BOMB Magazine - Gregg Araki by Lawrence Chua

26/02/2024, 08:50 BOMB Magazine | Gregg Araki by Lawrence Chua
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https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1992/10/01/gregg-araki/ 1/22
FALL 1992 ISSUE (HTTPS://BOMBMAGAZINE.ORG/MAGAZINE/41/)
INTERVIEW (HTTPS://BOMBMAGAZINE.ORG/FORMAT/INTERVIEW/)
Gregg Araki by Lawrence Chua

OCTOBER 1, 1992
Gregg Araki. Photo by John Letourneau, © 1992.
Intimidated, perhaps, by the potency brimming under the chalky

surfaces of Gregg Araki’s HIV positive road movie, The Living End, a
major Los Angeles dubbing facility refused to make video copies of the
film, calling it “pornographic shit.” The only thing pornographic
about The Living End, though, is the “dark, personal place” from which
the 33-year-old director says the film came. Araki, who is known for his
filmic exercises in uncontrolled middle class angst, can be
confoundingly hesitant discussing his motivations, but his work remains
a testimony to “no-budget” tenacity. The Living End is Araki’s third
feature film and with a $20,000 budget, it’s also his most expensive. Both
of his first features, Three Bewildered People in the Night and The Long
Weekend (O’ Despair) were made for $5,000 each.araki_02_body.jpg
Lawrence Chua
What was your own emotional involvement in The Living End? I’m
especially curious about…
Gregg Araki
My HIV status.
LC
No. Not at all, actually. There are just things in the film that appeal to
people on different levels. On one level it’s the joy of seeing things like
bashing back homophobes or blowing off a policeman’s head. Where did
those scenes come from?
GA
Wish fulfillment. (laughter) Yeah, The Living End, as all my films, comes
from a really personal place. In many ways, my films are not
autobiographical. I’m not HIV-positive, and I’ve never, of course, had a
relationship like the one in The Living End, but the characters express
things that I’ve felt. At least for me, The Living End is a very kind of
cathartic experience. The whole AIDS crisis has led to a certain attitude
among gay people of acting now, as opposed to being content. That has
been the major “benefit” of AIDS. There is a real sense of urgency.
LC
For a lot of us, though, that sense of urgency was always there.
GA
That’s hard for me to say, because I’m of that weird generation that
came out after the ’70s. Being gay in the ’90s is not just a matter of what
you do when you have sex. It has to do with a whole outlook, your place
in society, your feelings toward government, politics, culture. Because
homophobia is so prevalent, it becomes ingrained in your personality on
all levels. It really informs my films. Not just the presence of gay
characters and gay themes, but in terms of being, as a director, the
outsider.
LC
You talk about gay identity as some kind of essential experience. How
does that relate to your own work?
GA
To a large extent my outlook is not exactly embraced by a lot of the gay
community, especially the “Stonewall Generation.” You know, the
characters are definitely gay, but they’re fucked up. There are problems. I
am in no way, obviously, a spokesman for gay people in the ’90s. But
being gay in a society like this totally affects my films. Being gay, or
queer, as the lingo goes, does put you outside or underground.
LC
Is that a place you’d like to stay? Do you feel you have a choice of where
you place yourself?
GA
What I’m interested in, with each progressive film, is trying to push
myself harder to explore things I haven’t explored before. Whether that
means that my films are more successful or less successful in terms of
the "mainstream"—that’s a by-product. I never think about things like
who is the audience for this movie? It comes from going to U.S.C.,
which is a very industry-oriented school, and all they really cared about
was what does your audience want? It doesn’t matter what you want. It
doesn’t matter what you have to say. What does your audience want? My
reaction to that was, fuck the audience. They’re my films. I’m just going
to make them, and if people like them, that’s great, and if they don’t,
well, I’m not going to kill myself over it. Which is why I get criticized for
being so self-indulgent. But since I paid for my first two movies, I can be
self-indulgent. My next film Totally F***ed Up, which we shot this
summer, is about gay and lesbian teenagers. That film was inspired by
stories I’ve read about gay teenagers, homophobia, and suicide. But
again, it’s my own personal take on the matter. Some people sit in
coffeehouses and write poetry. I sit there and scroll these weird
screenplays out.
LC
Are you satisfied with the placement of your work?
GA
I realize that my work is bound to be marginalized. Not just because of
the queerness of the subject matter, but because of the whole punk
thing, which probably much more than being gay or Asian is the biggest
cultural influence on me. I don’t think marginalization is necessarily a
bad thing. Economically it’s inferior. Certainly my level of living is well
below anybody who directs commercials in Hollywood, but that’s not
why I make movies. The mainstream has become such a strange,
amorphous thing. As much as Hollywood wants there to be surefire
formulas, wants everything to be broken down into statistics and
numbers, in a lot of ways, America is such a weird place, that those
things just don’t work. You just can’t explain some things that are really
successful. Which is why I think, in terms of Hollywood, the mainstream
is not something which is readily definable. You can’t explain the success
of My Own Private Idaho because that film is like the most idiosyncratic
film I’ve ever seen.
LC
Tell me about Totally F***ed Up.
GA
It’s my most Godard-damaged movie to date. It’s really inspired, or
heavily influenced, by Masculine/Feminine. Because I’m such a Los
Angeles brat, it’s about 18-year-olds, and it’s filled with that kind of like
L.A. talk and shopping malls. My producer said it’s like a gay John
Hughes movie directed by Godard. Formally, it’s experimental, but the
content is very accessible. These kids crack jokes, smoke pot, have sex,
you know all that fun stuff. Totally F***ed Up is finally my big multi-
ethnic production, which everybody has been dying for. I can finally
answer all my critics in one fell swoop. I always get attacked for the lack
of ethnicity in my films and it’s something that I’ve always wanted to
deal with. Originally in Long Weekend (O’ Despair), the script was
supposed to have all these different ethnic people. Unfortunately when
we were casting, it came down to choosing the best actor, or casting
someone just because they were black or Asian. So, I ended up with six
white actors. Same with The Living End. I ended up with white actors,
although there are ethnic actors in small parts. Totally F***ed Up, was
extremely hard to cast, because I hate those movies like Heathers where
there’s 35-year-old teenagers in high school. I wanted really young kids.
Amazingly, of the kids, only one of the six was actually gay. They
shocked me, that 19-year-olds in America would be willing to kiss
another guy or kiss another girl. That really impressed me and made me
somewhat less pessimistic. But, I did finally get my multi-ethnic cast
after much trial and tribulation. My approach to them is still somewhat
incorrect to some people, but totally correct to me. The parts are not
written in any sort of ethnic way. Their ethnicity was completely
interchangeable. The ethnicity of the characters was like wardrobe,
essentially. All the boys in Totally F***ed Up are totally multi-racial, but
they’re all beautiful in their own way.
LC
Why is beauty a vanilla construct for you?
GA
The lead in Totally F***ed Up is this half-Asian kid. He’s probably the
most beautiful actor I’ve ever worked with. And I think that it isn’t
predominantly associated with one race or the other. But it is this thing,
all the characters are totally assimilated into the “white” culture, as I am.
He’s not different culturally than of the other characters. He doesn’t have
all the kind of “identifiers.”
LC
What do you mean by “identifiers”?
GA
He doesn’t eat with chopsticks, and he doesn’t take his shoes off when
he comes into the house. He’s like all the other kids, he talks about sex
and drugs, music, whatever. You know what I mean?
LC
So is that what you mean by “assimilation”? Can’t somebody eat with
chopsticks, take their shoes off when they come into the house, and talk
about sex, or shoot up drugs, or whatever?
GA
We were talking about the mainstream earlier. If he’s different from the
mainstream culture, it’s because he’s gay. It’s not because he’s part
Asian. All the relationships in the film are multi-racial because it’s the
make up of the cast. It’s something that’s not dealt with as an additional
problem. The essential problem is that they’re gay in a homophobic
society. It’s not like their racial differences cause a problem. I have this
thing about filmmakers who are very race specific, what I view as a kind
of reverse-discriminatory, elitist view of race. And they make movies
that are wholly Asian-American, or African-American. And I think that
those films are ultimately boring and retrogressive. And really
destructive. In my own life, race is not really an issue. It’s not like
something that needs to be overcome. All my friends have the same
interests; we’re different colors and we’re friends. This black guy came
up to me after the screening and said, “I understand what you’re saying,
but I’m black and I’m trying to get an apartment. Racism is an issue; it is
not a non-issue.” To me it’s not that racism doesn’t exist, because it does
exist, and is, of course, a problem. I live this kind of privileged existence,
being in Los Angeles, which is somewhat liberal, being in this kind of
underground whatever and having my knot of friends and stuff, I realize
that I, in a way, live in a bubble. I’m not in the South, where I’m
surrounded by the Ku Klux Klan. I live close to Hollywood where
anything goes. So it’s not to say racism doesn’t exist, I personally don’t
like to see race. I judge people on what they’re like, not by their race. It’s
not really a problem for me.
LC
How nice for you! But don’t you think it informs certain choices? You
mentioned how much you liked My Beautiful Laundrette. How come the
Asian guy always has to fall for Vanilla Ice?
GA
If they were both Asian, I think that it would have been, in a way,
backwards. These black films or Asian films or Latin films, where there
are Asians and Asians and blacks and blacks, are representative of a
separatist attitude. I’m third generation Japanese-American, but I grew
up in Santa Barbara which is very white, very middle class suburbia.
Consequently my friends say that I’m whiter than they are, because
that’s just my upbringing. I have relatives who live in Los Angeles where
there’s more of a Japanese-American community and their friends are
all Japanese-American in that clique-y way, you know, ethnic bonding. I
find that really backwards. Personally, I don’t like blacks who hang out
with blacks because those are the only people that relate to them, and
that they feel at home with. That’s racism in a bad way.
LC
That’s not racism. Racism is a specific equation of power and prejudice.
Ghettos like Chinatown and South Central are there because that’s
where people of color have been pushed. The reason I don’t hang out in
Beverly Hills is because every time I drive through at night I get pulled
over by the police. It’s not because I think Asians are superior people.
Our sexual choices are also informed by things like power and
domination. You’re right, there are a lot of limitations to telling stories
set in contemporary America that are ethnically and racially hermetic,
but I wonder why you think that to tell a universal story you need to
have white characters in it.
GA
There are ethnic filmmakers that are making films with ethnic casts that
reach a universal audience. I just don’t think that’s interesting. I would
much prefer to have there be all different races in the same movie. The
characters are what makes it universal.
LC
But Gregg, so far there have only been white characters in your movies.
GA
In a way, I’m totally naive because I don’t live in Compton. I don’t live in
the South; I don’t live in a place where every single day somebody’s
calling me a nip and wants to beat me up. I live in a place where
anything goes. You could be gay; you can be of color, whatever, just
mind your own business. (laughter) In that way, my world view is very
naive.
LC
You mean to say, you’ve never experienced racism in a gay bar?
GA
Supposedly, scientific fact or theory says that men tend to be visually
stimulated, in terms of sexual attraction. Which is why, the theory goes,
heterosexual women and gay men are so obsessed with appearance
and image. Whereas, the cliche is, that lesbians and heterosexual men
don’t really care what they look like. They are not out to attract male
gays. So, in that way, because a gay sexual connection has these two
lookers, in that way, something like race and preference and type
becomes doubly prominent. To me that’s one of the interesting things
about gay culture. This whole thing about gay attraction is something I’d
like to get more into in subsequent films. This magnetism can more so
than say, heterosexual interaction—transcend a lot of boundaries, in
terms of race, class, age. A really strong attraction can break through all
sorts of social restrictions. The cliche is: a heterosexual marriage, same
class, the same religion. Everything fits and it’s the perfect picture. To me
the exciting thing about being gay is that because it is already outside
what’s socially acceptable, it can transcend those boundaries.
LC
Do you really think it can transcend those boundaries?
GA
Transcendent in the way that it’s not necessarily accepted, but these
things do happen. These interactions exist. My films are not
autobiographical. However, my films are very much a representation of
my life. If they’re displaced to the extent that the protagonist in my film
is white, it’s still me. Because the image on the screen is not Asian, that
doesn’t mean it’s not me. If the image is a white person or if the image is
a black person or if the image is a Puerto Rican lesbian, it’s still me. I
don’t see the color.
The Living End. © 1992 Michael Matson.
LC
How long were you shooting The Living End?
GA
Three or four months, I think. We didn’t shoot full time. Whenever the
surf wasn’t up was when we got to shoot. I actually prefer to shoot that
way. A couple of days on The Living End were 15 hour days and I find
that my work really suffers when everybody’s tired. I like not to shoot 60
hour weeks and really kill myself. I’m just a spoiled artiste. Time is
money but time is not that much money.
LC
Did you shoot on your own equipment before?
GA
On my first two movies I had my own Bolex. For The Living

End and Totally F***ed Up, Jon Jost, who I met at the producers
conference at Sundance, felt sorry for me, so he let me use his
equipment—which was great. That’s how I got my first synch sound
movie through the Sundance Institute. He actually gave me some film
stock too that’s why it was in color. Originally, The Living End was
supposed to be black and white and, you know, $5,000. It’s still really
small, even by independent standards, way smaller than movies
like Poison. It just became a slightly bigger movie which, surprisingly,
people find very slick. The Living End and Totally F***ed Up were both
shot with a very small crew. Because we were so small we had to be on
top of things and communication was pretty good. So we could shoot it
very much like we shot the other movies, Three Bewildered People in
the Night and Long Weekend. We had no location permit. We were just
winging it. When you have three people you do that. If you have fifty
people you can’t just go into a coffee shop and start filming. We are still
small enough and portable enough that it worked out really well. I find it
a great way to shoot. It’s stressful because all these little disasters are
constantly happening, but to me it’s easier than to start managing a
crew. I just don’t like to deal with all those people. You have to feed them
all the time. That’s the biggest problem: keeping them fed.
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26/02/2024, 08:50 BOMB Magazine | Gregg Araki by Lawrence Chua

FALL 1992 ISSUE (HTTPS://BOMBMAGAZINE.ORG/MAGAZINE/41/)

Gregg Araki by Lawrence Chua

Gregg Araki. Photo by John Letourneau, © 1992.

Intimidated, perhaps, by the potency brimming under the chalky

The Living End. © 1992 Michael Matson.

On my first two movies I had my own Bolex. For The Living

Support BOMB’s mission to deliver the artist’s voice.

DONATE (/DONATE) SUBSCRIBE (/SUBSCRIBE)

Lawrence Chua is the managing editor of BOMB and a commentator for

Sign up for our newsletter and get an email every week.

Eduardo Machado (https://bombmagazine.org/articles/eduardo-

MFA Programs (https://bombmagazine.org/discover/mfa-programs/)

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