VERY, VERY FAR FROM HEAVEN

Paul Matwychuk / Vue Weekly / June 24, 2004

Director Ed Lachman on sex, censorship and the disturbing world of Ken Park.

"It's probably the most bootlegged film on the Internet right now," says director/cinematographer Ed Lachman. He's got a laconic way of talking that makes him sound like a rancher, even though he was born in New Jersey. "They're getting it off of DVDs from Holland and Russia and France‹it's been distributed all over the world except for the U.S." But he's not complaining that so many kids are willing to defy copyright law in order to see his film Ken Park (which he co-directed and co-photographed with Kids auteur Larry Clark) -- instead, he points proudly to its online popularity as proof that there's a hunger for films like Ken Park that skittish North American distributors have vastly underestimated. "Sex is such a taboo in the United States," Lachman says. "But we wanted a forum, something honest that kids could look at and say, 'Well, I've had a similar experience. Maybe I don't have to feel so alone and so lost.'"

Some might say that Lachman and Clark have taken honesty to an extreme. Ken Park examines a circle of four teenage friends living in southern California, all of whom have troubled, exploitative relationships with the adults in their lives. Peaches lives a double life in the house she shares with her soft-spoken Christian father: he thinks she's as pure as his idealized late wife, when in fact she's having wild sex with her boyfriend every time her dad leaves the house. Claude is a scrawny skateboarder whose alcoholic dad can barely hide his contempt for him -- or his desire to sleep with him. Shawn is having an affair with his girlfriend's sexy blonde mother, and Tate is a twisted little psycho who, when he isn't screaming at his grandparents, is holed up in his room, defacing pictures of starving Africans or doing a little auto-erotic asphyxiation.

It's easy to see why the film has had a hard time getting shown in the U.S. With its disturbing plotlines and Clark and Lachman's unapologetic willingness to show underage characters participating in very explicit sex scenes, Ken Park is a movie that most practical-minded distributors would immediately peg as being more trouble than it's worth. But I've got to say, I found the film's portrayal of these kids' lives to be oddly convincing and respectful; if the underlying message of Kids was "You have no idea how scary kids are," then the message of Ken Park is "You have no idea how scary the world is that kids have to live in." Much of the film's warmth can be attributed to Lachman, who photographs the young cast with a tenderness, a honey-golden California glow, that suggests that these kids have managed to preserve something pure and innocent despite the ugliness of their surroundings.

Ken Park is Lachman's first directing credit, but he's been a prominent cinematographer ever since the early '80s, when he collaborated with hipster directors like Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) and David Byrne (True Stories). He really hit his stride, though, in the late '90s, when he shot films for Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides) and Steven Soderbergh (The Limey, Erin Brockovich). In 2002, his amazing work on Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven won him nearly every cinematography award in the country. And it's possible to think of Ken Park and Far From Heaven as separated twins: two cautionary tales about the sick American urge to suppress and deny our secret lives and all our secret sexual desires.

I spoke to Ed Lachman last week from his office in New York. Here are the highlights of our conversation.

Paul Matwychuk: How did you get involved in this project? Was it well-developed before you came on board, or were you part of it right from the beginning?

Ed Lachman: Well, I met Larry Clark about 10 years ago at an art auction in Graz, Austria. Larry and I ended up at dinner together and I told him that his two books, Tulsa and Teenage Lust, were seminal books for me. There was a brutal honesty to the images -- you didn't feel the person taking them was a voyeur from the outside, but someone from the inside looking out. And I said that his books read visually like a film, that there was a story being told not just in the images but between the images, had he ever thought of making a film? And he said, "I've always wanted to make a film! How do we make a film?" And I said, "Just hang out with me." I said that his books were like visual diaries and I asked if he'd ever kept a written diary also, and I was happily surprised to find out that he did during his adolescence. And I also found out he was interested in skaters. And I was a skater when I was young, so I knew that subculture too. So I suggested that we develop some stories from his diaries, but also set it around skaters. So we documented skater kids for about a year, on and off, with a Hi-8 camera and kind of gathered ideas from these kids and from Larry's diaries... And I'd met Harmony Korine on the set of Light Sleeper, a film I'd done with Paul Schrader -- he was a production assistant on it. And we figured he was young -- let's give the material to someone young and give it some credibility. So that was pretty much Harmony's first-ever writing assignment.

Matwychuk: Now, this was all 10 years ago, even before Clark and Korine made Kids. So what happened to delay Ken Park for so long?

Lachman: Well, it was hard to raise money for this project -- people wanted to give us money, but it was always with certain criteria or restrictions.

Matwychuk: Restrictions over the content?

Lachman: Yeah, well, obviously over the content and the way we'd show the content. But we felt we weren't being exploitative. Everyone knows what those obligatory cutaways [before a sex scene] mean, but we felt that if we were going to be emotionally honest, why can't we see it? That's the whole problem -- people hide it behind closed doors and don't bring it out into the open. Whether you're an adolescent or an adult, we all have a responsibility to grow up to each other... I think the film ends on a positive note; I think these kids are resourceful enough to survive the emotional abuse they've gone through. That scene [an extended sexual idyll involving three of the film's young characters] shows sex can be a healthy and nurturing relationship versus a predatory and self-destructive one.

Matwychuk: A lot of people who dislike Larry Clark's films seem to feel there's an exploitative quality in the way the camera gazes at the bodies of his young actors.

Lachman: I can't speak for his other films, but I've read reviews that feel my camera humanizes the characters, that this is a warmer film than some of his other work. People say we've gone too far, but what's too far? I don't think there's anything in the film that's a violation of anyone. I think commercialized advertising exploits sexuality in a much more graphic way. People always ask me if the film is pornography, and I'd respond by saying that pornography is designed to titillate or arouse the viewer. I don't think people feel titillated or aroused by the images in Ken Park.

Matwychuk: Let me ask you about a couple of specific scenes that have given reviewers particular problems. The question they ask is, "Is it really necessary to show that?" So, let me put it to you: is it really necessary, for instance, to show the cum shot when Tate is jerking off in his room to the tennis match on TV?

Lachman: Well, my response is, the film changes at that point. The next scene you see is the perfect American family. It's like Blue Velvet, where you're showing something, an image of confrontation that affects the audience so that they're unable to see the rest of the film in the same way. Now, does it have to be on the screen for as long as it is? For me, the effect would be there if the shot were shorter, but I do think it undercuts that image of that perfect American family that comes after. I shot the film almost like a TV commercial -- this homogenized southern California light -- but you know that things aren't as rosy and perfect as they seem.

Matwychuk: What about the scene where Claude's father comes home drunk, the night he tries to molest his son? He's in the bathroom taking a piss, and the camera slowly pans down to show his crotch.

Lachman: Well, I think that's just showing something that's very animalistic about him. We were just trying to show the father being out of touch with his body.

Matwychuk: Is it difficult to find kids who are even willing to be in a film like this?

Lachman: Oh, no. All the young actors had never acted before -- they'd lived similar experiences, they understood this world, they knew Kids. And the thing is, kids grow up around pornography at a much earlier age these days, so they're comfortable with sexual images and they wanted to be honest about what their own experiences were. You know, the kind of questions you're asking -- I don't think anyone under 21 actually worries about those things. I find they feel cheated by the hypocrisy of the older generation. We made a film for young people.

Matwychuk: Was it a fun film to make?

Lachman: Well, it was a film where I got to make the film I wanted to make. Matwychuk: You didn't consider making an alternate version of any of the scenes in case you ran into censorship trouble?

Lachman: No, I don't think we could have made it any other way. I mean, someone else can go make -- what was that Hollywood movie they made about the girls in the Valley? Thirteen? Or what was that other one? L.I.E.? Where they're playing "Danny Boy" while the boy's being molested? Come on, you know? I'm sorry, but everything's skirted in these euphemisms and metaphors. Aren't we beyond that? I don't think making it poetic helps it reach people any better.