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Interview: Gregg Araki Talks Kaboom, Godard, Career, and More

He’s long displayed a keen interest in young characters whose restless sexuality is but one element in the volatile cultural landscapes they find themselves in.

Interview: Gregg Araki Talks Kaboom, Godard, Career, and More
Photo: IFC Films

Whether in the guerrilla eruptions of The Living End or the pothead reveries of Smiley Face, Gregg Araki has long displayed a keen interest in young characters whose restless sexuality is but one element in the volatile cultural landscapes they find themselves in. A New Queer Cinema guiding light whose “Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy” (Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere) lent the indie ’90s much of its anarchic energy and danger, his films have often given the feeling of an Armageddon bubbling underneath their brash surfaces, a sense of dread nevertheless kept at bay by spiky humor and compassion. This apocalyptic tension is at its most explicit in Araki’s latest, Kaboom, yet this buoyant amalgam of paranoid sci-fi and horny screwball comedy emerges as the writer-director’s funniest and perhaps most hopeful work, striking a balance between the thrust of his scruffy early pictures and the stylistic control and maturity of Mysterious Skin. I sat down with Araki in San Francisco, where Kaboom had just played as the San Francisco Independent Film Festival’s opening night film.

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How did Kaboom come about?

A lot of times when I go to film festivals, here or abroad, I get these kids coming up to me with DVDs of The Doom Generation or a Nowhere CD or something and telling me about how the movies helped them. A lot of times these kids come from these horribly retrograde little towns in some red state somewhere, and they grew up feeling ostracized or alone. I would often hear about movies helping them get through some really tough times, and, as a filmmaker, that’s really the highest compliment you can get, when somebody connects with something you’ve made. So in a way, I wanted to make another movie for this generation, while at the same time finding a way not to repeat myself or going backward. I’m really not the same person that I was in the mid 1990s. I’m older now, and I’m at a really different place in my life. So even if I wanted to, I couldn’t make, say, The Doom Generation 2. I’m just not in that angry, angst-ridden headspace that I was back then. But I had for years wanted to do this Twin Peaks-y mystery that was really out there, the kind that would allow your imagination to run wild and also maybe reach back to a kind of youthful innocence. That was Kaboom to me.

I keep seeing it described as a throwback to the trippy 1990s movies, but I see it as much closer to your more recent films, like Smiley Face and even Mysterious Skin.

I definitely think so too. On the surface, it seems like Nowhere, especially, but there are specific elements from the newer movies. In particular Smiley Face, which is the one that’s closest in sensibility to where my head’s at. Both of them come from the same sense of playfulness. When I made The Doom Generation, I was in a very vehement place which I’ve since moved away from.

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It’s certainly less despairing. The humor is warmer.

And a lot more accessible, I think. I’ve been surprised by how positively it’s been accepted in the mainstream. It’s my first film to be in the main selection in Cannes, and the ride from there to Toronto and Sundance and Indiefest has been incredible.

You’ve always been interested in youth.

Sure, but it’s important for me to not get pigeonholed as “that” director. A pet peeve of mine is when filmmakers keep making the same movie over and over without any kind of progression. I believe, of course, in the auteur theory that was taught in film school when I was growing up. But the old-time auteurs, like Howard Hawks or Hitchcock or whatever, they all worked in a variety of genres and types of movies, and their personalities would come through in their style or themes. So even if Kaboom goes back to the familiar themes of youth, my hope is that it stretches them, takes them to a different level.

The campus setting is wittily designed. Even the name, “College of Creative Arts,” seems like part of a catalogue of conservative fears about Southern California universities.

[laughs] I was born and raised in California, and there’s this very distinctive pace of life and attitude that’s always been a huge part of my movies. A very Los Angeles vibe, let’s say.

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I’m always struck by how sex-positive your films are.

I’d like to think so. A writer for The New York Times was telling me about how unusual it is to have an American movie in which sex has no awful consequences, how it is seen in an almost utopian way. You see these kids experimenting and sleeping with people of different genders, and they’re not being punished for it. Maybe it’s just the way I view sex, the relationships and the breakups, as truly important elements in shaping your identity when you’re growing up. American movies in general have such a weird, puritanical view of sex; you know, you have to have retribution in there somewhere. So much is lost when you repress sexual curiosity. Something like a Sarah Palin-like insistence on abstinence seems to me absolutely against nature.

I saw a connection between the liquid, volatile sexuality of the characters and the style of the film, with its shifting tones, fantasies, and dreams.

That’s an interesting observation. I think they’re certainly related, that sense of a sexual experience that’s very dreamlike. The colors are heightened, there’s a mashup of genres, characters wake up and aren’t sure what’s real. Sometimes it’s funny, other times it’s sexy, other times it’s scary. You really don’t know where it’s going next. With a huge percentage of movies, you know where they’re going before the first hour is up, and then you have to wait excruciatingly for them to get there. So one of the things I love to see when I watch Kaboom with an audience is seeing people going, “What the hell?,” as the story goes insane. I wanted a kind of rollercoaster feel to it.

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I thought of something Truffaut once observed about Godard’s 1960s characters rarely if ever having families.

[laughs] Yeah, they’re too busy driving cars and being beautiful and reading Mao.

The one cool adult here is Smith’s mom, played by Kelly Lynch. And the patriarch is a shadowy figure with his finger on the doomsday button.

The adults in the movie are, well, interesting symbols for what the characters think of the rest of the world. There have been notable parental figures in my past movies, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s mom in Mysterious Skin, but I do gravitate toward the joys and dilemmas of the younger characters.

And even with its apocalyptic punchline, the film feels unusually optimistic. There’s an openness that contrasts interestingly with the works of Bret Easton Ellis, who covers much of the same territory in a far more nihilistic timbre.

I do see it as apocalyptic, but there’s also a sense of celebration to it. When we screened it in Cannes, and the last shot of the movie happened, viewers started to cheer. It’s ironic, considering what that last image is. [laughs] When The Doom Generation premiered in Sundance, I remember people filing out looking shell-shocked. So I like that an ending as crazy as Kaboom’s can have a joyous feeling. John Waters sent me an email describing it as a “happy ending,” which, in a way, is totally true.

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Tell me a bit about directing the actors. There are some really marvelous comic performances.

I was very fortunate to get such a spot-on cast to work with. I had Johanna Ray and Jenny Jue, who had cast movies for Quentin [Tarantino] as well as the original Twin Peaks series, and they helped me with a bunch of auditions. Everyone in the movie won their parts fair and square, you know: Thomas Dekker was the best Smith, Haley Bennett was the best Stella, Juno Temple was the best London. It’s very heartening to see this new generation of actors who are going beyond the kind of bad horror movies and teen comedies they’re often saddled with and toward more risky, different material.

You were recently at the Sundance Film Festival. Do you feel the indie-filmmaking landscape nowadays differs from the days of The Living End?

It’s interesting. I get asked that a lot, probably because I’ve been to Sundance many times. The festival now is a much bigger, internationally recognized forum for independent movies than when I started out. It can be something of a media circus. However, as I was just telling Christine Vachon, it really hasn’t changed from the inside. The encouragement is still there, and it’s always great to see artists finding a launching pad, locating their own voices rather than trying to copy whatever’s been successful in the last month.

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Robin Wood passed away a little over a year ago, and he was a vociferous admirer of your work, The Doom Generation in particular. Were you acquainted with his writing?

Oh, sure. I actually met Robin in Toronto during the screening of one of my movies. The Living End was subtitled “An Irresponsible Film,” and I got that from an essay by Robin I read in film class, “The Lure of Irresponsibility,” about Bringing Up Baby. If you put both movies side by side, it’s almost the same story, these originally conventional protagonists who encounter a very healthy chaos in the form of other characters. And I told Robin about it and how influenced by it I had been, and he was very excited. Both as a writer who I admired and as one of the first critics to come out of the closet, he was a very important figure to me. And meeting him and sharing a mutual enthusiasm was a weird and really cool example of the circular nature of life.

It’s amazing how subversive the classic screwball comedies still are.

You bet. That’s probably my favorite genre. Bringing Up Baby is a brilliant movie, but my favorite has to be The Lady Eve. They had, and continue to have, a lot of strong things to say about gender roles. You can’t go wrong with Hawks or Sturges.

Or Leo McCarey.

Yeah, yeah. In fact, one year I went to the Toronto Film Festival and they asked me to join a group of filmmakers who were talking about their favorite movies. I picked The Awful Truth. Still daring, still awesome.

Fernando F. Croce

Fernando F. Croce is a San Francisco-based film writer whose work has been published in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, MUBI, and Fandor. He runs the website CinePassion.

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