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LARRY THE KIDPamela Harland / IF Magazine / August 13, 2001
Older, taller and less rebellious looking than most controversial filmmakers, Kids director Larry Clark walks into the room dressed in black, mourning the loss of an R rating for his film Bully, based on the true story of several teenagers who killed their friend Bobby Kent. Although Clark is here to discuss the process of making his new film it is obvious the whole ratings system is on his mind and he, like for his movies, does not censor his thoughts. "Fuck the MPAA," says Clark discussing what happened when he submitted his film for a rating. "They said no way are you going to get an R rating with this film. So I said 'Well, what can we do, give us some advice (in order to get that R rating).' And I have the fax they sent and their advice was 'Hide your children.' They were saying America should hide their children. So that was their advice. Fuck the MPAA." Bully, starring Brad Renfro, Rachel Minor, Nick Stahl and Bijou Phillips, based on the book by Jim Schutze, is clearly not a children's film and Clark acknowledges that however, he still feels the film is no more controversial than the average R rated big studio film. He thinks because of his film Kids, which was pretty graphic in and of it self, that the MPAA is out to get him. "Yeah, I think I am a marked man," says Clark. "You know the MPAA is a studio system and it's not the government's rating. 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 indie films like this that they'll pick on. But you can name a number of Hollywood movies that get R ratings. It's ridiculous and corrupt and bullshit but what can you do." The film does seem to have a lot of nudity in it although, the graphic nature of the film seems somewhat tame compared to a lot of recent violent films. Gladiator, The Patriot and Kiss of the Dragon, all of which received an R rating, however, their graphic nature came in the form of violence. Sex is where the MPAA draws the line. Requiem for a Dream recently experienced the same response from the MPAA. And like Bully, the film went out as unrated. Audiences may see Bully as sex filled and agree but Clark disagrees saying his film, although packed with nudity, does not have too much sex in it. "Some people say there's so much sex in it and I think the whole thing is 'less is more' but there is quite a bit of nudity in the film. It's just a choice of what you put in and what you leave out." Doing a film based on a true story did not make the 58-year-old Clark feel more responsible in not leaving some things ambiguous. Besides Bobby's best friend Marty there were six other people involved, who after beating to death Bobby went off and told several people which ultimately resulted in the arrest of all involved. So to get the "real" story of what exactly led up to the incident would be near impossible. "Who really understands and knows completely what was going on and why," says Clark. "Somebody wasn't there all the time. And Bobby and Marty's relationship was strange. They were doing all these things together. They were best friends from the time they were 5 years old. They were inseparable. It was only when Marty was 19 and Lisa came into the picture did things change. She drives the murder plot. It was her idea. Without Lisa these two knuckleheads would still be down in Florida being stupid. You really can't understand Bobby and Marty's relationship completely. Marty and Bobby posed as a gay couple and went into clubs and hustled gays. They would go to their house and Marty would keep the guy busy while Bobby would rob the house. Who knows what was going on, but they had sex with girls ... they had group sex, sex and drugs and parties. They did all kinds of stuff." It is unclear whether or not Bobby and Marty were sexually intimate, though a sexual conflict in Bobby was apparent. However, due to a lack of facts, it was only hinted upon in the film. Recent uproaring on poor parenting has become the focus in this country after several school shootings have plagued our country. And although Clark did not set out to make an example out of Bully, his film, inadvertently, is at the height of a very topical subject matter troubling America today. "I am just making a film," explains Clark. "I am hoping that everyone will see the film and relate to it on some level. Everybody brings themselves to a film and their own experiences. Since the film was made we've had all the school shootings blamed on bullies and all of a sudden Bully is very topical. They are talking about passing laws against bullying in congress and of course it is just part of life. I don't know if passing laws is going to do anything. It kinda makes it a topic that should be discussed because everybody's been bullied and we all know the damage that that can do to us not only physically but psychologically. It always comes from bad parenting whether it's the parents fault or not. I am sure a lot of parents thought they knew what was going on and were doing what they could." Clark, who did not meet with any of the convicted teens, says he thinks this applies to them. The lack of parental supervision and the fear of stirring up a confrontation can lead to a distant relationship with teens and eventually result in problems big and small for the teenager. "In this country there's a lot of kids at home in their room, where they are most of the time. The parents are in the house doing whatever it is they are doing, watching TV or whatever and the kid comes out of his room, makes a sandwich and grunts and then goes back into the bedroom, you know how teenagers are. So the parents think they know where their kids are, then they think they are OK. But they don't know what's really going on. I think there's a tendency to not have a confrontation in the home because who wants to fight all the time. Who wants to challenge their kids all the time. You want your kids to be happy. In these kid's cases there was a lot of that going on." Suddenly Clark's phone rings and he gropes his body to find it. "Sorry it should be on vibrator," apologizes Clark. Unable to locate it, the phone keeps ringing. "Oh fuck, let me turn it off." Back on track, speaking of the kids' troubled pasts, Clark says any one of their personal stories could have been made into a film. They all had back stories that explained a lot of what led them to commit murder or be an accessory to the crime. Heather's mom witnessed the murder of her mother by her father and then lived with her dead mother in the house while her father continually had sex with her post-mortem. Ali was raped at 14 and then led a life in prostitution thereafter while her parents tried to deny their daughter's pain by buying her a new car and giving her an unlimited credit card. And Lisa was a straight A student and had a very close relationship to her father until when she was 12 he suddenly and abruptly abandoned her and her mom and went off to start a new family. "There are all these things that happened," explains Clark, "and all these kids came together because of it. So there is all kinds of psychological reasons about why these kids were fucked up." Possibly the downfall of making a film with so much turmoil and destruction is the inability to tell the story properly without having vivid and revealing shots, something the MPAA is apparently and adamantly opposed to, at least in some filmmakers' cases. But Clark relents he was trying to abide by the rules of an R rating, even resisting from showing the male genitalia, and in making Bully he thought he had. "I was trying to shoot for an R rating," says Clark. "I was trying to do it in the way I wanted to shoot it but still not give in. I was supposed to have an R rating. Luckily Lions Gate (The film's distributor) is such a good company - they are such good people they are releasing the film unrated. They aren't trying to cut the film down." With Clark's newly finished filming of Ken Park, he wasn't trying so hard to abide by the MPAA's R rating standards. He made the film he wanted without even thinking of the rating, which from what he says will likely be yet another "unrating." "I am editing it now," says Clark in regards to Ken Park. "Everybody's naked. You are going to have more frontal nudity than you've ever wanted in your life. All my old girlfriends called me up after seeing Bully and said 'You never have any male frontal nudity. You always show the girls, you gotta show the penis.' So in the next movie there is going to be more penises than you guys can swallow." Well, if you aren't going to conform, that's another way to go. 
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