KIDS DIRECTOR LARRY CLARK LIVED THE LIFE HE DEPICTS ON SCREEN

Chris Hewitt / Knight Ridder / July 31, 1995

Larry Clark in his laid-back, younger-than-his-52-years voice. Clark's fire was lit during a phone interview, and it's only fair, since Clark's movie, Kids, which opened Friday, has lit up parents and editorial-page columnists. Kids unflinchingly depicts some New York teen-agers, who spend virtually an entire day drinking, drugging and passing around the virus that causes AIDS.

In his first interviews for the movie, Clark said, "I want to mess with people" and suggested that Kids sprang from his own arrested adolescence. Now, he's taking a more reasoned approach and letting his come-on-baby-light-my-fire movie do the provoking for him. Still, when he's told that young people in Minneapolis/St. Paul will not be able to see Kids, he goes off.

"Well, we'll see about that, man. We'll see about that," Clark says, laid-back turning into "Stand Back." "That really makes me mad. It's definitely a movie kids should be able to see with parents. I'm going to fly out there to that theater and MAKE them do it. Fuck them. Parents should be able to make this choice, and you should say that in your article. Gene Siskel was on TV the other day. He's a parent, and he said kids 16 and older should be able to see this movie."

Originally, Kids was given an NC-17 rating, which means kids 17 and under cannot get in no matter what. Clark and the movie's distributor protested the rating and decided to release "Kids" unrated, which transfers to individual theater operators the responsibility of deciding who to admit. Clark, the father of a 9-year-old and a 12-year-old, is no fan of the ratings board.

"It should be the parents, not some fuckin' ratings system that gives other movies with 100 times more language and nudity and violence R ratings," he says. What does he think the problem is? "They don't want to confront the fact that teen-agers are having sex, they are taking drugs, that there is such a thing as adolescent sexuality. They've forgotten what it was like to be a kid."

The language in Kids is incredibly explicit, but it contains only brief nudity and violence. What's shocking is that the graphic language and heavy drug use involve baby-faced kids who look even younger than they are. The movie's main character is a self-described "virgin surgeon" who specializes in deflowering very young girls and, at the beginning of the film, we learn he has HIV.

Clark makes the movie look like a documentary, and the dialogue, by 19-year-old Harmony Korine, is convincingly realistic. How did a 52-year-old capture the life of young people so authentically? He lived it.

Clark was introduced to the culture of skateboarders by a young photography student. "He gave me entree by telling the kids, `Larry's OK,"' Clark says. "I learned to skate a bit, and they got to know me. By the time I made the film, I'd been hanging with them and having fun for around, like, three years, so I knew these kids well."

Talking to Clark, it's clear that he was both surprised by and a little envious of the world these kids live in. "There was a time of my life when I was trying to relive my past, where I did want to be a kid again," he says. "But I think it's over for me. I think I'm pretty comfortable being an adult now."

He's also comfortable revealing that he befriended boys who figured they could avoid AIDS by having sex with very young girls. And admitting he would hang around in parks watching kids initiate unsafe sex: "I saw that happen. I would see them bring girls into the park, and I would watch the seduction take place."

Clark has been an acclaimed (though controversial) still photographer for three decades, and he is clear about his artistic goal: He wants to capture on-the-edge reality without commenting on it. That's why, in Kids, the movie never steps back to say, "This is wrong" or "This is going to get these kids in trouble" or "If they keep doing this, they are going to wind up dead." Clark thinks those kinds of evaluations are up to the person watching the movie. But when he witnessed that sort of behavior in real life, did he feel a responsibility to "evaluate" it?

"Well, when I was hanging with them, I was one of the guys, having fun and seeing what was going on," Clark says. "But even though I was treated as one of the kids, we did have heart-to-hearts, and I would give them advice. But the thing is, kids are kids, and if you remember what it was like, you only live for the moment and for being with your friends."

The difference, of course, is that when Clark was a kid in the late '50s and early '60s, living for the moment wasn't as dangerous as it is today. Clark acknowledges this, but he isn't eager to sum up the message of Kids.

Pressed three times to describe his own take on the behavior of his characters, Clark finally relents: "I do think that there are some obvious things: There are consequences to be paid for whatever we do. And obviously, the bill's going to come due for a lot of characters in this film."

Clark doesn't agree with writers who have called Kids bleak and hopeless because there's no sign that its characters are going to shape up. "I worry a lot about the characters in the movie, or I should say, if they were real kids, I would worry about them. And there are kids like this," Clark says. "But kids go on. This is life, it's the way it is. Some of these kids will be writers or artists or businessmen. And some of them just won't make it."

It's the kids who "just won't make it" who stick with you most. Kids convinces us that we are eavesdropping on a world we wouldn't normally see, and Clark's achievement is that he examines this world without blinking or looking away when it gets rough. He shows us a scary future that we are doing absolutely nothing to change.