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Features
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Araki's Mysterious Process
In working with a group of child actors to adapt a novel about child abuse, renegade filmmaker Greg Araki was careful to only give their parents the full story background.
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
By Christina Radish
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Christina Radish/Agency Photos
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Provocative filmmaker Araki
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Having firmly established himself as one of the most unconventional yet intriguing voices in independent cinema, filmmaker Gregg Araki has departed from his usual in-your-face fare in order to bring a novel to the screen that affected him deeply enough to devote years of his life to making it into a film.
Previously known for his teen apocalypse trilogy - Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere -- the 45-year-old southern California native knew that if he was ever going to adapt someone else’s material, it had to be Scott Heim’s novel Mysterious Skin, which explores the way in which child abuse can have profoundly different effects on its various victims. Both incredibly unsettling and moving, Mysterious Skin explores often disturbing subject matter in a raw and unflinching way.
“I read the book in 1995 and it was just this really powerful experience,” explains USC film school grad Araki during a recent interview with FilmStew. “I really appreciated the way Scott told this very dark story, but in this incredibly beautiful and poetic way. The book really had a huge emotional impact on me and really haunted me for years.”
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Christina Radish/Agency Photos
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Co-star Brady Corbet
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Originally hailing from Kansas, where the novel and film are based, Heim says that Mysterious Skin started out as two short stories because he had always been afraid of the idea of writing a novel. “I had written a short story that was about the Neil character, and then I started writing something that was about a kid remembering what he though was a UFO abduction,” recalls the 38-year-old Boston resident.
“I realized, somewhere along the line, [that] someone speaking under hypnosis about what they think is a UFO abduction is just so similar to the things people say when they’re remembering sexual abuse memories,” he adds. “So I decided to make these parallel stories. I’m also interested in writing about things that people think are disturbing, but putting them in places that people always see as serene and safe. I like turning that around and showing that bad things actually happen in places like that.”
“I think that makes it more disturbing because you’re seeing these beautiful images, but it’s something horrible that’s happening.”
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Christina Radish/Agency Photos
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Novelist Scott Heim
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Mysterious Skin tells the story of Brian Lackey (thirteen’s Brady Corbet) and Neil McCormick (stunningly portrayed by former Third Rock from the Sun star Joseph Gordon-Levitt), two 18-year-olds growing up in the stiflingly small town of Hutchinson, Kansas, where they have both been sexually abused by their Little League baseball coach (Bill Sage).
In order to bring a new treatment of this taboo subject to the screen, Araki says he tried to remain faithful to the original material while paying special attention to the fact that he was working with young actors.
“I loved the scenes in the book and in the film that deal with the very young boys,” he explains. “I knew I didn’t want those scenes to be some little flashback. On the other hand, I knew of the difficulty of working with child actors. The kids didn’t actually know the subject matter, and they didn’t really know what their characters were doing, most of the time. They really just acted their scenes bit by bit, and moment to moment, in a very simple and very direct way.”
“I had been advised, early on, that child actors don’t actually like to have the whole picture,” Araki continues. “Unlike an adult actor who wants the character motivation, kid actors really just want to know, ‘What am I doing in this take, right now?’ It was a matter of figuring out how to keep those scenes in the movie, but shoot them in a way that the kids didn’t have to know what the movie was about. It was all very elaborate, in the sense that there was actually a different script written for the kids.”
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Christina Radish/Agency Photos
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Co-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt
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Even though his young stars were not entirely aware of what the film was about, Araki says that the parents had full knowledge and were very supportive of the project. “As a director, I work in a very Hitchcockian way, so everything was very carefully story-boarded,” he insists. “I also edit my own movies, so I knew exactly what I needed the kids to do in each shot, and where I could cut away to something, and what I’d be cutting away to.”
“It was all very thoroughly explained to the parents,” he continues. “Exactly what the kids would have to do and how I would get, emotionally, what I needed for the scene, without them knowing what was going on. I promised both sets of parents that the kids would just have a really great time making the movie, and they wouldn’t be traumatized, in any way, by what they were having to do. The kids were great and the parents could not have been more wonderful or supportive.”
Although he wasn’t on the set until the very end of filming, Heim is satisfied with the way his story was translated to the screen and points to the fact that he and Araki were friends for quite a few years before filming began. “When he was writing his script, he would just ask me questions about how I envisioned certain things in the book, or what the interior of the house would have looked like -- that sort of thing,” Heim remembers. “Joe actually met me before filming started, and he wanted to go back to Kansas. So, he and I went back and just drove around, and met my family and friends.”
“I took him to some of the settings for things that I based the book on,” he continues. “He took his video camera and taped people’s accents.”
For Araki, it was important to be faithful to his friend’s book. “Scott and I didn’t physically work on the script together, but I had the book with me the whole time I was writing and I’d just lift whole passages out of the book, particularly because Scott has a very poetic, eloquent style,” he explains. “One of the things I loved so much about the book is how the words are put together, so I would incorporate a lot of the prose from the book into the movie. The mood of the book is very much in the script.”
Having read dozens of actors for the lead roles, Araki says that it was the fearlessness and commitment of Gordon-Levitt and Corbet that led them to be cast in the roles of Neil and Brian, respectively. “We just got super lucky,” declares Araki. “Everybody in the movie, down to the smallest parts, were all so perfect, which doesn’t always happen.”
| “As a director, the cliché about directing is that it’s 90% casting,” he continues. “In this case, it was really true, in the sense that everybody was so perfect and they were so prepared and so serious about what they were doing. It was really a delight to come to work.”
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Indeed, Heim now says that as a testament to matching his vision, Araki’s actors are the only people he can now picture when he thinks of the characters he imagined 10 years ago. “There are shots in the film where Brady looks a lot like I looked at that age; it’s kind of frightening,” he admits. “Maybe it’s just a testament to the friendship that I made with Gregg and how much we talked about the characters and the scenes and specific images from the film because he just got so many things exactly how I had envisioned them.”
“If I were to pick up the book right now and read a scene, I wouldn’t see the characters how I initially saw them in my head when I wrote them, I would see the actors,” he observes. “They’ve just replaced the images that I had in my head when I wrote it, which is totally fine with me because I’m so happy with the movie.”
| Adds Araki: “My goal with the movie was really to just devastate people in the way that the book was just devastating for me to read. I was literally crying when I finished the book. It had a really pure, emotional impact on me, and I really wanted to try to achieve that with the film.” |
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