Feted during the 1990s as face of gay cinema, Gregg Araki's films were erotically charged and nihilistic. His latest film, 'Kaboom', the inaugural Queer Palm winner at Cannes, is still about sex and still apocalyptic – it's just more fun, he tells TARA BRADY
AMERICAN AUTEUR Gregg Araki exploded on to the independent cinema scene during the 1990s with a hip, underground milieu that owed as much to The Breakfast Clubas it did to Stan Brakhage. Extreme, erotically charged, hilarious and nihilistic, each Araki picture was a new post-MTV, post-everything sensation.
“I see myself as very much a cultural sponge,” says the director. “I am exposed to all kinds of different stuff: advertising, photography, commercials. I have always been influenced by album art. Design. Colour. All that stuff is in my brain. When I sit down to write a movie, it comes from a secret place. I don’t think about it. I don’t make conscious homage. The Hitchcockian shots just come naturally now.”
Over the course of his Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy – a sequence comprising Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generationand Nowhere– Parker Posey, Ryan Phillippe, Christina Applegate, Shannen Doherty, Heidi Fleiss, Perry Farrell, Traci Lords, Rose McGowan and Josh Ritter all turned out to pay their dues.
The pop-culture vultures were not alone. The release of The Living Endin 1992, an apocalyptic road movie featuring two HIV-positive men on the lam, inspired bullet-stopping volumes of film academia. "Of the heterogeneous group of young gay filmmakers currently lumped together under the term New Queer Cinema," wrote the late Robin Wood, "Gregg Araki is the most challenging and audacious." More than a decade later, the filmmaker is still grateful and bemused by the rapturous reception once afforded him.
“I was aware of it, as my background was in film studies,” he says. “I had a masters and I went to film school so I was literate in that language. It was very flattering to be the subject of that amount of critical work. But as a film student, I know the critical work is creative work in its own right. It ceases to be about the movie. There is a lot of projecting, which is not a bad thing. There is a separation between what I do and what they do.”
For all the hypothesising, the Asian-American director defies neat classification. Once hailed as America's great gay director, he lived with Beverly Hills 90210star Kathleen Robertson for two years and has, throughout his film career, sought to explore the shifting boundaries of sexual identity.
"My movies have always been interested in sex," he says, "but it's not really about titillation or exploitation or gay or straight. It's about having access to a private, intimate moment. My feeling about people – in general and in the cinema – is that sex is the moment at which you are both emotionally and physically naked. You could be somebody's best friend for life and never see them that way. Everybody has that public face that they put on when they walk down the street and go to Starbucks. But I am more interested in the hidden face. I also feel that – less so in Europe, maybe – there is a real hypocritical attitude to sex. America is obsessed with sex in an unhealthy and f**ked-up way . . . [whereas] my characters express themselves and define themselves sexually. It's dishonest – like the Twilightmovies, where there is so much titillation but also this weird Mormon abstinence."
In 2005, the release of Mysterious Skin, Araki's award-winning abuse drama, seemed to point towards a successful mainstream career. But ever the maverick, Araki's most recent films mark a retreat to the underground. Smiley Face, a goofy stoner comedy with Anna Faris, perplexed the filmmaker's new admirers.
Just wait until they see Kaboom.
A late, unofficial addition to the Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy, the 10th Gregg Araki film is a giddy, over-sexed campus comedy that pitches a young bi-curious hero against a doomsday cult, lesbian occultists, and any number of decadent temptations.
“It’s this whole other world,” laughs Araki. “I wanted to let my imagination go wild and not to edit myself. And not worry about genre and the market place. We had Ulrich Schnauss, Robin Guthrie and Mark Peters do some of the music and so much of the mood and the tone is thanks to them. We wanted to create something more dreamlike and accentuated than boring reality. So, it’s really all created from my imagination. It’s not like I hang out at the mall.”
Last year, Kaboomwas awarded the inaugural Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. There was, says Araki, a neat circularity about the occasion.
"When The Doom Generationpremiered in Sundance, the audience were shell-shocked and silent. When Kaboompremiered in Cannes, we got this crazy standing ovation. The audience left pumped and ready to party.
"Despite the fact that Kaboomis this apocalyptic epic, it has a sense of fun and playfulness to it. I'm older. I'm in a different place in my life. My apocalypse is a bit more grounded."
Kaboomshows at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin, and Queens Film Theatre, Belfast, until June 23rd
Gregg Araki: what to see
The Living End(1992)
The early 1990s was the high period for New Queer Cinema and Araki's funky, loose-limbed feature follows a high-brow film critic, recently diagnosed as HIV-positive, as he hooks up with a drifter and embarks on a decadent road trip. The film's surface nihilism caused controversy but big-gun critics hailed it as the future of cinema.
The Doom Generation(1995)
The middle part of Araki's Teenage Apocalypse trilogy, and amusingly (and only partly accurately) billed as "a heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki". James Duval and Rose McGowan play a cruising couple who pick up a dissolute character. Was praised as a heady combination of Godard's
Breathless, Truffaut's
Jules and Jimand
Melrose Place.
Mysterious Skin(2004)
This had the dubious honour of opening against
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Well, it is, in some ways, a science-fiction film. Two characters deal with childhood sexual abuse in different ways. One becomes a trademark Araki sexual drifter. The other sublimates his grim memories into fantasies of alien abduction.
