COME SEE THE PARADISE

Tom Lyons / Eye Weekly / February 4, 1999

Larry Clark was the director of Kids, the critically acclaimed 1995 film about teenagers self-destructing in New York. But he wasn't the writer. That credit belongs to Harmony Korine, the teenaged skateboard punk with the photographic memory who used so many of his friends' conversations that many assumed the film was improvised or a documentary or something other than the tightly scripted drama it was.

Korine has since gone on to make Gummo. Larry Clark, meanwhile was in town for the 1998 Toronto International Film Festival to promote his sophomore film, Another Day in Paradise, a road movie about two pairs of junkie criminals. The veteran junkies are played by James Woods and Melanie Griffith. The teenagers they mentor and exploit are played by Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner.

At 55, Clark's not exactly a kid any more. But he tries. Dressed in grimy jeans and a ripped jacket, with slicked-back hair and sunglasses, he skateboards unsteadily across the pool side patio of the Four Seasons and falls on his ass after a couple of feet. Undaunted, he starts over, falls again, then picks up the board, walks over to the table and orders a double.

"I was in 'the life' from about 15 years old to 38," he says, quick to establish his own credentials as an outlaw. "Drugs. Sex. Rock 'n' roll. Crime. All of it -- I was in a penitentiary, man. I know it all. Nineteen months. No fun. It was in Oklahoma. A state penitentiary. I shot a guy."

His new film, he says, is the genuine article.

"I was trying to make a Hollywood drama about the outlaw life, because Juliette Lewis is not a Southern girl. That's bullshit. It's Hollywood cliché. And all those movies with the happy endings. And all the moralizing. It's bullshit, man. This is real. This is the way people would react."

His request for "fucking outlaw" verisimilitude colored his approach to the actors.

"I wanted to thump [James Woods] a couple of times. We had a line producer. Big old football-playing motherfucker. He would jump in between us, because I was going to thump him good. So he's lucky to be around."

It apparently played a part in the shooting schedule as well.

"We were supposed to rehearse for a week. We rehearsed for about an hour. There was a problem. We had a producer who said I was a liar. And he fucked around. He fucked up. He was a scumbag. He was an egomaniac. The biggest asshole in the world."

Despite Clark's assurances that this movie portrays the "real thing," it doesn't seem all that different from the truckloads of other competent, but derivative, Tarantino-inspired crime flicks to have come along the last few years.

Not that Clark himself isn't the "real thing," however. He ends the interview by stumbling over to the edge of the patio to take a leak against the wall, while the well-heeled patrons keep smiling politely.