By Elina Shatkin, May 30, 2006
"I don’t do documentaries," declares director Larry Clark.
That statement might come as a surprise to both fans and critics of his movies, which are known for their gritty, neo-documentary style. It's an aesthetic that evolved from Clark's still photography, which began in earnest when he returned from fighting in the Vietnam War. Returning to his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Clark began photographing his friends, many of who had become crystal meth addicts, and in the process, became one himself. All this is well documented in his groundbreaking 1971 book of photographs, Tulsa. Savage and disturbing but relentlessly captivating, it sparked an immediate controversy that didn't abate with the publication of his two subsequent books, Teenage Lust (1982) and Perfect Childhood (1992). With Kids, his 1995 feature film debut, Clark continued "documenting" his favorite milieu: youthful dissolution, sexuality and self-destruction.
While Kids reinforced his image as a cultural provocateur, subsequent films Bully and Ken Park cemented it. "Larry with his eye is very good at setting a frame and then messing it up," Gainer continues. "Larry's idea of a good frame is this: if you have a great shot with a 35mm lens, then put on a 50mm lens. It feels a little more real and intense that way. Look at Kids and you'll see how a lot of the film is shot just a little too close."
Shot handheld, on video in a style that blurs the line between fiction and documentary, Wassup Rockers follows a group of teenage Latino skateboarders as they skate their way through Beverly Hills. It originated when Clark was on a photo shoot near Venice beach and noticed a group of Latino teenagers at a nearby skate park. "They had taken a couple of metro trains and a couple of buses to get to there, and they just looked different. They looked different from the other skaters," says Clark. He started talking to them, struck up a friendship and eventually went to photograph them at their homes in South Central Los Angeles.
"I met these kids who live in South Central, in the ghetto, in a gang-infested neighborhood. These kids don’t want to be in gangs. They just want to have fun and listen to punk rock and wear their clothes tight and grow their hair long. And they have to fight to be who they are. It's interesting that the peer pressure in the ghetto to conform is probably stronger than it is anywhere else," says Clark.
"One of the main reasons I wanted to make this film," says Clark, "was that you never see these kids. If you ever see kids that look like this on film, they're drug addicts or gang bangers or some kind of vicious fucked up kids
. And these kids aren't like that."
From inception to production, Clark spent over a year hanging out with, photographing and videotaping the boys, then incorporated those experiences into a loosely-written, 50-page script. Wassup Rockers is less plot-based than his previous films. "That's because I wrote this one myself and I made it up," Clark says with a laugh.
The actual dialogue in the screenplay was kept to a minimum to allow the boys to speak and behave naturally. Clark kept rehearsals to a minimum, describing them as "Very little. Very loose. Nothing serious. I wanted it to be spontaneous. I wanted it to be like it was happening for the first time. And for these kids, this was the best way to do it," says Clark.
This also largely accounted for Clark's reluctant decision to shoot the movie on digital video. "I never wanted to do a film in video. Never ever," he emphasizes. "I want to do 35mm. I'm really old school. But this seemed to lend itself to that and I thought we could run and gun and it would be lighter and require less people." Clark proved himself wrong.
"Probably the greatest flaw of the film is that Larry didn't just grab a single chip camcorder and shoot it that way," says the film's cinematographer, Steven Gainer. "What ended up happening is it became a real movie with make-up trailers and lights and the whole shebang."
Gainer's vision was to shoot the best possible video footage he could. "I've always tried, whether I'm shooting HD or mini-DV, to make it look as good as you can for what it is, and not to try and make it look like film," says Gainer. He notes that for the amount of money they ended up spending ($1.9 million, according to him) one could easily shoot a movie on film.
Wassup Rockers was shot in approximately 22 days (with a few additional days for pick-ups) during LA's rain-drenched winter of 2005. Everything was shot with multiple cameras -- Canon XL2 camcorders -- so that the cast, almost all non-actors wouldn't have to endlessly redo takes.
The color correction and finishing were done at Complete Post, a Technicolor subsidiary. Gainer credits Dana Ross of Technicolor Digital with bringing out the best in the film. "The very first examples I saw [of mini-DV transferred to 35mm] looked really bad," says Gainer. "But Dana spent hours and hours altering the lookup tables so that exactly what we saw on the teleciné screen was what ended up being projected on the motion picture screen. He ended up getting us something that looked really nice."
Wassup Rockers will premiere at the Slamdance 2006 Film Festival as the opening night film; it will reportedly screen on 35mm. "I think it's my best film but it’s also the hardest film I've made," says Clark.
.
|