Mysterious Skin

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Release Date: May 6th, 2005 (LA/NY); expands to other cities at later dates

Cast: Brady Corbet (Brian Lackey), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Neil McCormick), Elisabeth Shue (Mrs. McCormick), Mary Lynn Rajskub (Avalyn), Michelle Trachtenberg (Wendy), Jeffrey Licon (Eric Preston), Lisa Long (Mrs. Lackey), Bill Sage (Coach), George Webster (Young Brian), Chase Ellison (Young Neil), Richard Riehle (Charlie), Billy Drago (Zeke), Kelly Kruger (Deborah Lackey)

Director: Gregg Araki (Splendor, Nowhere, The Doom Generation)

Screenwriter: Gregg Araki

Based Upon: The novel by Scott Heim.

Premise: A teenage hustler and a young man obsessed with alien abductions cross paths, together discovering a horrible, liberating truth.

[MacGuffin]

Gregg Araki is the cult director of such acclaimed films as The Living End, Nowhere and The Doom Generation. His latest film, Mysterious Skin, is the first film he’s done in five years and is also his first adaptation of a book. It stars Brady Corbet and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Kansas teenagers Brian Lackey and Neil McCormick. Both were sexually abused by their baseball coach at the age of nine and over the years they have dealt with their experiences in different ways. By age 18, Brian has come to believe that he was kidnapped by aliens while Neil has taken the more realistic but dangerous approach of becoming a teenage hustler.

Daniel Robert Epstein: Mysterious Skin comments a bit on that running controversy of whether homosexuals are born or made. I know which side you fall on.

Gregg Araki: It’s how many beers they have [laughs].

DRE: We’re never sure what the Brian character’s sexuality is. Also would Neil have just become a regular gay kid in Kansas rather than a hustler?

GA: Yeah just a regular gay guy like a designer or something. He would design tablecloths.

I don’t feel like I was tackling that specific question. It’s always been my feeling about the story that Brian is heterosexual and that Neil is gay from a very young age. They have diverging sexual orientations. If you see my movies I always felt that sexuality is an amorphous thing anyway. I’ve always been a believer in the gray scale of sexuality.

DRE: Did the coach see that Neil was a gay kid or did he just like the way he played baseball?

GA: He’s the best player on the team [laughs]. I think one of the things that is so provocative about the story is that the Neil character from a young age has desire. I can remember being a very young kid and having desire. What happens in the book is that Neil has desire for the coach and the coach acts on that.

DRE: Since this was your first book adaptation how much was the author, Scott Heim, involved?

GA: It was very important that the piece be realistic. I’ve never been to Kansas so it was important to me that it have a Kansas feel to it. Scott wrote me letters telling me what Kansas was like but I felt like the movie has a universal approach to what childhood is like. I grew up in Santa Barbara California which is much different than Kansas but there is a universality to the way I grew up so I really related to the story. When I wrote my script I had the book with me so I would lift whole entire sections from the book.

DRE: I saw an edition of the book that had Fruit Loops on the cover and you use Fruit Loops a lot in the movie. Apparently Fruit Loops is also an insult for a gay kid.

GA: I’m not sure where the idea for using Fruit Loops in the title sequence came from. I just had this image of this stuff falling out of the sky with this happy kid. I think it was influenced by the book. Also that song we used is a cover by Slowdive of Syd Barrett’s Golden Hair. I’ve always loved that song so that song with the images of stuff falling all came to me when I wrote the screenplay. It really set the exact tone of the movie I wanted.

One of things I always loved about the book is the job that Scott did with the characters. Even the smallest supporting characters, like Neil’s johns, all have a real level of nuance and humanity. They are all flawed human beings including coach. They all have human frailty which makes the story so much richer. If the coach was just a bad guy that would just be simplistic.

DRE: It’s almost become a movie cliché for a male hustler or a female prostitute to eventually get beaten by a john. But in Mysterious Skin after Neil gets beaten that allows him to become more open to understanding Brian. Was that the intention?

GA: I thought that it was essential that Neil goes to New York, become this little fish in the big pond and his acting out becomes increasingly more dangerous. That’s why everything that happens to him on his journey is important.

I really feel that the movie does have closure to it and both characters come to know one another better. It’s almost like two halves of the same person being unified.

DRE: Do you think all the frenzy in the media over child abuse will affect the release of the movie?

GA: We’re selling tickets at the Michael Jackson trial.

I think the Michael Jackson thing is just static in the air. It’s sensationalized Page Six stuff which is just what the problem is when people talk about this issue. I’ve never had anything like that happen to me but the book really captured what that experience must feel like. I found it so devastating and emotional to see what these characters go through. But the Michael Jackson trial is like Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. I always knew that this movie would be very uncompromising and that it would upset some people. A lot of people have said that this is my most mainstream and accessible movie. That to me has been the biggest surprise. The movie transcends the boundaries of what a Gregg Araki fan’s expectations are. At screenings we’ve had 65 year old ladies watching Neil have sex with random guys and all the rough stuff then they come up and thank me for making the movie.

DRE: The coach character is either fishing for kids or having sex with kids. You never really see him as a person.

GA: Really? I find the coach a really interesting character. The actor who played him, Bill Sage, really worked hard on him. With only like four minutes of screen time I think that character haunts the whole movie. Neil at one point says that he is like a ghost watching us. I don’t see the coach as one dimensional but a very complicated person with conflicted feelings.

DRE: Do you see this movie as a continuation of your work or a break?

GA: I see it as both. It is a big departure because I think it’s my first character driven serious drama. On the other side I think it is so much a part of everything I’ve done. There is so much in Mysterious Skin that is in all my movies especially like the Wendy character who is the best friend that is also like a lover. That’s probably why I related so much to the book.

DRE: Do you think you will ever do a movie about 40 something people?

GA: Oh why not! Everyone always asks me why I make all my movies about teenagers. I really only made three movies about teenagers which was like the teen apocalypse trilogy of the mid-90’s. But to me Mysterious Skin isn’t really about teenagers. It’s almost incidental that they are teenagers. These characters are dealing with the aftermath and they just so happen to be 18.

DRE: What is CrEEEEps about?

GA: CrEEEEps is more of a straight horror/sci-fi movie but still, I could never make a movie I wasn’t interested in. Gus Van Sant told me that one has to make movies you like even if no one else likes them. Every movie you make is three years out of your life so as a director you only have a limited amount of movies to make in your lifetime then you’re dead.

[samsong]

never seen any of gregg araki's previous films, and from the opinions expressed by some of you in the araki thread and my teacher who literally cringed at the sound of his name, it should probably stay that way.  I really liked Mysterious Skin though despite its flaws... a few unwarranted moments and redundancy but it's a "compelling" film.  i found it beautifully disturbing and the emotional rawness/resonance of its closing moments made me want to overlook its shortcomings completely.  joseph gordon-levitt's performance is amazing.

[polkablues]

Just caught this one at the Seattle International Film Festival.  Apparently, Araki went and decided to become a legitimate filmmaker on us!  Damn good movie.  Right up there with "Mystic River" in terms of recent similarly themed movies, and without all the operatics that made "Mystic River" so tiresome.  I wholeheartedly approve.  









"Doom Generation" is still balls.

[analogzombie]

Doom Generation" is still balls.

I haven't seen Mysterious Skin yet, I plan on catching it this week, and I can definitely undertsand the criticisms of his movies, but I've got a soft spot for the Doom Generation. It's the first movie I saw where I realized that you can do anything you want with film. you can be as brash, as ridiculous, as offensive, whatever. It's when I learned that film can be anything. It's hindered my ability to accurately judge his films. DG and Nowhere just feel so much like lsd and ecstasy fueled teenage explosions to me. They resonate with the particular place and time I was at in my life when I saw them.

If Mysterious Skin turns out to be what everyone is talking it up to be, a real affecting film, no one will be happier than I.

[Ghostboy]

I saw this tonight, and it's really quite good. And it's the second best movie to use a Sigur Ros song for purposes of emotional closure.

[xerxes]

i'm going to bite.  what's the first?

[Ghostboy]

The Life Aquatic, of course! Which puts Vanilla Sky at a distant third.

[cowboykurtis]

I was hoping you weren't going to say that

[Ghostboy]

Why, you think Vanilla Sky should be first?

[Brazoliange]

The Life Aquatic, of course! Which puts Vanilla Sky at a distant third.

I knew I'd heard that ending song somewhere.

and here my friend was trying to convince me it was fucking David Bowie  

[Pubrick]

The Life Aquatic, of course! Which puts Vanilla Sky at a distant third.

I knew I'd heard that ending song somewhere.

and here my friend was trying to convince me it was fucking David Bowie  

in this day and age, it's impossible to find out these things on ur own.

[cowboykurtis]

Why, you think Vanilla Sky should be first?

No, I just wasn't a fan of life aquatic.

[Ghostboy]

I just enjoy making facetious comparisons.

[Brazoliange]

The Life Aquatic, of course! Which puts Vanilla Sky at a distant third.

I knew I'd heard that ending song somewhere.

and here my friend was trying to convince me it was fucking David Bowie  

in this day and age, it's impossible to find out these things on ur own.

I'd already returned the DVD and it isn't on the soundtrack