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Gregg Araki & Scott Heim on Mysterious Skin
Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin
Writer/Director Gregg Araki and novelist Scott Heim discuss Mysterious Skin with journalist Roger Clarke
at
The Script Factory SCENE at London Film Festival
Curzon Soho
Oct 2004
Roger Clarke: Scott, can you tell us a little bit about how you came to write the book and the whole process of writing the book?
Scott Heim: I started writing the book at Columbia University where I had moved to go to school for my MFA. I had actually started writing it as a short story – two short stories. I didn’t realise that it was going to be a novel at all. I wrote a short story, which is essentially Wendy’s narrative in the book, and then I wrote another short story about a character called Brian who kept having UFO memories. Later, I was talking to a friend who is a novelist and he said, it sounds like you could make a novel out of this. It’s something I knew I always wanted to do, but I sort of needed someone else to tell me I could do it. I was afraid of the word ‘novel’. So I started writing it as two stories in parallel. I kind of see novels in shapes and I see this one as sort of a diamond shape, which starts out in one place and then the two characters go off on their separate stories and come back together at the end.
RC: So you didn’t really have a clear idea of where you wanted the story to go when you started?
SH: Well, I knew where I wanted it to begin and end; I just didn’t yet know how I would get there but I guess that is part of the pleasure of writing a novel – the excitement of discovering.
RC: So I’m sure you get asked this all the time, but is it in any way an autobiographical novel?
SH: Didn’t you ask me that eight years ago when you first interviewed me!? The best answer is that the great thing about writing a book with two lead characters is that you can sort of fracture your own experience into the different characters. People see me as Brian, but I think there are a lot of things that have happened to me which have lent me a darker perspective like Neil’s. Actually Gregg just asked me yesterday about whether the firework scene happened – and it didn’t, it just came out of my own imagination – but a lot of the things in the book did happen.
RC: Is there a filmic influence on the novel?
SH: I’m definitely a writer who imagines what it might be like on screen, but I hope I am not one of those writers who thinks, ‘this is going to be a Hollywood movie.’ I think that somehow cheapens the creative process of writing a novel. But I think it would be wrong to say that when I write a scene that I don’t try to picture what the characters would look like, or how it would be on screen – how it might move into the next scene after that.
RC: Gregg, how did you first become aware of the novel?
Gregg Araki: The novel was sent to me in 1995, either right before it was coming out, or just as it was published.
RC: Who sent it to you?
GA: Oddly, it was a CAA agent, and I’m not a CAA client.
RC: Did you read it immediately?
Gregg Araki directs Elisabeth Shue in Mysterious SkinGA: I usually take a really long time to read things – books, but scripts even more so. I do remember I was immediately really taken with it; I thought it was so beautifully written and it had a profound and really lasting emotional impact on me. It stayed with me.
RC:Did you immediately think about it as a prospect?
GA: Not really originally, because I thought the book was sort of un-filmable because I had just finished shooting Nowhere, with Mena Suvari who was like 12, and another kid who was 13. Those were the youngest actors I had worked with. In combining the experience of working with 12 or 13 year-olds and then thinking about the scenes in Mysterious Skin with the eight year old boys – and they are scenes which I think are absolutely at the essence of the power of the book – early on, I couldn’t imagine how I could make this book into a satisfactory movie. I didn’t want to make a watered down, made-for-tv version. What is so special and extraordinary about the book is that it just sort of takes you places that are beyond your imagination. Unfortunately, the things that happen in Mysterious Skin are things that happen everyday – it’s just so widespread – but for people who haven’t experienced it, it is really territory that is unimaginable. It was those scenes in particular that really attracted me to the book, but also made it feel like it wouldn’t be adaptable. It wasn’t until a few years later that I had been experimenting with subjective camera and points of view. I edit all of my own movies, and through editing I came to realise that I could film these scenes without the kid really knowing what the scene is about or what the story is all about. I wasn’t until I figured out a cinematic strategy for that that I thought, ‘well, maybe I can do it’. The scene I am really thinking about is the one that happens in the kitchen with the coach, and it is the scenes that I think is really the fulcrum of the whole film. It wasn’t until I figured out how I could handle that scene that I figured out how I could do all of it.
RC: At what point did you discover that Scott was thinking about making it into a movie and was work-shopping it.
GA: Well it is sort of interesting, I’m not really into ‘fate’, but it was weird because Mysterious Skin did come into my life again and again, so it was sort of destined that I was going to make the movie! As I said, it did come to me in 95, and then in 96 or 97, I was on the committee for the Sundance Institute screenwriting workshop, and this stack of scripts came to me to read to see which ones I would recommend for the Lab. There were like 15 of them, or something, and I am really bad at reading scripts. There were only two that I liked; one was Mysterious Skin and the other was Boys Don’t Cry (but it wasn’t called that at the time). It was a complete coincidence that it came to me again, and I wasn’t connected to it at all at the time. I had just been a fan of the book.
RC: So Scott, you just developed the script on your own steam?
Photo: Micky Goeler
Scott & Gregg answer questions at SCENESH: No, the script was actually optioned by a different company shortly after it was published, but they would have made a very different film. I wrote the script on my own and it was fun but there were some things they wanted me to change, which I didn’t really agree with…
RC: Such as?
SH: When I wrote the character Avalyn, I wanted her to be a little crazy but believable with her UFO abduction theories, because I don’t disbelieve UFO abductees either. I do think there is something strange going on there. They wanted a scene where she is walking around outside and her father comes out and talks to her, and it becomes obvious that what happened to Brian has happened to her with her father and she is using the abduction as a replacement for molestation also. I didn’t want to do that, but it was sort of like ‘do this, or don’t have the movie made’.
RC: Was there anyone attached to direct at that point?
SH: No, we had lunches and things, but there was no one confirmed.
RC: Did you have a dream list of directors at that point?
SH: I did. One of the funny things was that we had a dream list of directors and also of actors, and one of the people at the top of the actor list was Joe [Joseph Grodon-Levitt], but he was on our ‘Brian’ list. Years later he got the part of Neil. Now I can’t imagine it any other way. At some point the option fell through and I thought oh, it’s never going to be made…
RC: How was it revisiting the novel?
SH:: It was fun. I was far enough away at that point that it didn’t hurt to change or omit scenes. Then by the time Gregg was re-working the script for his film, I didn’t care anymore. Strangely enough, I think his script is truer to the novel than mine was.
GA: It’s odd because one of the things I really wanted in the adaptation was to be really faithful to the novel. I wanted to take the film a lot back closer to the book that Scott’s original script.
SH: I think a lot of that was that Gregg had figured out how to do that with the subjective camera angles and how to treat the little boys. My script starts in the present and has a lot of flashbacks, rather than with the scenes with the eight year old boys. I didn’t know how to do that. I think if someone had told me that they were going to make a film of my book and that they were going to have these kids in scenes like this, I couldn’t have imagined how it would be done.
RC: How were they filmed in the end? What techniques had you developed?
Mom and Neil with 'the coach'GA: I work with storyboards and everything is very carefully planned out and it was all very intricately planned so that the kids could be in the scene and we could get what we needed from them without them knowing what the scene was about. I mean we didn’t want to traumatise kids in making a movie about a childhood trauma! So, it was great because the parents had read the whole script and they knew what the movie was about and Mary Jane [Mary Jane Skalski, the producer] and I had extensive meeting with them where we went over the storyboards and they knew exactly what we would be doing and what was required of the kids. I told the parents ‘your kids are going to have a great time making the movie, but they won’t be able to see the movie for another ten years until they are 18’ - which I think is going to be a really odd experience for an 18 year-old! We were very careful about protecting the kids.
RC: So did you have problems getting this film funded, since it’s very strong and controversial subject matter?
GA: Well, it wasn’t easy. It’s financed primarily through foreign film sales. This is a really low budget independent movie – which is the way I think this film should be made. I think that if it was made, not even as a studio movie, but as a mini studio movie with a significantly larger budget, it would require to many compromises. What really attracted me to the book was its uncompromising nature, its truthfulness and its courageous desire to face what the book is really about, and also that it takes you to places I had never been before. I didn’t want to make a version where the door closes and the music plays and it’s all left to the imagination. That is like a TV movie to me, and of no interest.
RC: Can you tell us a little bit more about the script writing process, and how you two worked together?
GA: Well, we didn’t really work together. Scott had written the book, and then two drafts…
SH: It was kind of like Gregg wasn’t working directly with me as a person, but he had this book with multiple narratives, so there were different people who were talking about other characters…
RC: But were you in on the process? Were you emailed drafts?
SH: Well we’d been emailing about it for a long time. I remember you emailed me and said, I’m sitting out here in the sun, working one the script…’. In general when he started working on it, he went pretty crazily into it. Sometimes he would email me to ask about turns of phrases I had used that were sort of Kansas-isms. There were things that coming from Kansas that I knew about when I was growing up – like the world’s longest grain elevator – and people don’t really know what a grain elevator is…Then when they were making it, I got a few calls about things like asking what the interiors of houses were like in Kansas in the 80s. Those were the kinds of questions that Gregg had, but once he took over, it was his baby.
Photo: Micky Goeler
Gregg Araki at SCENE
GA: It was really easy to write the script actually. The film is so faithful to the book and everything in the film is really in the book: the perfect parallel structure of the narrative; all of Brian and Neil’s key scenes. The process of writing the script was really just about condensing this 350-page book into a 99 minute film using all of these filmic narrative techniques and ellipsis, particularly in the first act of the movie where huge chunks of material are being condensed into 2 or 3 minutes of screen time. The language of the book is totally beautiful and poetic, so the language of the narrator in the book - told in those snatches of journal entries - is actually just lifted in huge chunks for a lot of the voice over narration in the film. There is a certain sort of elegance to the phrasing that I didn’t want to lose, like when Neil was talking about his feelings being like opening a gift in front of a crowd. We worked these into the voice over.
RC:Were there any problem areas?
GA: I think the script was probably easier to adapt than it would have been to just write.
RC: This is the first adaptation that you have done?
GA:: Yes. You sort of lose the responsibility, in a way, because the voice is already there and the characters and the story. I was so in love with the book and the way it was constructed that it was really just a matter of condensing this. I tried to replicate the poetry of the book visually with the design of the film. With the photography, the editing, the music, the film is designed to have this all over visual beauty in the same way that the book as this verbal or literary beauty.
RC: Seeing it again, I was struck by how beautifully cast it was. What were your feelings about how the cast works?
GA: Casting was really intensive – we read a lot of actors and had lots of auditions, but everyone we got was just kind of perfect and they were all so passionate about the project. I now couldn’t imagine anyone else in those parts. I remember when I read the book, with Avalyn in particular I thought, who is ever going to play this part? She is such a strange character – she is sympathetic but also pitiful at the same time. That was the very first part we cast, and Mary Lynn Rajskub who is this amazing character actress who is in Punch Drunk Love gained like 30 pounds to play the part. In real life she is nothing like this character.
SH: When you write the novel you have your own idea about how the character looks, but now my ideas have totally changed because I’ve seen Greg’s film so many times. I think Mary Lynn was very close to how I’d imagined her, but I can’t quite remember exactly what that was like because all I see is her now. Gregg did such a great job in getting so close to what I had imagined’ Also, I don’t know if Elisabeth Shue was what he had originally had in mind for that part, but she is so close to what I had imagined for the character of the mother.
RC: Do you think the finished film is an improvement on the novel in any ways?
SH: I guess I think they really complement each other, and I hope that people who read the book would want to see the film and people who see the film would want to read the book. So far, the best feedback I have gotten was from people at the Toronto Film Festival and here [London Film Festival], from people who had been really big fans of the book. I guess I thought they would be the harshest critics, but the most positive feedback I’ve gotten about the movie was from them.
RC: I think we’ll take a few questions from the audience.
AUDIENCE: Gregg, if you write, direct edit and produce a film, who is there to tell you when you are going wrong. Who do you bounce ideas off of?
GA: There are a lot of people – my producer Mary Jane, and the editor. When I’m in the editing process, my assistant editor might say, ‘I think this song might work better here’. The whole process is a very collaborative one. It’s a very fluid exchange. From the DP, to the wardrobe design, it’s all about collaboration. I have a very specific vision, but you really as a director, rely on collaboration with all of the people you work with to realise that vision. There are checks and balances.
RC: Do you have the same team each time?
GA: Not necessarily, the production designer was new – she was a set director on a television pilot I’d done a few years ago – and the DP Steve Gainer was new. He shot Larry Clark’s film Bully. They were all great. I always have a great relationship with my crew, particular my creative departments. Like I said, I always have a really clear idea of what I want, but within that there is a lot of room for flexibility and input.
SH:…you are the easiest person to get along with. I can’t imagine anyone fighting with you!
GA: It is a really is collaborative process, especially with the nature of Mysterious Skin. It was such a project that people were really passionate about. They were so dedicated to it, and put so much into it. The production designer slept like 6 hours a night and kept calling Scott and saying things like ‘what colour should the wallpaper be?’. There was so much work put into it, and I am lucky to work with great creative people with brilliant ideas.
AUDIENCE: The voyeuristic aspects of the film concern me. Do you think there is a danger in showing this on screen?
Elisabeth Shue and Joe Gordon-Levitt in Mysterious SkinSH: I think the question mostly concerns Neil, and I think the major thing that I wanted to tackle in this was people’s perceptions, which are very ‘black and white’. I didn’t want to make the coach all bad or anyone all good to counteract that. I realised with Neil that there was a big challenge because there were certain things that he is doing which could make an audience hate him, but in the book – and I think Gregg wanted to do the same in the movie – I wanted to present a fragile character because he grew up with a mother who treated him more as a peer than a son. He also enjoys getting attention from a man – it’s the coach of his baseball team and he’s a great player - because he doesn’t have a father figure, aside from his mother’s screwy boyfriends. I’d hoped that I could present this boy as a fragile soul in the first place so that this person can be doing bad things but that you as a viewer can see the seeds sown which help us to understand why he is doing what he is doing. I think a lot of time in a society, we just see someone as a villain because we never get to see the reasons why they could do the things they did. I think that that is my job as a writer of a book like this – to make the audience sympathise with the character even if they hate the character at the same time. It makes the character more well-rounded and I think that is what elevates a film or book above a genre where the character is either bad or good.
GA: I personally appreciate the complexity and the depth of all of the characters - including the coach and the men that Neil sleeps with. None of them are two-dimensional cardboard figures. They all have a depth and a humanity and fragility to them. It was very important to us understand the coach – and Bill Sage who plays the coach and I had lots of talks about who he was, and why he was the way he was. Obviously I had lots of discussion with Joe as well about where Neil was coming from. The Neil character talks about the coach as being the great love of his life and he is sexual from a very young age and has desire for the coach, but it has always been my theory that Neil was more fucked up from what happened with the coach than Brian was. Externally, Brian shows more sign of being damaged and traumatised whereas Neil is diametrically opposed to that; he is hip and cool, and a much more sexual creature, but his damage is all really deeply internalised. I think that is one of the beauties of Joe’s performance in the film. When I watch the movie, I see the pain he is carrying from all that has happened to him.
RC: Scott, I think you took the actors to Kansas, didn’t you? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
SH: Yeah, I took Joe. Joe met me and wanted to see what Kansas was like and wanted to go to as many places as he could where I had set scenes. He went back to this small tiny town from Kansas where I grew up, and he met my Mom and some of my friends and I took him to this baseball field – not that this is autobiographical – where the games were played. I drove him by the house where I grew up and he recorded people speaking so he could get the slight twang that people from the Midwest have.
RC: What sorts of questions did he ask?
SH: I was prepared to answer any deep and personal questions that he had about the character and what I had intended when I’d written the character. In a sense, he was kind of not only stepping into the shoes and soul of a character I had created, but also into the shoes of a character I once was because a lot of the things in the book were actually lived.
RC: Was he basing his performance of the character Neil on you, in any way?
SH: I think maybe a little bit, but he really made it his own also.
AUDIENCE: All of the other characters seem to have their own stories in the book, why do you not write about the coach being the way he is?
SH: In an earlier version of the book, he actually had a chapter where he was a narrator, and I said earlier about my perception of the book as a diamond shape, and that chapter didn’t fit. All of the other chapters go back and forth – no matter who is narrating the book, it goes ‘Brian/Neil. Brian/Neil’ – and that just stuck out as a thorn. Also, I think I realised at some point that the book isn’t so much a mystery, even though it’s called Mysterious Skin. It’s not a mystery about what happened, but a mystery about how those characters find out the truth of what happened. It’s so much more a thrust of their stories together until the end point and I think the coach’s story just stuck out a bit.
GA: I think it would also stick out in the film as well. I didn’t even know there was a coach’s story originally. The coach really isn’t in the movie very much. He has just a few minutes of screen time but his presence is there most of the time. He is like this ghost that haunts every frame of the movie. To me, it’s interesting that you ask this about the book, because all of the other narrators in the book are children, or all young, and for me that is really what the power of story is all about. It’s about childhood, told from the kids point of view. You never get Mrs. Lackey’s point of view or Mrs. McCormick’s, it’s always Neil’s point of view of Mrs. McCormick. So it’s really about their perceptions of the adult world rather than the other way around.
SH: I think when putting him in the book without giving him a narrative, to present this person as realistically as possible, I have to pile on the details about him – the quirkier the better. If I had wanted to create a more ‘black and white’ version, I wouldn’t have included all the details like the games he has the children play, where he opens up the cabinet and you see what he has bought hoping he would have a child over to seduce him. Even though most of us don’t agree that that is a good thing, we are forced to see the hyper reality of that and wonder what was going through his mind when he bought these video games and these cereals and decorated his house like this. Hopefully that makes him real. We might not like him but we are forced to see and understand as much of him as possible.
RC: The whole flat is geared up for seduction really.
GA: Bill [Sage] and I talked about this a lot. We felt that in his own way, the coach is almost like a kid. He lives in this kids’ world. I think Bill saw the character less as a predator; he saw him as living in this world. He wanted him to chew bubble gum while playing video games with young Neil, to suggest that psychologically the coach was this overgrown boy.
AUDIENCE: The scene where the revelation comes to Brian was really amazing. When they actually broke into the house you saw these kids toys lying around, and I wondered whether that was supposed to suggest that the coach is still living there and that these are his tools of seduction, or that someone else is there now?
GA: The house is inhabited by someone else now. That is why the décor is different. Neil is talking in the baby’s bedroom saying that this used to be coach’s bedroom, now it is a nursery.
AUDIENCE: I hope I didn’t miss something and that this is a stupid question. In the scene where the family see the UFO, is that supposed to be the start of his dream, or is that real?
GA: I love that scene, but it’s a deviation from the book. In the book, they see something far in the distance, and it’s more like lights in the field. For me, it was a great visual symbol. That whole section of the film is sort of further away, more impressionistic, like a memory. It’s not quite as realistic as the ending of the film. So the UFO is sort of like a cliché of how an eight year-old boy would visualise a flying saucer. It’s how a flying saucer is supposed to look! What I love about that scene is that when he is on the roof and he is looking up at this thing, it’s just like this monumental symbol of this enormous thing that is taking over his life. From that moment on, his life is forever changed, and I thought it was this strong symbol for how Brian’s life is transformed. For me that whole section of the film is really grounded in subjective memory.
AUDIENCE: Can you say a little bit about how you directed the children? You talked about how they were kept very separate, but what sort of direction did you give them to get what you were looking for.
GA: I’d never worked with children who were so young and I’d asked other directors what advice they would give. What kept coming back to me was that kids don’t act in the same way that adults do with a larger psychological span. They aren’t interested in what the character’s motivation is, what their personal history is, or where they are from or going. It is really all about the moment, and very specific direction is essential. This was perfect for how we were working in this film because I just needed very specific pieces for very specific moments, which were really broken down. It was like ‘you are in the cellar and you are scared and you are looking this way’. With kids, you just have to be specific and say ‘pick up this pen now’. It’s difficult to work with kids because of the logistics, but the actual direction of the kids was not problematic at all. The kids themselves were so natural and it still amazes me to this day how much emotion and feeling there is in those performances. There faces are so expressive, but I as the director know that they don’t even know what they are reacting to. They aren’t seeing what we do. They aren’t even in the same scene as the other actors, but we got really lucky because the kids were just amazing.
RC: What is next for you two?
SH: I have been working on the same book for about eight years, which is finally almost done. It’s called, We Disappear.
GA: That is why the last word of the movie is ‘disappeared’…it’s an homage to your new book. [laughs] I’m working on lots of projects. I have a genre movie I would like to do, which is a little bit bigger and not quite as dark as Mysterious Skin. It’s kind of a sci-fi/horror film, but interesting, not just a run-of-the-mill genre movie.
RC: Gregg Araki, Scott Heim, thank you very much.
[applause]