Larry Clark : “an eye in the storm” (un oeil dans la tempête) Interview by Raphael Cuir (06.02.07)

Raphael Cuir: Your photographic work has been related to that of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, do you souscribe to these connections ? : People like Robert Frank inspired me. But I was really influenced more by people like Lenny Bruce. He was all about the truth and he cut through the bullshit and he was always commenting on the hypocrisy of America, which I was living and seeing, that was important to me, so I was really influenced by those kind of people. RC: - Concerning the series, you were really part of the scene you photographed, you were really into it, having drugs and sex with those people on the photographs – how did you manage though, to take the photographs ? LC: Well, you know I’ve had a camera in my hands since I was super young. And then I just had this epiphany one day that I could photograph my friends, cause I’ve never seen anything like this. I was coming out of the 1950s where everything was repressed and back then in America, there was no talk of drugs and things like that, it wasn’t suppose to exist, but it did exist. I was just kind of practicing my photography at first and if you look at the Tulsa book its mostly rooms. So we’re talking about fairly small confided spaces and the Leica was very quiet, I couldn’t have done it with a simple reflex camera, where the mirrors smash together, the Leica was very, very quiet and everybody got used to it pretty quickly. It was more like, if I didn’t have my camera, it was “Larry where’s your camera?” as opposed to, “you gonna take my picture?”. I was just part of the scene, and it was very organic, it really came from a place where there was no thought ever to show the pictures or publish the pictures or anything for a while, and it was very intimate in that way, and I’m very close to the people with a 50 mm lens, so I’m like right here. RC: For you there’s a cinematic quality in the Tulsa series ? LC: The book is laid out like a film, you’re seeing the same people over a period of years so it becomes visual anthropology. I was seeing it as a film, I mean I was in the scene, but I was able I think to be two people at the same time. I had lived in Tulsa and when I was 18, I went to a photography school for two years, which was in the basement of an art school. And my friends were artists students who were sculptors and painters, and I realized what was going on, and I saw that you can use anything for self expression and I happened to have a camera – I would have preferred to have been a painter or a sculptor, anything but a photographer a writer even – but I happened to have a camera. RC: I was wondering how the drugs would affect your perception and if you could feel it ? LC: I became much more focused; very, very focused. I mean, I was a very hyper kid, super hyper kid. Many kids today if they show any sign of being hyper active, they give them Ritalin to slow them down or to calm them down they give them some kind of speed. When you have ADD or something, your brain is moving so quick that you can’t focus, you know ? There is too many things going on, and the speed like levels you out or equals you out. And so maybe, just by accident, I fell into this world of drugs that calmed me down a bit, and leveled me out and gave me this terrific focus where I could make these photographs. RC: It’s kind of the reverse of what you’d expect ? LC: There is this calm in the storm, in the eye of the storm, that I would find through speed. So I was actually self-medicating myself without knowing what I was doing. And I think that calmness enabled me to make photographs, like in the book, especially when there was so much going on, and even when there wasn’t a lot going on, it was all, I guess, interesting to me. RC: How did you shift from photography to movie, how did you decide that the next thing had to be a movie, especially a movie like KIDS, which was certainely not the easiest way to start as a film maker ? LC: I always wanted to be a film maker, but I was so involved in the lifestyle and got so crazy with the lifestyle of the outlaw and drugs and drinking, that I wouldn’t have been able to make a film, I was just too fucked up. So finally, I just said its now or never, I want to make a film. I saw some films that were being made… People called me up and said “you got to see 's Drugstore Cowboy, this guy’s doing you”, so I went to see the film and it was a good film. But my reaction was this guy is on my turf, I should be doing this. So I just decided I was going to make a film and I went on a personal kind of rehabilitation, I cleaned myself up and got myself together. I knew that I had to clean up my image to get anybody to give me money to make a film and to be taken seriously. I’d done a lot of crazy things, this is a reputation I still have. But I came out and was able to do this and I’d done so much autobiography that I wanted to make a film that wasn’t about me at all. I had three kids then and my son was twelve. He was approaching adolescence and my daughter was younger and I have another daughter who’s older from the outlaw years. And I said, well I want to make a film about contemporary teenagers that I really didn’t know anything about, that wasn’t about me and that’s kind of what started it. I explored that and looked around, and I thought that the skateboarders were the most interesting certainly, visually exciting and interesting and they were treated like outlaws and everybody was afraid of them and hated them. Adults and cops were freaked out by skateboarders, and I decided that it was because they had so much freedom that they could go anywhere and do anything and were totally self reliant, so I started exploring that world. I hung out with skaters from around the country for about three years before I got the idea for the film RC: But KIDS doesn’t seem to be so much about skating ? LC: I wanted to show what was going on with this group of downtown skaters in New York I met, and there is very little skating in that film but it’s actually a skateboard film, a film with almost no skating in it. Everything in that film was true and I’d seen a lot of it happen and I knew for a fact that there were also other things happening and I wanted to show this life, but I didn’t have anything to hook it on. I understood if I made a film that showed all of these scenes without some kind of hook that it wasn’t going to work very well. I knew this kid, this 15 year old kid, in Washington Square. And safe sex was being discussed constantly because they were going to give out condoms in the high schools in New York. The catholic church was against it and there was this controversy, it was front page headlines, and the planned parenthood organization was going around New York and giving away free condoms, that summer, to everybody, and kids were walking around with strings of condoms around their necks and condoms everywhere and safe sex. And this one kid I’m talking to he says, “I practice safe sex, I only fuck virgins.” And over the summer I watched him deflower a couple of virgins and he would take these young girls, he was very young himself, and he was very nice to them. And so I got this idea about a girl who gets AIDS from one sexual encounter, which is the only thing in kids totally made up. RC: Why do you call yourself a moral filmmaker? LC: Well there’s a moral center to all the films. I think : consequences, you know ? Since the Tulsa book, I’ve been called many, many names, “pornographer”, “child pornographer”, “garbage”, “trash”, “he’s romantizing drugs”, and on and on and on… But there is a moral center to all the work and the moral center is consequences. Consequences for everything that we do, and that’s just a fact. RC: There is the question of the aesthetic of violence, if you wrap violence in aesthetic then you might give it some appeal, it’s like legitimizing it … ? LC: I think that regarding the violence that is shown in my films and in the photographs there is always a price to pay for looking at the work. I mean, I’m going to make the audience pay a price for this. I try to get the reality so they pay the price. You see so many films and there’s so much done with violence, there’s violence everywhere in film, but there is no price to pay. Hundreds of people get killed, thousands of people get killed and it means nothing. RC: You have kind of a realistic style, showing things as happening here and now, sometimes almost like a documentary, does it allow you to remove yourself at a certain distance from the way things happen in front of the movie camera ? LC: A real documentary like Tulsa has a fiction quality to it, and the fiction films have a documentary quality to it, so I thought kind of turn it around. You know, I don’t really want to have a style, if you have a style your kind of locked in and you lose that freedom, if you don’t have a style, then I think you’re free, I’m always fighting against that. RC: In « Bully », Marty and Bobby are selling some gay sex snuff movies, and « » begins with a teenager commiting suicide and shooting his suicide with a video camera through which we see the sequence at some point… Do you have an interest in what we call snuff movies ? LC: Not at all. You know, two skaters go out after school and they skate for a couple of hours. One-guy skates and the other guy films him and then the other guy skates and the other guy films him. Then they go home and they watch it. Now you see, everything is documented, I mean with cell phones… and there’s probably a camera on us now somewhere, so that is why that was there. It was just a comment on everything being documented which is very obvious now, and its almost like if it’s not documented, did it really happen ? RC: It is well known that sex is one of the most difficult subject in any field of creation, as long as you want to avoid platitude - Would you say that sex scenes are among the most difficult to shoot for you ? LC: Sex scenes are the toughest, the toughest to make it look real and to make it work. There are some many reasons for this, I mean there’s a million reasons. Thinking about it can be very erotic but sometimes, watching it happen, it’s not. So I think you have to be really good visual artist to pull it off especially if you’re setting it up. It all comes down to having a clear vision I just happen to know what I want and I’m able to do that. RC: But how do you manage to get this sense of spontaneity, of authenticity that characterizes the sex scenes between, let’s say, Lisa (Rachel Miner) and Marty (Brad Renfro) in « Bully », or the cunnilingus scene in « Ken Park », which is really so true and so daring ? LC: It was a lot of work and a lot of direction. I ate a lot of pussy and I ate a lot more pussy and I figured out how to make it look right and how to film it. And then to teach the actor how to do it. That’s just work. That’s really thinking it out, you know? RC: But to get this kind of intimacy between the two actors. Do you kind of keep it very quiet on the movie set ? LC: First of all you have a closed set and you have the least, the very minimal amount of people. Everybody is like in another room including the sound people, and then you create this environment and I really work with the actors. And since I know what I want, then I’ll know when I have it, when it’s there, its difficult. We worked it out. We worked it. There is no one-way. It changes every time, who ever you’re doing it with. Its always difficult is always hard. The most difficult sex scene was the one in Ken Park where the father goes in and gives his kid a blowjob at nighttime. That was the toughest one, emotionally, because none of us knew that. And we had to figure it out and I had to make it up and you really pay an emotional price for that. It’s my job to really make people understand what we are doing here and what it’s going to look like. It all comes down to trust and I have to trust them, and if there wasn’t that mutual trust then it wouldn’t work. The sex scene at the end of Ken Park was really hard, really difficult. But I felt it was important, I always wanted to do that. RC: In a recent interview with Catherine Millet and Patrice Blouin in Art Press, the filmmaker Jean-Claude Brisseau explains that in movie making « you also have to work with the principle that what you get on screen is not up to what you get in life ». Do you share that kind of experience – how do you deal with that ? LC: I think it all comes down to a lot of technique. You can have the most amazing, incredible, real thing happening in front of you, but if you don’t know where to put the camera it’s never going to work. It’s going to look terrible. It comes down to being a visual artist. So much of it is about that : where the camera is. And then really working with the actors. I’m always really close to the actors. During scenes I’m not looking through a monitor at all. I’m right there, watching them and working with them. It’s not only about how its happening, it’s also about how it’s filmed, cause it’s not life, it’s being filmed even though you’re trying to get it close to real life and you want it to come across as real life. RC: So would you say that one of the most important task as an artist and as a film maker is to find the right frame ? LC: In both cases it’s to know where the picture is. I see films and I’m saying, man, the camera is in the wrong place, it should be here and it kind of fucks up a lot of movies for me, even good movies when the camera’s in the wrong place. RC: sometimes it seems that actors in your movies, are not so much acting as they are performing in front of the camera, like the performer artists in the seventies, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci… In « Ken Park », when Tate jacks off while strangling himself and watching the tennis woman on TV… we see the ejaculation and a close-up on his dick dripping sperm… obviously the actor might have had to do the thing for real in front of the camera… How do you work out scenes like that ? LC: Obviously, that was one take, amazing. And it never crossed anybody’s mind that I was actually going to film it like that. I told (screenplay writer) what I wanted and what the scene was. Harmony wrote the scene and its on his face, I said, “no man, I want to show this”. No one believed I was going to show it, but I knew that it needed to be shown exactly like it was. And so when we filmed it was just Ed Lachman, my DP, and myself, and we both had cameras, that was it. RC: It must be very hard to get an actor to do this, it’s so demanding… ? LC: Yeah, it is hard. James Ranson, the actor, was the first person that I cast in Ken Park, I casted him about a year earlier, and so he had time to rehearse (laughs). It’s a devastating thing to do to yourself. I mean it was one of the bravest, strongest things. And he paid a price for that ; he paid a tremendous emotional price personally for doing that to himself. To trust me that much to do it. And when the scene was over he was shattered, just shattered, he was a mess he just like, collapsed. Psychologically it was devastating but he trusted me enough to do that, so as I say, it’s all about trust between the actor and me and me and my actor. A scene like that, or you could probably find other scenes in the film where it would never occur to people to shot it the way I did, to actually show it. It’s so forbidden and they’re so many rules, that you just wouldn’t do that. Whereas for me, it never occurred to me not to do it. I come from the art world and you mentioned a couple of good ones, Chris and Vito, I doubt that it would occur to them to do it any other way also. But I couldn’t have done it, I wouldn’t have done it, if I had to do it any other way. Which brings up another problem a challenge for me now. I have a screenplay about a girl growing up in Texas from kindergarten to age 14. And as she grows up there is a lot of sexual stuff that happens, and stuff like that you couldn’t film you couldn’t show. There’s just no way that one could do that. So now, for that film, I have to figure out how to do this without showing stuff and make it just as powerful, so that’s a new challenge for me, I guess, to turn that around. RC: Have you been fighting censorship ? And to what extent ? LC: I'm always fighting censorship, or I'm not fighting it, they are fighting me, you know ? It’s always like that. Especially making films, you run into a lot, because there is these phony censor boards, the MPAA, which is run by the studios. It is the most corrupt stupid shit in the world. I mean, these people are just corrupt, corrupt, corrupt. It means nothing. But they control the theaters, and they say, well if you don't like it, then just put your film out unrated, but then if you don't get a rating, you can't get theaters, because theaters won't run films that are unrated or that are rated X, and its run by the studios, so you can have Sharon Stone stabbing Michael Douglas while she's fucking him and its ok, because it is a big studio movie that makes a lot of money. They pick on the small indie movies, that they don't care about, like my films and a lot of other filmmakers. It’s a totally separate standard and it’s complete bullshit. Realistically when you make a film there is that kind of thing. But I just make the work, you know, Ken Park could never be cut one frame, the contracts all say it could never be altered or changed or cut or censored in any way, and if there is countries that have a problem with it, then fuck it, they can't show it, I don't care. RC: There is a little problem with Ken Park; you know there is a censored DVD… LC: The Chinese version ? The pixilated ? There is nothing I can about that. It is totally illegal what they've done, but there is nothing I can do about that. RC: Ken Park ends with these sex scenes, and the teenagers talking about their dreams, like if there was hope again. Is sex hope? LC: Well, what I was trying to do there was kids who aren’t getting anything from adults, none of their needs are fulfilled by the adults around, their parents, their teachers, whatever. And when you're a kid, if you're getting nothing from grown ups, you're probably going to commit suicide if you don't have your friends, your peers, to go to, you go to your friends, you know ? So I had this idea. Especially in a film like Ken Park, usually it would end with these kids being so beat up and despaired and down, and you would just wonder if these kids are going to make it. So I had this idea where they would come together and only have each other, and have sex maybe in the best possible way as a kind of salvation or a kind of redemption, and that was the "art" idea that I had. To be able to pull this off was what was difficult, and it really does work, because I wanted it to be the cleanest scene in the movie, even though they are having sex and its explicit, and people who leave the theater tell me that, you know, its the cleanest scene in the movie. RC: But then they are not having safe sex , its very smooth, but very dangerous, they are putting their life at risk… LC: Maybe not. They were young, and they had each other. They hadn’t really been out. RC: In your movies you seem to be more interested in what’s happening right now and right there, in « Kids » and « » the action takes place in a single day –what kind of relation do you have with time, which of course, is a major issue in movies as well as in photography ? LC: I always liked 24 hour movies. I always liked that way to tell a story. I always like to cram in as much action. Like in Kids, all those things that happened, were like through a three-year period. And so I cram them all into a 24 hour thing because I want it to be a rollercoaster ride. Other good films are 24 hour films, like La Dolce Vita, it starts in the morning and goes through the night, with all the debauchery, and then it ends on the beach, with maybe the water coming and washing away the sins, another one was Mikey and Nicky. It’s just a format that I like, that I wanted to do. RC: I'm curious to know if you had seen Easy Rider when it was released. In spite of its violence, and even though there is disenchantment in it, it is almost romantic compared to your Tulsa series … LC: You have to remember the people who did Easy Rider are from L.A., so it’s different.... Maybe that's changed now, but you know... I liked it, great music. It was a good film. RC: How do you work on the music in your films? LC: Well it is so important in the films, I really work on that, I really work on the music. It changes all the time, sometimes the music comes first. When I did KIDS I had the music for the losing credits, I knew I wanted to end the film with that tune by Lou Barlow, that was the first tune in the movie which I knew before I made it. And I knew I wanted KIDS to start with punk rock. RC: In Bully and in Ken Park you make appearances. What does it mean for you to be in the movie ? LC: In Bully, I was the father, the actor didn’t show up so I stepped up. And then in Ken Park it was supposed to be Leo Fitzpatrick from KIDS and he got hit by a car so I just stepped in. I have no real desire to be there. It’s very difficult. The best thing is that you really understand how difficult it is for an actor to be saying dialog, saying lines when you are doing actions ; you have to take a cigarette out of your pocket and light it or pull a gun and talk and do all this, its very difficult. When I was doing Bully, the way the scene was written I would take the glass, put in some ice and mix the drink and drink it while I’m talking to the kid right ? And I couldn’t do that ! And we tried all these things to get the timing down, it was really hard to do so, I just had the drink and it was one line, “tell her I’ll write to her !”. RC: What’s next ? LC: I’m going to have an exhibition of photographs in the fall, in Luhring Augustine gallery (New York). I have a lot of work to do. I have four screenplays ready to go, maybe the next one will be a film called Wild Child, a small film, back in the ghetto again, we’ll shoot it in South Central, I like South Central, I like shooting there. I’m too busy. Trying to stay busy, Okay ?