GREGG ARAKI
The cult filmmaker on aliens, MTV, and staring at people for fun
My first experience with the films of Gregg Araki was when I was working as an usher at Laemmle's Sunset 5, and we hosted the world premiere of Nowhere, a youth-gone-wild movie described by one critic at the time as "Clueless with nipple rings." Facially pierced hipsters in neon camouflage pants were everywhere, and Michael Stipe approached the popcorn counter with Courtney Love to ask if I could get him either an aspirin or a large blunt object with which to strike him over the head.
Araki came in every day after that to check the sound levels, usually insisting that they were too low, as the movie needed to be at "pain threshold." His relentlessness in ensuring appropriate pain levels should come as no surprise to his fans, who revel in the director's cinematic assaults of sex, violence, color, and sound. Araki's movies have always been considered shocking, but his latest, Mysterious Skin, may be the most envelope-pushing one yet. Eschewing his usual over-the-top, hyper-real style, it's a movie that deals seriously with child abuse and its after-effects, and boasts numerous scenes of former 3rd Rock From the Sun star Joseph Gordon-Levitt having sex with particularly repulsive older men.
CityBeat: Between Nowhere and Mysterious Skin, there's this running metaphor of aliens representing a fear of sex. Is that based on the anal probes, or is there more to it than that?
Gregg Araki: It's weird, because Mysterious Skin is based on a book by Scott Heim, it's strange to me how well it fits into my oeuvre, in terms of ... . On the one hand, Mysterious Skin's a big departure for me in that it's my first serious character-driven drama that doesn't have that kinda postmodern satirical edge to it that most of my other movies have had, so it's really in a way different, but in a lot of ways it's so much the same, in terms of the aliens, and the sexuality, and the beautiful and doomed character. There are many through lines, I think.
And the next movie you're doing is about aliens as well, right?
I have a project I'm working on right now, we haven't started it yet, but it does also have aliens in it. I think it's because there's such a potential for cinema to break free from reality, just aliens and anything with a supernatural or metaphysical bent are metaphorically interesting. My films always happen in that somewhat surreal world, so it's something that recurs again and again.
Did you deliberately cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt to screw with his wholesome sitcom image, or was that maybe something he was looking to do anyway?
Joe is a really serious, really talented young actor, and after being on a sitcom for 10 years, he really is interested in the dark and edgy, so Mysterious Skin really appealed to him when he read it. I didn't really watch the sitcom, so it's not like I had any great scheme to reinvent him in any way. He just came in and he really nailed the way I saw the character of Neil. One of the first sentences in the book to describe Neil is something like "Neil McCormack is a scruffy, moody little stick of a boy" - and that was so much Joe's physicality that when I met him it really struck me, and he just has a really unusual and powerful screen presence. The same with Michelle Trachtenberg; I didn't watch Buffy, so I didn't really know who she was, but I just thought she was really great and nailed that character.
Looking at Joseph in this and James Duval in your other films, I wonder if you take a kind of joy in finding these pretty-looking guys and then really messing them up onscreen.
I think that there is a certain - I wouldn't call it a joy. I mean, everything that happens in Mysterious Skin is really straight out of the book, it's not like things were invented for some sort of purpose. Everything is very much in the character arc of Neil. I am just more interested, I think, in casting people that have a really strong presence. I really look for people who are just fascinating to watch, because I think cinema's a really interesting way to sort of politely stare at people. I really like to look at people, and you can't in real life stare at people - it's kinda rude.
A lot of people talk of your movies in terms of shock value.
I have never thought of my films as shocking. There are shocking things in them, especially Mysterious Skin, which I think has moments that are extremely disturbing and somewhat uncomfortable, but everything is very much an integrated part of what's happening to these kids, and everything is necessary. I'm never interested in just shock for shock's sake. I think there are strains of filmmaking where that is the purpose of the film, where the statement is to outrage, which I think is fine, but something that as a filmmaker I've never been that interested in.
Is it true you did a pilot for MTV?
It is true! I did a pilot in between Splendor and Mysterious Skin. It turned out great, actually. It was called This Is How the World Ends and the title is a reference to the day that I have a series on MTV is the day the world ends! It was really cool, sort of like Dawson's Creek meets Twin Peaks, and it was a day in the life of this rich Beverly Hills kid, but it had a really kind of surreal Lynchian element to it. It would have been an amazing series, I think. It tested well and they were really supportive of it, but I think it was financially too much of a risk. We were part of that same cycle as Jackass, and Jackass did get picked up because an episode cost like $500, and this show we were doing had costumes, and sets, and the whole nine yards. Some day I hope to do a cool series.
You can't do a Mulholland Drive-type thing where you just add another hour and release it as a movie?
It's funny that you mention that, because I was very interested when I heard David Lynch was doing that, but it was interesting to see Mulholland Drive, because I had seen the pilot, and if you've ever seen the pilot versus the feature film version, literally the moment that Mulholland Drive the movie stops making sense, that's when the pilot ends. In the movie, literally the next scene, they're having weird, unmotivated lesbian sex. It's this sustained really unified thing, and then suddenly there's just this moment where everything just kinda goes crazy. I think it's really hard to make a pilot into a film because a pilot is really just the seed of a very long, drawn-out, developed story. It's not supposed to be wrapped up in 10 minutes. I had thought of that, actually.
You've made a couple of movies about threesomes. Do you think in real life, they can work out well?
I'm of the mindset that I'm not gonna judge what anybody else does, because I don't want them judging me, so ... anything's possible.
Published: 05/26/2005
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