Larry Clark

Started by Born Under Punches, March 29, 2003, 04:46:03 PM

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Ghostboy

I saw Ken Park this evening. It's pretty lame. The first half is good, suggesting that it might be an interesting and thoughtful look at disturbed teenagers. Then it takes the most purely predictable route and goes for simple exploitative ends, and then trying to tack a meager bit of meaningfulness on at the very end.

It is indeed very graphic. I didn't have a problem with that, and had the same amount of nudity and sex been in Kids, I thought it would have been worthwhile. There's a teen threesome at the end that's very natural and well done (and hardcore, as far as oral/handjob stuff goes -- The Brown Bunny ain't got nothing on this). I didn't think it was too exploitative. The stuff with the kid who's sleeping with his girlfriend's mom is pretty good, too. It's actually quite funny. But whenever the movie tries to be disturbing or shocking, it falls flat.

I haven't seen Bully, but the friend who saw this with me said that it is far superior.

jasper_window

Where did you see it?  Film Festival?

Ghostboy

No, actually I rented it from an import DVD store.

ono

Quote from: GhostboyNo, actually I rented it from an import DVD store.
Does this store have a web site?

Ghostboy

No. But most major cities have at least one video store that rents underground/import stuff.

Pozer

I can't believe how many of you think Bully is a brilliant movie. It's a terrible, god awful film.
I remember watching it with friends and we all thought they made up the story as they went along.
and the performances (aside from Nick Stahl) were horrendous. that guy Telly from kids didn't steal the show. He just proved why he doesn't get any other work.
we're talking about the same Bully right?

Pubrick

i don't reckon i'll watch it ever again.

but that part where Larry Clark goes "tell her u'll write to her".. that was funny.
under the paving stones.

Cecil

and when telly says "what? ah man, that guys fucking retarded" was funny too

and this:

donny
fatalize, whats that? fatalize... whats fatilize mean... um, i mean... does it mean youre dead?  

derek
no dude, its worse... i mean... its way worse, bro... cause you have to live, man... you have to live and youre a... fuckin baby

hahahah, the whole movie is full of great lines

NEON MERCURY

Quote from: poser.... that guy Telly from kids ...

thats on eof the main reasons why this film doesn't work for me..that guy telly was the worst character i have seen plotted out on paper and put on screen..horrible, horrible stuff i  cannot see anyhting redeming in this film w/ the exception of maybe chloe S.

and what 's..also annoying is telly's cool sidekick drinking the fourties and speaking juvenille slang all the way through this film... :roll:

scratch gigli and the watcher from all time worsts and put this up there.....

rustinglass

I saw ken park yesterday, I pretty much think it sucks. I agree with ghostboy's view, the beginning was a bit interesting, but after that it just ruins everything.

I didn't like kids either, but his film with james woods, last day in paradise, or something, was pretty good, the only thing I liked of clark's work
"In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don't have experience of the west, they even believe that western shit is pie."
-Emir Kusturica

Pwaybloe

Courtesy DVD Times12/17/03:

Matt Day recently had the chance to talk exclusively with Larry Clark, director of the films Kids and Bully, about his latest work Ken Park. The film has sparked a storm of controversy around the world due to its graphic content, read on to hear his defense of the film, and his thoughts on his films on DVD.


Matt Day: Ken Park has been grabbing a few headlines lately, after being banned in Australia, how's it going getting the film released elsewhere?

Larry Clark: Good. I was just in Europe I was at a film festival in Germany and we premiered it there, then I was in Paris doing press – it opened in France on October the 9th – then I went to Lyon and they premiered it there as well.

MD: So it's just the UK and America that are having trouble with the release?

LC: Well I think we're close to making a deal for the UK, we actually have three suitors believe it or not that want this film so the whole thing's coming together and hopefully it's going to play in the UK. We have a distributor in the US, so hopefully the film will be out soon. It's kind of a shaggy dog story because the film was originally going to come out in August and then November and it might even be delayed a little more but it's definitely coming out in the US. What's taken so long is we had distribution, somebody courted us, wined us and dined us, and then they pulled out at the last minute.

MD: Was that in America or the UK?

LC: That was in the US, but now we have new distribution in America. This film, it was such a struggle even making it, it took all these years to get financing for the film, and when the film was finished the producer and financiers said this film will never be distributed, you'll never get distribution unless you cut it, no-one will touch it. And I said "wait a minute you're wrong, if we can get it in front of an audience wait and see what happens". Luckily we got in Venice, where they also told me I wouldn't get in because they brought in a new director who they said was very conservative, but he loved the film and invited us to the competition. So we brought it to Venice a year ago and the audiences responded to it so well and then they sold it all over the world. Now here's this film that I was told would never be distributed unless I cut it, I said I'm never going to cut a frame from this film, this is what it is, it took all these years to get it made. If I wanted to cut it I'd have made a different film years ago. Now they've sold it all over the world, it opened in Russia, in Spain in Greece, it opened in Italy July the 4th – 32 prints of this little film in Italy – it opens in France soon, it played in Austria, and hopefully now the UK, I'd love it to be in the UK.

MD: Well the UK presents a rather difficult situation, as you've made it clear you didn't want to cut the film in any way. I recently spoke to Sir Quentin Thomas, who's the director of the BBFC, and although he hasn't seen the film yet he did confirm that ejaculation is something that hasn't been classified in the UK before.

LC: But look at the rules, I have a copy of the rules, and the rules state that you can show erect penises, you can show ejaculation, you can show oral sex, you can show intercourse, you can show anything as long as it's in context, so maybe it hasn't been done, but it can be done – there's no rules against it, and this film is all about context. I was told that if you show certain things in film, if you show certain images, it's automatically pornography. I said wait a minute what are you talking about?, and they said if you show certain things, like ejaculation, it's automatically pornography and I told them – no it's not, if it's a part of life, if it's in the context of the story, if it's not gratuitous, and if it's really well done then it's not pornography, and I'll prove it to you. That was one more thing I wanted to prove, just one more challenge, and this film – and you've seen the film – is not pornography. It's part of the story, it fits in, it seems right. Take for example the last scene in the film, the sex scene at the end [one of the most explicit in the film], people from Venice, and film festivals all over the world, tell me that's not pornography, it feels right, it's not a dirty scene – the dirty scene is where Peaches' father kisses her. This isn't me, this is audiences everywhere, they see the film and respond and they think this is OK. I think that the people that see the film at the BBFC will see that, a lot of people are speculating but I think that we're really breaking new ground here, and that's one of the roles of an artist, and when people see this film they'll see it the way it is, I'm not cutting the film for anybody, ever.

MD: The UK has an interesting situation in that there is a classification exclusively created for pornography – the R-18. Films classified with this can only be sold in licensed sex shop, but they can get away with a lot more than is allowed at a regular 18 rating. If the BBFC were only willing to pass the film uncut with that rating would you want it to be distributed in that way?

LC: No.
This is a film, it'll be shown in theatres, it a good film – I think it's my best. I'm working with a great cinematographer Ed Lachman, it's a great looking film, it is what it is, and it's not pornography, I'm very proud of this film.

MD: There were a lot of familiar faces, but not big names in the film, did that help add to the realism?

LC: The acting is just spectacular, it was really interesting to mix first time actors with really experienced ones. All the adults a really great, professional actors, and all the young people in the film are first timers which made it really interesting. Wade Williams, who play's Claude's father in a brilliant performance and he said that working with Stephen [Jasso], he doesn't know what he's going to do, he doesn't know where he's going to go, he's just so open and honest. "If he had any kind of training I might know, I might have a clue where he is, where he's going to go, so I'm out there totally lost, I have to stop acting and just be real". So that makes for fantastic scenes where the actor is forced to be real and the first timer is being real, so I was really happy with the first timers, it's interesting to see what happens.

MD: You really seem to have a talent for picking a young cast off the streets and finding great actors out of nowhere.

LC: Well I did it in my first film Kids, no-one in that film had ever acted before but they were kind of from that scene, that downtown scene, and it's weird to do that. I'm amazed by it too, I was in the skate park and I saw Stephen Jasso who plays Claude and I saw Mike Apaletegui who plays Peaches boyfriend Curtis and they were just skaters in the park that you see in the film, and I thought in my mind that's the way I want Claude to look, and that's the way I want Curtis to look, so I went up to them and, well, I made them actors. The main thing about being an actor is to not be self conscious and these kids really can do that. You can usually tell right away, sometimes you see one and you have a reading and it doesn't work, but generally you can tell it right off the bat.
But then it's a lot of work, it's not easy, I don't want to say this just happens. You pay a price emotionally to pull these performances out of them and they pay a price too, emotionally, to give that kind of an honest performance.

MD: There were certainly some fantastic performances in the film, do you think it will launch careers the way Kids did for Chloe Sevigny or Rosario Dawson?

LC: I think if they want to continue a career they can. I think Tiffany Limos is amazing, and she's out in California now, she's going to be in a couple of films but Kids really did [launch careers] Chloe's a huge star in Europe, Leo Fitzpatrick works a lot and John Abrahams who had a small part in Kids has also been in a lot of films.

MD: You wrote the stories for both Ken Park and Kids but you got Harmony Korine to write the screenplays.

LC: Yeah Harmony did a brilliant job, but after he wrote Kids for me it to a year to raise the money, that was a tough film to finance too, just trying to find the money – and keep all the kids together because they had no money. Harmony was living with his grandmother, and I'd cast a lot of the roles and I was trying to hold everybody together so I made a couple of music videos for money to pay some of the kids rent. But in that time I had all these stories for Ken Park so I gave them to Harmony and I told him I could have four films here but can you put these together in one movie, and he made a brilliantly structured screenplay. So I've had the screenplay all these years, but when we made it I changed it a bit, we read it and there were some things that worked and some that didn't and I didn't like the ending so we changed the ending a bit.

MD: What was it originally?

LC: [laughs] The ending was a joke, I mean it ended on a joke, and after we went all that way through the film I didn't want to end it that way, and it wasn't a very good joke! But Harmony wrote both those screenplays when he was 19 or 20, and I truthfully think they're so good because they were the first things that he'd done, and he was really in a space where he could work with no distractions, and he hadn't taken any drugs yet.

MD: [laughs]

LC: Seriously! He'd never taken drugs, he wasn't a drug taker, and I think he's gotten a little lost since then but I got him when he was fresh, and I think you can see the screenplays are very well done, they're very clear, and there's certainly a talent there that will hopefully be rekindled.

MD: A lot of people have criticised you for your depiction of children in Kids and Ken Park, perhaps not realising that the screenplays were written by somebody of that age.

LC: Well that was the point, I started making work for myself when I was a teenager photographing my friends. My first book Tulsa was a photo-documentary of my friends over a period of nine or ten years, so it became like visual anthropology, I started that way so when I had the idea for Kids I immediately thought of it. When I did my first work people said it was from the inside, only someone from the inside could do this. So when I had the idea for Kids I thought it would be great to have some kid from the inside write this, do what I did years before, but I said, no kid can write. But then I met this kid who was in his last week of high school, and we're in the [skate] park, he sat down beside me and we started talking, and he told me he wanted to make movies, so a year later when I got the idea for Kids I thought of Harmony, so I called him up, and you know what happened.
And even though I had the ideas and the stories for Ken Park, Harmony was 20 years old so he was understanding the relationships on a level with them as an adolescent and I certainly think that was a big plus.

MD: Speaking of your photography, I've always felt that both Kids and Ken Park feel more like photographs than films, in that they're a snapshot of these lives. Has your history as a photographer made you more likely to strip away the regular movie structure and just make a picture?

LC: Well I've been making images so long I just feel so comfortable with it, it just comes to me naturally. Working with Ed Lachman, who's a great cinematographer, he did Erin Brocovich and Far from Heaven, he tells stories - and I can say this because he says this – he was inspired by my work, by Tulsa and Teenage Lust. So working with him is great. He knows how to make an image too, and he knows my vision – and I have a very clear vision – and I think that's why the film works, I really know what I want and I'm not out there flailing away. Maybe it takes a while to figure out how to get it! But I know what I want and Ed and I together probably have 70 years experience as visual artists so between us we should be able to figure it out and make this a visually exciting film.

MD: Well the shot towards the end of Ken Park, with Tate sitting on his bed with his grandfather's teeth in is one of the most disturbing images I've seen on film recently.

LC: [laughs] Yeah.....it certainly is.

MD: Moving away from Ken Park, Another Day in Paradise was the only time you've worked with anything like a star cast [in the shape of James Woods and Melanie Griffith] is that something you want to do again?

LC: Probably I will do that again, but I certainly had a baptism by fire on that film. I wanted to challenge myself, I'd only made Kids so I hadn't worked with actors and I wanted to do that, but it was a really difficult film to make, I wasn't in the best shape myself, I was still fairly chemically involved when I made it so it was hard. But I learned a lot, I learned about working with actors, and about working with Hollywood crews – you really have to teach them a lot, they have real cookie cutter rules and ways to do things, which is why all those films look the same and they're so boring. So it was really something but now I think I could do it much better, and I actually have a couple of screenplays that I'm close to doing deals on and they'll be with actors.

MD: I heard a rumour that you were meeting with Billy Childish to do a film based on his autobiography.

LC: Yeah, it's funny, I didn't even want to come to Europe, I was just so tired, but I wanted to meet Billy Childish. So I thought if I'm going to England I'm going to meet him because I'm a big fan, but I couldn't find out where he was. My girlfriend got on the internet and tracked him down and emailed him, so I met him and I told him I really liked his book My Fault – which I think is the best title for an autobiography ever – so hopefully we'll get that off the ground, it's a film I'd love to make, an English film, I'll come and make a film in England! That'll be fun.

MD: So the other films you're working on, are they also adaptations or are they original?

LC: Well I have an original screenplay called Syrup which is a comedy that takes place in the hip-hop world and we're very close on that, we're looking into casting it now so hopefully that'll be made soon, and then I have a drama based on a 1973 Jim Harrison novel, he wrote Legends of the Fall, but this is an earlier novel about a guy that comes back from Vietnam and he and his girlfriend and another guy go on a road trip across America so that's like a road movie. So I have a number of films I hope to make back to back, I've been busy.

MD: It'll be good to see you busy.

LC: Yeah it certainly will, it keeps me out of trouble! [laughs]

MD: Your films haven't received the best treatment on DVD, with Another Day in Paradise the only one you were directly involved with, do you want to be more involved with them?

LC: Well Another Day in Paradise I had to do. I was supposed to bring in an R [rating] on that film so to get my director's cut on the DVD I had to agree to talk about it, and then they censored me! Sons of bitches said I slandered some producer so they censored me so I've never listened to it but I know there are a couple of lines that are censored. I have been asked to do a commentary for Bully and Kids, and at some point I will, I just haven't gotten around to it yet, but I could just sit and talk about them they were really interesting experiences, so hopefully that will happen, but it's just so hard to get paid for these fucking films! You make them and then you never see the money, it's very difficult to beat them because they're all thieves.

MD: [laughs]

LC: [laughs] No! some of them are good thieves, nice kind thieves, I like a lot of them, but they're all thieves, what are you gonna do? But as you make more films you figure out how to keep a little bit of money for yourself.

MD: Is it frustrating getting a relatively small audience for a film you've put so much work into?

LC: I'm making little art movies, I'm not pandering to audiences, so it's just commerce, it's the name of the game. I'm just grateful that I get to make the films that I do, it's a struggle, but I'm pretty happy.

MD: So do you ever consider making something less controversial, something easier to get funding for, or are you committed to pushing the boundaries?

LC: Well I can do a whole lot of different things, Ken Park was something I had to do, I had to, but it's out of my system for a while so hopefully the next film or two won't be quite so difficult to finance or get distributed, but I have another script that I'm going to wait a couple of films before I try to make it. It's really a dangerous film and it really breaks a lot of taboos.

MD: Well coming from you that's a serious claim.

LC: [laughs] At the moment I don't know how I'm ever going to make this film but luckily I do have another one!

molly

Quote from: XIXAXCaught Bully in my Netflix last night, and wow... Another great one. I saw "Kids" first, and it stuck with me for days. I can always tell if a film is powerful if I keep thinking about it for several days after viewing.

Larry Clark probably is a pervert, and he probably does have a thing for nekkid teens, but I have to say that it's probably one thing (of many) that makes his stories so believable. Real life with a bunch of really bad kids from messed up families.

That's not a world I'd want to live in, but I sure don't mind visiting for a few hours at a time. After seeing Bully and Kids, I guess I'd call myself a Larry Clark fan. I enjoyed both of them a lot.

I saw only Kids.
I wouldn't say Clark is a pervert, not even near that. I'd say he realizes the gap between brain development of nowadays teenagers and the amount of freedom they have. He is like a man who saw something extraordinary disturbing, and can't forget it. Like those old homeless people in movies that speak crazy things and then in the end everybody realizes he/she was right. Peer pressure is something people should take more seriously, it's like flu in kindergarten. Children can be so cruel. That boy that was having unprotected sex knowing he is HIV+, I wanted to strangle him while I was watching the film! He was so irritating! American kids start having sex earlier than kids in Europe, but sex is only a place where that irresponsability manifests. I can totally understand Clark's obsession, when I remember some kids I knew. And you wouldn't believe, but the majority of that kind of behaviour is something their parents would advise them as a smart thing to do.

Gold Trumpet

After viewing Kids and Bully, it is no doubt that Clark should be thankful to the likes of Oliver Stone in giving subjects a "brutal honesty" where other filmmakers avvoid the truth of subjects by pushing the style. I just don't think Clark is anywhere near Oliver Stone. Clark's films are so brutal in sexuality and violence that they feel exploitive and opportunistic. Clark's realism says the world of youth is an orgy of sex and violence. Artistic license he has, but how interesting is to have these things everywhere? Clark needs to be more patient and understanding of how to get to the higher themes he is trying to convey.

Pubrick

Quote from: The Gold TrumpetClark needs to be more patient and understanding of how to get to the higher themes he is trying to convey.
yeah but then he wouldn't be able to masturbate to it, would he?

the dude's a filthy old soomka, and that's fine cos i like the chicks he hires. i don't expect much more from him.
under the paving stones.

Slick Shoes

Kids was kind of neat the first time I saw it because it was the closest thing to porn I had ever seen.

I saw Bully at the Venice Film Festival and almost laughed out loud during that part where the kids are sitting there in that living room and he cuts between shots of the disturbed youth and an Eminem video.