made me think that this seems like a subject ripe for treatment. Once I started doing the research, I realized that it could be more rationally explained as a series of circumstances that led one to another, each violent episode in a chain, rather than what [D.A. and Helter Skelter author] Vince Bugliosi had sold the public and the jury with this theory that Charlie was some Mephistopheles/ Rasputin who engineered a plan derived from the White Album to start a race war. I didn’t buy into that. I know his beliefs and I read everything but I think it was just circumstantial.

INT: The film pays a lot more attention to the family than to Charles.
JVB: Yes. Manson is the charismatic one, the visual one, but what about the people who actually did the killing. Besides random newsreel footage you’ve seen of them at their court dates, or on parole hearings, you really don’t know that much about them. Especially Bobby Beausoleil. He keeps on getting glossed over; even on this latest remake CBS did of Helter Skelter.

INT: Why is that?
JVB: I think that people want to concentrate on “crazy Charlie Manson.” They’re still propagating the boogieman.

INT: In watching the film, I notice that we often get a disagreement about what was going on. Sometimes, there is something like a dialogue happening between different characters’ perceptions of events. One says "It was all about sex" and another says "It was all really very spiritual and not just sex."
JVB: That was based on my research. Different people’s accounts of the same event in some instances were wildly different. You had to start attaching the message to the messenger and looking at who is saying what and what was his or her motive. It becomes like sitting down with this Rashomon situation and trying, not to figure it out, so much as present various viewpoints, because that is what is out there. So I am objectively sitting back and saying "Who knows what really happened, but here’s a couple of different accounts."

INT: And of course, the look of the film picks that up. It doesn’t have a clean look that would suggest that we trust the visual when people contradict each other. It’s got a distinctive look. I was reminded of people like Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger.
JVB: Absolutely. Particularly the two Kenneth Anger films that Bobby was involved with: he’s in Invocation of My Demon Brother, and he did the soundtrack for Lucifer Rising with Donald Cammell. They’re almost hypnotic, and they evoke an underground, anti-film sensibility almost. You feel like you’re letting loose a spell by playing it in your VCR. I wanted to evoke that aesthetics as well. This is not Helter Skelter, either version, where the side you are following is the D.A. and the cops. This is from the point of view of the family.

INT: In fact the police barely enter into this.
JVB: Hardly at all.

INT: So is it a story about how the '60s counter culture could look like a hippie commune and then the next thing you know it’s something else?
JVB: It is an aberration. There were thousands of communes around the country in the late '60s and early '70s. But Charlie is forever the posterboy for the bad hippie. He is, as many people said, the first original punk. He’s got the punk aesthetic.

INT: Let’s talk about the process of making this film. You’ve been involved with the project for quite a long time. Let’s talk about that.
JVB: As a struggling independent filmmaker in Dayton, Ohio who had finished my first feature Deadbeat at Dawn, I was naïve in the distribution game. We thought we were going to make some money with that film. And so we raised seed money and jumped into Charlie’s Family [as it was then called] in ’88, and then we ran out of money, and it became a process of showing people the footage that we had shot and cut, and raising more money, and shooting when we could. Finally, principal photography was wrapped in late 1992, and then up through 1995 it was raising money to get everything processed and cut, and getting hold of a Steenbeck [editing machine] to cut on. Finally in 1997, I had a decent cut, still rough, still a work in progress. That was screened at the FanTasia Film Festival in Montreal, and at the Chicago Underground Film Festival that summer. From there on out, it became a process of finding the right people to become involved in the film to finish it the way that I wanted it finished, which is blown up to 35mm, 5.1 Surround mix, leave my cutting alone, let me have my cut… These demands have made it very difficult for a lot of people. We had several offers to cut this, cut that, or let’s dump it straight to DVD, or what have you. But I felt that this was a really powerful film. I think it’s the best thing that I have done to this point and I wanted it to have a fighting chance in the art houses.

INT: What kind of cuts were people asking for?
JVB: Basically toning down the sex, violence and drugs, which is basically the story of the Manson Family. It was like "Well, why don’t you just make a film about something else." If you’re truly going to try to represent this subject matter, it demands an NC-17 approach. To do it less than that is irresponsible, because the film is a warning of sorts. Manson’s not an isolated phenomenon. You’ve got the Heaven’s Gate cult, you’ve got David Koresh. Another one is popping up every decade, or even more often.

INT: Let’s talk about violence. The violence in the film looked very much like '70s exploitation films. It’s very gory. What were the decisions about how to present the violence?
JVB: Well, I don’t think I was consciously emulating any film era or film style. My approach was to make it graphic. I had to try my best to make it leap off the screen, to remind people who get caught up in this fuzzy nostalgia of "that late 60s Hollywood and that crazy hippie cult leader Charlie Manson" to remind them what happened to those poor people. And it’s not just Tate and LaBianca. Nobody ever talks about Gary Hinman, which is the first real death committed by a member of the Family. And even before that, Charlie shots Lotsapoppa. He thought he’d killed him, he thought he was a Black Panther. He was wrong on both counts. Nobody talks about that part. I just tried to present it as graphically and realistically as I could. I guess if there was any model, someone who I think presents violence onscreen well and honestly, it's Scorsese.

INT: Yes, I was just thinking of the scene with Gary. One thing we’re reminded of in the movie is that it is hard to kill people. The scenes are hard to watch because it’s not just someone plunging a knife in once
JVB: Actually, I think it was Alfred Hitchcock who first presented honestly how hard it is to kill a man. In Topaz, Paul Newman and his costar try to kill this Russian agent, and they break the knife off in his shoulder, beat him with a shovel, and finally have to hold him with his head in an oven with the gas on. It’s just painful.

INT: Do you think your take on the project has changed over the time you’ve been involved. Do you look back and think "Wow, I remember thinking in ’92 that it was like this…"?
JVB: No, surprisingly not. I watch the finished film and it’s pretty much what I set out to do then and I think it is what I want now, and I think it is 90% successful. It may seem scattershot and rough to other people, but to me it seems absolutely perfect.

INT: You offer up a contemporary story alongside that of The Manson Family. What’s that there for?
JVB: The contemporary story gives it some relevance. I think this phenomenon of runaway disenfranchised youth who are rebelling against society in general, looking for some way to express their conflicted emotions; it’s a problem in every city in America. You can look at the case of the runaways who flocked to Charlie Manson, but if the film is simply that, then it’s just a recreation. I wanted to give it some relevance. Don’t think that there aren’t a bunch of kids throughout the United States who use hard narcotics and have violent tendencies and who have a twisted idea that Charles Manson is some sort of American hero.

INT: Here’s the classic end-of-interview question: Now that you’ve got distribution, this is on its way to theaters, what are you working on these days? And having spent so much time on murder and the dark side, do you feel like making a lightweight comedy?
JVB: Well, not a comedy per se, but I’d say black comedy is definitely a big part of the two projects I am cultivating right now. One’s a mafia film; one’s a biker film. They both have a large amount of violence, but they are far lighter in tone than The Manson Family project, because they are works of fiction. And I guess we need to do something lighter just to break it up a bit. I need to show my Monty Python side.

INT: I think we’re lucky we didn’t get Monty Python’s Life of Manson…
JVB: No, I needed to keep the grim tone, and that wasn’t easy to maintain, to see that all the way through, but we got it done. We got it done.