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LARRY CLARK INTERVIEWChris Neumer / Stumped / 2005
Chris Neumer: I was doing research on you a couple of days ago. I just typed in “Larry Clark interview” and one of the first things that came up was my previous interview with you. That’s never good when you’re using yourself as research material, but just looking through the other interviews that you do, I was struck by the fact that in every single interview you do, you get the same questions. It’s “Oh so you’re fascinated by youth culture, you’re fascinated by the loss of innocence.” And I think this seems even more taxing than normal for you. Is that the case? Larry Clark: You know I’m really enjoying talking about Wassup Rockers, the new film. The only question is “Why are you so obsessed with youth culture?” and my answer, you can look at my answer. Neumer: Oh yeah, and that’s part of my goal today is NOT to find out why you’re fascinated by this. I want new material. Clark: Right right right. I mean it’s such a matter of the public record. But these kids form Wassup Rockers are such special kids and when I met them my first thought was, “People should see these kids.” Neumer: Did you meet them in a professional sense or just sort of like walking around? Clark: No. I was actually photographing Tiffany Limos who was in Ken Park and it was opening in Paris in the summer of 2003. This French magazine Rebel wanted me to make some photographs and so they negotiated with Tiffany. I didn’t want to do it and I said, “Tiffany, I have so much work.” And she said, “I get the cover.” And I said, “That’s even more work. They’re pressuring me to go out and make a great photograph in a couple of days and that’s ridiculous.” Anyway, so the movie’s opening there and it would be good press for the movie because the magazine would be on the stands in Paris, so I said, “Okay.” So we were supposed to get the cover and 10 pages and I was going to photograph her with some of the actors from Ken Park so Tiff and I came out to LA the first of July in 2003 and met these two French women from the magazine and as the kids from Ken Park weren’t available I said, “Let’s find some skaters.” So we went down to Venice Beach and in this little skatepark and found Porky and Kiko. And Kiko was 13 years old, just this little kid and Porky was 14, or barely 15. And they just had this style. Their shoes were falling apart and part of their boards were no good, they were wearing clothes that were way too little for them and they had long hair. And they looked really poor but they had this style. So we just ended up talking to them and I photographed them with Tiffany and then they took us out to South Central where I met Jonathan and the rest of them and that’s where it started. Neumer: Let me ask you this: you mentioned that they had a quality. You’ve worked with entirely professional actors, established veterans and you’ve worked with people whom you’ve literally plucked off the street, is there an IT quality that you look for that you can put your finger on that people just have. Clark: Probably. Visually people are interesting, and then you get to know them and you can kind of... yeah I guess so. I don’t quite know what it is. It’s hard to verbalize. I know it when I see it. Sometimes it’s obvious. Like with Jonathan Velasquez from Wassup Rockers, this kid is this man-child. He’s this great looking kid that the camera likes. Being a visual artist for over 40 years, I saw this kid and said, “Man, the camera really is going to like this kid.” We started photographing him and the end of the story about Rebel magazine is that they ended up giving us 23 pages because the pictures were so good. And they did two covers. The cover with Tiffany and then the cover with Jonathan, this 14 year old kid. They did two covers for the same issue. So with someone like him you can just tell right away. Kiko kind of came into his own. I knew this kid for a year and a half before we started filming. Kiko grew up a bit and got some self-confidence. He was very shy, and he turns out to be this natural, great actor who was just... I kept giving him more and more to do in the film because he was so funny. But that’s how I met him. It was serendipity. And then a couple months later when the magazine came out I went back and took them the magazine and they were amazed. I was amazed. Their parents were amazed. And they wanted to go skating again because we’d taken them skating for four days all over Hollywood. These kids didn’t have cars so they had a great four days when I was with the French ladies with Tiffany and them. Neumer: I’m sure you can do a follow up, like Wassup Rockers 2 where you take them to Beechwood Canyon or Encino. Clark: Take them to Mars or Hawaii or something... Tijiuana. Neumer: I have to say that when I was watching this film I was thinking, “I don’t think I could have ever of conceived of this,” but I was enjoying it. I don’t even know how you could start to conceptualize this ahead of time. Like how do think, “Okay, now we’re going to have a bunch of shots of them just throwing their boards and hopping over walls.” But there’s an interesting message here and that’s that if you’re a minority and you go into Beverly Hills, you’re going to get shot or arrested or beat up. I thought, “Okay, I’m sure certain people are going to take that from the film.” Are you doing anything to, I don’t want to say “soften” that message, but to move the focus of other people onto things other than that? Clark: Well, as I say, when I met these kids and started thinking about this film, my first thought was that people should see these kids. You never see these kids on film. And South Central is all black and Latino people, there’s no white people there. White people are afraid to go there. So if one wasn’t living there and black or Latino, you wouldn’t know about the peer pressures that can form there which are so enormous. You wouldn’t know about the racial politics about the ghetto, which I didn’t know about. Neumer: What are the racial politics? Clark: The blacks vs. Latinos. Neumer: It’s that simple? Clark: Yes, it’s simple as that. Neumer: Then I was aware of that. Clark: And just the everyday struggle that these kids have. They can get shot walking to school two blocks away. Two blocks from Kiko’s house is a black high school and right after we finished filming there was a shooting there, a driveby. In the film, at 3:15 you see the kids come out of school and it’s just like that. At 3:15, the kids got out of school and someone drove by to shoot someone and missed, shot a 15 year old girl in the neck and she died two weeks later. It’s horrible. Think about sending your kids to school and the fact that that can happen and it does happen. But when I met them and started talking to them and found out about the peer pressure—if you don’t conform to the streets in the ghetto and dress like a gangster and smoke pot and listen to gangster rap, that if you don’t do that you have to fight for the freedom to be a punk rocker and wear tight clothes and look different and have long hair and try to have fun and be yourself is difficult as Kiko explains in the film. And that’s an everyday reality. The peer pressure in the ghetto, I found, is stronger than any other place. So I thought that that was interesting. So all these things kind of drew me to want to tell these kid’s stories and the first half of the film we’re recreating their stories. All those things in the first half of the film actually happened. They would tell me these stories and the movie actually opens with the little documentary... Neumer: Is this up until the point they actually go to Beverly Hills? Clark: Up until the point they go to Beverly Hills. The movie opens with when I first met them, when I’m interviewing Jonathan and he’s telling me these stories about him and his friends. A year later we recreate these stories that he’s telling us, but when I took them the magazine back they wanted to go skating again because I’d taken them all over going skating, so I took them skating. And then the next Saturday, Kiko calls at nine in the morning and says, “We’re ready to go skating.” So I went and got him and it turns out to be our day. Every Saturday for over a year, I’d take them skating, so they really got to know me and I got to know them and they trusted me and I trusted them. That’s why the film worked. I would take them back into Hollywood or LA, wherever they wanted to go and I would take them to restaurants and stuff and I would feed them and they’d be talking about the white people. Neumer: Let me just stop you here and ask you this: one of the plot strings of the movie is that you have this ragtag group of kids that goes into Beverly Hills and the “Man” sort of comes down on them. I was wondering, because I know that the way you shoot is not the way a lot of people shoot conventionally, did life started to imitate art, where you would take your group of ragtag Hispanic youths into Beverly Hills to shoot the thing and be hassled a little bit and encounter things like that. Clark: That’s exactly what happened, exactly what happened. I was taking them into Hollywood all the time and they’d be talking about white people and watching white people, who would act very different than they’d seen people act. Neumer: We’re not all like Friends are we? Clark: It’s just different. They’d say, “In the ghetto people couldn’t get away with that. Couldn’t walk that way, couldn’t talk that way?” Neumer: Any certain or specific— Clark: Well, there’s a certain way to walk down the street in the ghetto. A certain way to act. Plus there’s no restaurants there. Everything is, they shove your food through a hole, through the plastic. I’d say, “Let’s stop at a coffee shop.” They’d say, “There’s no coffee shops here.” There’s nothing like that. I got this idea to, rather than keep the film there, to get them out and have them interact. Paris and Nicky Hilton were in the news for going to clubs back then. This was way before the sex tapes. Neumer: Back then? Were they still in the news for doing just that? Clark: Yeah, they were in the news when they were much younger for going to clubs. On ET every night and in Page Six of the New York Post they’d be there and I thought one day, “What would happen if Nicky and Paris drove by in a convertible, saw Jonathan and Kiko, thought they were hot, picked them up, took them to Beverly Hills and their boyfriends came and called the cops and they started running and had to jump over the fence in the backyards of Beverly Hills? What would they find?” And that’s how it started. That’s how the process started and I said, “Who would they find in their backyards?” And I thought, “I bet Charlton Heston has been sitting in his backyard for 30 years with a rifle waiting for a person of color to trespass so he could shoot him. Neumer: Not Clint Eastwood? Clark: No, because I cast for Charlton Heston, but what does he look like anymore? And a Clint Eastwood look-a-like showed up and he was the best actor, so I cast him. But he’s playing Charlton Heston. Neumer: Ah. Clark: It’s all mixed up in there. So I started tripping about who they would meet and what they would find there. Neumer: But when you were researching— Clark: The idea was that they would go to Beverly Hills High and skate and it would start there. So the way I wrote it, they go to Beverly Hills High and they see the skate spot. They go and the girls would be there with their boyfriends and the boyfriends wouldn’t be such good skaters. The girls would be fascinated by the boys and there’d be some conflict and the cops would pull up and everyone would run. And so I took the kids to Beverly Hills High to skate because they’d never been there before... Neumer: This scenario you’ve just described about the cops showing up, that was sort of going on in your mind, or... Clark: In my mind... but then everybody ran. And so I took them there just to show them the location to see if they could skate. So we go there and there’s always skaters there, Beverly Hills skaters are there, families are there having picnics all the time. Neumer: Well, they have those grassy hills... Clark: Exactly. But so I take the kids there one morning to skate and we get busted right away by this cop who looks like Robert Patrick from Terminator 2 saying, “Where are you kids from?” “We’re from South Central.” And I say, “I picked them up in South Central, we’re making a movie.” I showed him my DGA card. Right away, South Central, these kids are brown, he makes us sit on the sidewalk for an hour and a half and gives everybody tickets. And it was just like that scene. And he says, “I’ve been warning you skaters for three months, you can’t skate here.” They’d never been there before, what are you talking about? They come from South Central! And he goes, “Oh South Central, what else are you doing here? And why are you going to South Central? Why are you picking up these kids?” And he gave everybody a ticket. I said, “These kids have to go to Santa Monica courthouse? They live 26 miles away. They live with their mothers. How are they going to get them to court?” And he says, “I don’t care. It’s your problem. You brought them here, you take them to court.” And I said, “In the three months that you’ve been warning skaters, how many have you given tickets to?” And he said, “You’re the first.” Neumer: Shocking. Clark: So that scene really happened. I had to take the kids to court, and then I wasn’t their parent, so I had to go back, reschedule, bring the parents to court one morning and pay their fine. And so I put that scene in the movie. That really happened like that. Neumer: When you were shooting scenes like that, the sort of stereotypical Beverly Hills cop, was there a sense that you didn’t want to make him too white? You know you hear standup comedians imitating white people and there’s always a sort of hyperbolic sense of being white. Did you ever shy away from that or encourage people to go towards that when you were shooting? Clark: In the case of the cop he was building. I had him building and building and he got really nasty in the end. And it worked that way. You know I felt sense I was there when that happened that it was a totally racist incident. It was so obvious that he wouldn’t let the kids go because they were Latino and from South Central. It was totally like that. I didn’t make that up. I wasn’t shying away from that. And it got to the point where I was goofing on white people. It was kind of funny that way, because in film you normally wouldn’t see these kids. If you saw these kids they’d be stereotyped as drug addicts or gang-bangers or something. Not just good kids. Really good kids who were punk rockers like these kids. So it kind of got funny in Beverly Hills where I am goofing on white people and I’m thinking, “Who would be in their backyard?” It was really a little over the top in a lot of cases where these over-the-hill actresses who are alcoholic, maybe agoraphobic, that get up and get dressed up. Neumer: They don’t even have to be over-the-hill. Clark: They dress up to the nines in full hair and makeup and never leave the house. They just drink all day. And I’d heard about that through the years so... It was funny when I realized I had them trapped in Beverly Hills it was kind of like The Warriors. They’re trapped somewhere and they have to get back home where it’s safe. Neumer: I picked up on that too, but more because the haircuts kind of reminded me of some of The Furies. Clark: [laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Neumer: One of the guys, I don’t know if he was wearing a baseball hat or just a little beanie... Clark: Yeah. And you know I always liked that film, it was one of my favorite films, just a fun, fun film, which was based on a Greek myth. It’s kind of like Ulysses. Neumer: Either The Odyssey or The Iliad. Clark: One of those. Neumer: I’ll figure out which the right one is and credit you with that. Clark: With the Sirens, trying to draw the boys in and it’s the Beverly Hills girls as the Sirens. I wasn’t constantly figuring this all out but it’s all in there. And then after I wrote it, the second half, I realized that The Swimmer was one of my favorite films, and in The Swimmer Burt Lancaster is going to swim across Beverly Hills pool by pool and so he goes through yards and he interacts with people so it’s kind of like Walter Hill meets John Cheever. Neumer: That’s an interesting combo to say the least. Clark: So it’s all mixed up in there. It’s kind of stream-of-consciousness. Neumer: It came off as such, in terms of that it felt effortless watching it. It just went. It sort of meandered. Clark: I’m really mixing genres. Thank you very much. Thank you. It was fun as a filmmaker to do that because I’m not really a writer and so the structure of the film is kind of screwed up because I don’t follow in three acts so it was interesting that it turned out at all. Neumer: Was it they type of thing in any manner where it’s like—you know how you meet women who say, “I have to spend an hour putting on makeup so it doesn’t seem like I’m wearing makeup.” I was curious to know if in any way, was this like, “I have to spend so much time making it look like I didn’t spend any time,” and I was wondering with you if you had to spend a lot of time making it look effortless? Clark: Yes. A lot. It was really, really hard and hard work. And the kids were wild and untrained and I was tough on the crew because you cannot just pick up kids off the street, wild kids, and say, “Sit down and shut up while we set up and now we’re ready, come over and be yourself.” These kids had to be themselves the whole time. Making a film is a discipline and it’s hard. And the crew worked hard. Just getting the kids to do anything and to round them up for each scene, each shot, was crazy. It was like herding cats as the DP said. I actually kind of lost my crew, not even halfway through. They had no idea what I was doing and I was kind of dragging my crew along and getting the kids going and now that they’ve seen the film they go, “My God, Larry, we had no idea what you were doing.” Yeah motherfuckers, I had to drag you along. But I understood that the kids had to be themselves the whole time. Neumer: Sort of like reverse method acting? Clark: Exactly. Neumer: Don’t get into character. Don’t even think about getting into character ‘cause I need you. Clark: Exactly and the method—well I’m a method director, I think, so it was difficult. And we worked fast. Neumer: For Bully, I think you said you started with 40 days and got it cut down to 23 so I’m assuming this was worse. Clark: This assignment was really crazy and I don’t know how I pulled it off but I did. It was totally nuts. Shooting so many scenes in one day sometimes. Neumer: Do you know how many setups you averaged? Clark: Oh God, I don’t know, but it was a lot. It was really, really hard. Neumer: Like in Rodriguez territory, probably? Clark: I don’t know what he does. Neumer: They say that the designation of ‘a lot’ in the studio system is twenty setups in a day and Rodriguez said, “Please, if I do under eighty then I’m upset.” Clark: Wow. Well, we did a lot. But anyway, it’s whole story to make it look effortless is really hard work, but I’m really happy and they did a great job. And they’re like 14 year old school girls that take acting classes after school and we cast them. Neumer: After you cast them? Because I know Rosario took acting classes after you cast her. Clark: No, these were girls taking acting classes so they hadn’t really had experience except that they wanted to be actresses. And they were terrific. The kids liked them. Neumer: Let me ask you this on a completely different tack. One question I had for Chan-wook Park, the South Korean filmmaker who made Oldboy... Clark: Oldboy, yeah, I saw Oldboy... Neumer: I was talking to him in sort of a fantasy film kind of sense, like fantasy football. In the sinkhole that is my mind I was trying to figure out what it would have been like if he had made the film Sweet Home Alabama. He doesn’t understand American culture that well, but it would be interesting to see this from another perspective. Now here you are and you have this... it’s funny how you make films about urban kids but they’re all sort of different in their own way, but I started thinking about putting you on Sweet Home Alabama or Sweet Home Alabama 2 and, for starters is this something, in the most generic terms imaginable, that you’d even be tempted to do? Clark: What is Sweet Home Alabama? Neumer: It’s like the most sappy formulaic, romantic studio comedy you can imagine. Clark: Who’s in it? Neumer: Reese Witherspoon. It was released four or five years ago. It was the first film to make her big. Clark: I have no idea what film that is. Neumer: Take any very sappy romantic comedy, could you put your own... Clark: ...stink on it? Clark: Absolutely, absolutely. But you know, those things are so unrealistic, I used to take my daughter, who just turned twenty, to those movies because—I would take her to go see all those romantic comedies with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. We’d see all those and they’re so unrealistic and I would wonder sometimes, “What would happen if I’d made this?” If I really made it the way... I could do anything, I could make any kind of film. Neumer: Well that’s the one that I would like to see. I’d like to put you on it. Clark: I will rent the movie and watch it. Neumer: Oh no, don’t. It’s horrible. It’s awful. It’s the kind of thing that’s just bad, bad, bad. Clark: But Sweet Home Alabama 2? Neumer: I’m saying, if you made it, I’d go and see it. I’d go, “This is different enough to work.” 
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