BULLY INTERVIEWS

Daniel Baig / Pop.com / September 3, 2001

The new movie Bully from Lions Gate Films purports to tell the true story of the brutal 1993 murder of a twenty-year old Hollywood, Florida "kid" by a group of his high-school-dropout acquaintances. It stars Brad Renfro and Rachel Miner, as the principal conspirators, and Nick Stahl as the murder victim, who was done in by his former friends because of his abuse of them.

Bully, directed by Larry Clark, is based on a book of the same name by Jim Schutze. It's a little unclear just who wrote the screenplay. Though Zachary Long and Roger Pulis are credited on screen, in various statements Clark, including in an interview with The New York Times, has said both that he basically filmed Schutze's book directly, ignoring the screenplay, and that he had screenwriter David McKenna (Blow) do a new screenplay which he used.

In any case, one thing is certain - Clark, the notorious auteur of Kids, was most definitely the director.

He and star Stahl spoke recently in Los Angeles with me and other reporters in very brief roundtable interviews to discuss the movie. Brad Renfro was also supposed to be there, but wasn't able to attend because of the death of his grandfather.

Nick Stahl in Bully plays a scary, charismatic, violent alpha-male character. In real life, he comes across as quite shy, and very hesitant in his answers to questions.

Predictably, he was asked about all the nudity in Bully. Nick -- "I'd say that there probably wasn't a solid day that went by where somebody wasn't naked."

Why, and why were he and the other actors willing to expose themselves like that?

"That was Larry's choice... I think because I think it was a good story worth telling. And the whole cast was sort of in it together, so it kind of took some inhibitions away, I guess. Because the nature of the story kind of outweighed the insecurities about your body..."

I had to wonder if Larry Clark consciously chose his clothes to provide us writers with a great opening for our stories about today's interview: he wore a black T-shirt, on which a red, grinning devil's face just managed to peek out from under the lapel of the black blazer he wore over it. It's too easy almost - in the eyes of many, Larry Clark IS a grinning devil. He's been accused of being not only a pornographer, but a CHILD pornographer, thanks to a body of work famously (or infamously) represented by the 1995 movie Kids -- which was so controversial Miramax's Weinstein brothers had to create an entirely separate company just to release it -- and also including books of his photographs like 1992, which features shots of a teenage boy in his underwear in various suicidal poses. With Bully, he's merrily continuing along his diabolical path. Kids was an NC-17 release. This movie is going out unrated.

"We submitted it to the MPAA and they said, 'No way you're going to get an R with this film.' We said 'What can we do? Give us some advice.' And I have the fax, and their advice was, 'Hide your children.'"

One of the reporters in the room didn't get this. "Huh?" she said.

"They're telling America to hide their children. Fuck the MPAA."

I opined that his reputation with Kids might have come into play.

"Yeah, I think I'm a marked man. But, you know, the MPAA is a studio system. It's not the government rating, it's the studios. If you have a big studio movie with big-name actors, you can get away with murder. You can get ANY rating you want. You can buy any rating you want. It's only the small indy films like this that they'll take on. . . . It's ridiculous and it's corrupt, it's bullshit, but what are you going to do?"

I asked Clark about a scene in Bully in which Nick Stahl's character Bobby, after staring at his own naked body in a mirror, interrupts his friend Marty (Renfro) and Marty's girlfriend Lisa (Miner) having sex. Naked Bobby comes over to the bed, and violently knocks Lisa off of Marty, throwing her off the bed. Bobby straddles Marty, punches him in the face, and announces that it's his turn. Cut, end of scene. (In the following scenes Marty has a black eye from the punch). I felt at the end of the scene that it was fairly obvious that Bobby rapes Marty. This would make sense, as throughout the movie there is a great deal of evidence that Bobby is struggling with homosexual desires, especially for Marty. However, later in the movie Lisa tells people that Bobby raped HER, but no mention is ever made about Bobby having raped Marty. Had I, and other critics I had discussed the scene with, misinterpreted it somehow?

Clark responded, "Uh, well, he punches Marty [and] says, 'I'm next,' right?"

Right.

"Well actually the way it was was he had sex with Lisa. Actually, in reality that's what happened. In reality Bobby also had sex with Lisa. But when I saw the cut, when we edited the film and that cut was there, one day I saw what you saw. I said, 'Wow. You know, he says "I'm next" and he's really hovering over Marty,' so I thought it was interesting, you know. It was just one of those moments where it's a little ambiguous which just makes it more interesting... and it's okay for people to see it different ways."

One of the advantages of being a movie critic is that you have the opportunity sometimes have the filmmakers clear up confusion like this. Clark also clarified another aspect of the movie for me. The character played (brilliantly) by Leo Fitzpatrick in the film is slightly older than the other murderous young people, and was believed by them, with absolutely no basis in fact, to be a Mafia hit man. In all the scenes at his house, Clark shoots him surrounded by young - eleven, twelve year old - boys, coming and going, shooting pool, drinking, hanging out. None of the other characters even seem to acknowledge their presence, and no reference is made to them.

Clark explained that "this kid ['the Hitman'] had this gang called the Crazy Motherfuckers who had a reputation, and they went around and they stole and stuff, but in reality it was a gang of like twelve and thirteen year old kids that went and stole car radios... Talk about arrested development."

The director told us that he had "pursued" Brad Renfro from the beginning to play Marty. Apparently, though, Brad didn't quite LOOK the part before filming commenced - "I took him down to Florida about a month early and we worked out for a few weeks to try and get in shape for the role because he was supposed to be kind of a buff kid."

And on the topic of Brad's (and Nick's) body - another reporter queried Clark about the fact that the movie features frontal female nudity, but goes to rather tricky lengths with the camera to not have frontal male nudity. He explained that, "I was trying to get a rating, and if you show male frontal nudity they [won't] give you an R rating. I was trying to get an R. And I should have gotten an R on this film, but of course I didn't... I was trying to shoot if for an R... I was supposed to have an R."

(After the interviews were over, one of the reporters present, a well-known columnist and editor at a top entertainment website, revealed that he had actually seen a videotape of the rough cut of Bully, courtesy of a friend, and it did indeed feature full-frontal Brad and Nick. Apparently, for the release print in some places readjustment of the frame had been done, to bring the bottom of the screen just a little higher up on Nick's body, for example.)

Giving up on attempts to appease the MPAA by adhering to a nude double standard, in his next movie, Ken Park, which he is editing now, "You're going to have more frontal nudity than you'd ever want in your life... It's going to be more penises than you guys can swallow."

Please come up with your own clever comment to end this article after that. I fear that my editors' good taste prevents me from supplying one myself.