Interview with Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin)

it's my first adaptation I've never done a book before I just the book was sent to me in 1995 and I was so um struck by it it was just such a beautiful like a beautifully written story and with such incredible emotional impact like I was really just kind of devastated when I read the story of it and it was just kind of moving in a very kind of profound way and um I thought that if I ever do make a book into a movie that it would be Mr Skin that partly the difficulties of of this type of yeah I mean originally I read the book I really loved it I thought you know it really moved me but I just really felt like it was one of those books that was impossible to adapt you know because it was because of you know what I loved about it was what made it impossible to death with it it just goes to these places that you just have never even really imagined you know like there's scenes in the in the film and in the book that I just have never even you know the it happens all the time but you never even really think about it and um it just really opened my eyes in a way to to this whole other world you know that is you know out there but at the same time um you know having I had never worked with like children so young I've never the youngest actor and nowhere I had some actors who were like 13 14 maybe but in this in this story the boys are eight years old when when the story began and um it wasn't until I really figured out a way to shoot the more difficult material with the small with the young actors that then I I suddenly thought oh well maybe this film is doable like the there is a way to shoot these scenes where you can um use subjective camera and use point of view and editing so that the act the kid actors themselves don't really have to know like what the story's about or what the context of what they're doing is and that way you know I didn't that way you don't have to traumatize the children who are in the movie in order to tell this story of trauma so it wasn't until I really figured that out I figured out a strategy of I mean I always very carefully kind of storyboard my movies and I edit my own movies so I knew exactly how I was going to be able to shoot this stuff yeah it wasn't until I figured that out then I thought oh well maybe I can adapt the book and then you know from there it was actually relatively and once I figured that out it didn't take that much longer for me to adapt it and then make them move the movie it was a struggle in terms of I mean the the movie um I don't know if they neces I mean I don't know if they necessary helped us and they I mean to me they almost might have heard us in a sense because uh Mr Skin is you know I think so different from those movies you know because those movies are more um about the adults you know and this movie is really about the the kids and it's all from their point of view and it's very it very much puts you in their position and you sort of experience this kind of emotional Journey subjectively with them so um I think that you know and so in and you know Mr Skin is a challenging film or challenging story so you know you finance a film like that and putting film like that together is always going to be difficult you know I I mean I think that it was made mystery skins made exactly as it should have been made you know which says as a sort of very uncompromising um you know independent movie and in the truest sense of independent cinema as opposed to if Mr Skin was made in a larger way with a much larger with uh like small Studio scale it would have had to have been so watered down so deluded that it really would to me not uh as a director have been worth making like what what's so extraordinary about mystery skin is um the places that it goes that are have never been seen before not necessarily because it's not like um there was a real consistency I think to the level of performance and the way we approached the movie um every the making of the movie was actually very it was difficult because you know we were working with a limited budget and had tight schedule and we had the kids and it was just like logistically there were a lot of things deal with the period piece said in Kansas um there were so many things to so many factors that made the shoot challenging but at the same time everybody we were so blessed that the crew the cast everybody was so um dedicated to the project and really had such a investment in it you know that um the the experience of making it was very everyone took it so seriously and really worked so hard so um it's not like the tone on set was always very all about the work you know and always very um very determined to make the movie as as great as it possibly could be so right right well Brady and Joe both came in and you know auditioned for the parts and were really you know we saw dozens and dozens of actors I mean there's so many the casting process was quite lengthy involved and you know they just they won the parts really fair and square they're just they were so they're both as as actors you know particularly for actors who are so young extremely dedicated so you know well trained um they really are so resourceful and and um you know they have the raw talent but also they take their work so seriously you know and and they both of them really um did a lot of research and really came to set so prepared that you know that and you know obviously you know the whole the movie is really kind of about the two of them so it was really resting on their shoulders and and uh you know I they took the movie really seriously when they were we were making it I never worked with actors so young before and and as I said it was a concern of mine that I didn't want the kids to be traumatized so the kids actually did not know their parents obviously had read the script and knew what the film was about and we had long discussions with the parents about how stuff would be shot and how the children would be protected from the subject matter and so the kids themselves um I really just I'd never worked with kids that young and I asked for some advice from other directors and they're talking about how children that young don't really um act in in like out whole performances you know I mean they're not really interested in their character's motivation and psychology and what their history is and they really just act moment to moment you know Line to Line you know everything is very much very specific and very broken down so which actually worked perfectly for what we were doing because the the kids um didn't know the context of what of the larger context of what the script was about and I always find it amazing when I watch the movie because both um George and Chase the two younger versions of Brian and Neil are they have such incredibly emotional faces and they're so natural and there's so much going on in their performances when you know I know as the Director made the movie that they don't even know what they're reacting to they don't even know what the context is yeah and I just find it really so amazing that they that their performance is you know are are so um it's so rich and so emotional certain scenes are always harder to shoot than other scenes that scene was difficult because of the um the intensity of it and also it was also a very intricate scene had a lot of setups a lot of different shots a lot of different you know action to work out and so technically it was difficult scene I mean it's in a way um really exciting scene a really kind of rewarding scene as a director to shoot because there's so much stuff going on so much action so much drama and so much a lot of filmmaking to be done in that in that scene so as a filmmaker those scenes really interest me but um but it was it was not easy to shoot I'm always fascinated though that um the most surprising thing about this movie has been you know that Mr Skin has these kind of very intense very disturbing kind of scenes of them but that um the the way the film works because it has this sort of very sort of beautiful and kind of dreamy um aesthetic and the and the characters of Brian and Neil I think are so emotionally sort of um involving that the audiences don't um the the audiences are really sort of sucked into the story of the movie and it's been surprising to me um I've had several sort of like you know older women like grandmothers and stuff coming up to me saying oh you know how much they love the movie and how how much how emotional it was for them and how they it really affected them and it was you know it surprised me in the way that the film has really appealed to this very uh like this very broad audience that I would think would be very sort of um put off by the more disturbing scenes in the movie The you know the scenes of Neil when he's hustling and you know there's so many scenes in the movie that would think that I couldn't imagine you know the 65 year old woman watching and feel and and um and extend sort of going with but the film is very sort of weirdly um watchable like it's a very it's a really strange movie in the sense that um it's a it's dark and it's about a dark and disturbing subject but there's something very unique about it that it's something that um really kind of sucks you into it and you're very kind of open to it my experience in the past with sort of dark and disturbing movies like irreversible or kids is that you're very kind of distance from them and you're very they're like almost painful to sit through like the I remember when I saw irreversible I was like under my chair for half of the movie and this movie is very the way it functions as a piece of Cinema is completely different because it it's so um the style of it is so sort of inviting that it just sort of really you're sort of drawn into it and it and it really sort of um works for this audience that that I didn't I that it wasn't I was not expecting it to work for I think it's also the fact that the and Brady was talking about this as an earlier interview today is that in um everything in the movie like it the more intense things the more the darker material the the tougher scenes in the movie are all so essential and integrated in the the characters um Evolution you know I mean like all those scenes are so important to what the film is about like there's nothing gratuitous about them at all like there's never the sense that there's anything sort of there for exploitative shock value or just you know just randomly there like everything in the I mean this is a testament to Scott in the book and that everything is so integral you know and that's why I felt like um you know that if I couldn't make the film in a very uncompromising way in a in a way where you don't have to like sort of dilute the more difficult elements of the of the story because the difficult elements were really what make the story unique the the aesthetic of the film I really you know I sat down with the DP before we started and I said I just want mystery skin to be the most beautiful movie that you've ever seen and the DP uh Steve Gainer who shot bully was so excited to hear that because he's all when I sat down with Larry she bullied bully he said I want bully to be the ugliest movie ever made so and you know DPS of course loved Beauty and they love to make beautiful images so um the any that aesthetic really came from the book because the book is you know it tells this dark story but in the most beautiful kind of poetic language um and so what I wanted to do when in the film was cinematically translate the beauty of the book into cinematic Beauty so um I always had this aesthetic in mind for film that was um based on uh like this very specific design of color lighting um texture and that that it was not I didn't want to make the film a like handheld pseudo documentary DV kind of gritty movie I wanted to be this really elegant composed very sort of gorgeous aesthetic experience so that there was a lushness to it that and and um that sort of uh it it's not like it softens the hard edges of the story but like I said it just sort of it sort of lulls you almost you know like it like um you know I've seen the movie obviously like a thousand times by now but it's like I always get sort of taken away by the movie and I find it such a pleasurable experience to watch it um like the scene of the the drive-in and the um when the two kids are at the drive-in and there's the music and just everything about that scene just is so hypnotic and it just kind of really sort of like just like takes you away into the world of the movie and that's really what I want how I wanted the movie to work you know I wanted to have this aesthetic that was very kind of um you know visually kind of so Lush and so kind of appealing I think that yeah I mean Cinema is really um well just because Cinema is so much like dreams anyway you know and so much like and dreams are related to memory and that I mean in the film it's sort of a stylistic uh strategy in the sense that the First Act or the first reel of the film is when the kids are younger when their aid is much more sort of fragmented and almost impressionistic in the way that the memories of the kids you know because they're 10 years earlier or 10 years older in terms of the memory um is like it's more hazy and there's more sort of blackouts and more sort of um there's more of a kind of like almost like a vagueness to those images like they're they're like these Impressions you know and they're like one of the scenes that I really um love is I love the scene of the little boy watching the spaceship because people are all is that spaceship supposed to be real like and to me it's sort of like such a great symbol of because the spaceship is such a sort of the way an eight-year-old boy would imagine what a flying saucer looks like it's such a sort of cliche you know 50s cliche of a flying saucer that it's really becomes this huge symbol of this thing that takes over his whole life like when he's standing up on the roof in the sort of monumental um UFO gun just overtakes the whole frame in the way that his life has been sort of overtaken by this trauma that has happened to him and that he's sort of blacked out you know that he's sort of not remembering I don't know if it's it wasn't really it wasn't hard for us it was like there was a lot of um the book is very specific in that sort of like lower class Suburban kind of world of what the what the uh you know where the the milieu of these boys and where they grew up and that was really kind of um that really keyed me into the whole story because I grew up in you know Suburban California which is not Kansas but there's so much like there's so much sort of universal about that story about growing up even though what happens in the book didn't happen to me I really felt this Affinity with that childhood because that childhood was so much my childhood and so there's um and so in the sort of production design of the movie The Cree the creation or the recreation of that world was very um I guess I didn't really approach it from uh like like other films had been there sort of point of view as much as like this is what my life was like you know and it's like the people like you know they were working on the movie The Art Department stuff would go oh that's like that's the wallpaper I had you know I mean I played with that toy when I was a kid and it was very sort of like Pro it became this very sort of like personal um creation of this like this world that that you know everybody grew up in that's the way the the book works I think because it really sort of draws on you know it gets you to remember your own childhood and like this and that's why I think the story is so um that's what the sort of secret I think of its impact is that Scott is very cleverly integrated all of these sort of I the iconography of childhood and all of these little like that little cereal pack and the thing the the the everything about about the story is there's all these specific details in the story that you relate to so much that it's really you're re-experiencing your own childhood only you know in this childhood you know there's these terrible things that happen so it makes it it really um you relate so strongly to the characters and the way they're growing up right then you're sort of growing up with them I've never had a um movie before that has has such an expansive sort of span of time you know like the fact that the movie begins in 1981 and ends in 1991 and you go through so much with these characters and I think that's for me why the ending of the film is is so kind of emotional and so like profoundly kind of moving because you know so much about these characters and you've experienced so much with them and I see the story as these two sort of lost souls and you know and they finally come together and the last thing in the movie is so um it's so uh emotional in the way that there's a hope there you know but it's not there's also an uncertainty you know and it's not this sort of cheesy kind of Hollywood happy ending but it's not just total like gloom and doom and everything is terrible you know that there's really the sense that these kids have really been through something and really been traumatized and really are trying to deal with the aftermath of what's happened to them and that you know the audience has been through everything with them you know

Channel: weirdlingwolf

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Keywords: 'Slaughter High' (1986), wes craven, VHS horror, sam raimi, tobe hooper, george A romero, The Burning, splatter horror, making of, behind-the-scenes, quentin tarantino, occult, cult horror, Giallo, dario argento, luigi cozzi, Suspiria, deep red, umberto lenzi, hammer films, Battlefield earth, hal ashby, david lynch, The Intruder 1962, William Shatner, night of the comet 1984, End of days 1999, val guest, the quatermass Xperiment, documentary, Jean rollin, French cinema

Id: M14XT7Od2hk

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023