CHRIS NEUMER: I was doing research on you a couple of days ago. I just typed in “
LARRY CLARK interview” and one of the first things that came up was my previous interview with you. That’s never good when you’re using yourself as research material, but just looking through the other interviews that you do, I was struck by the fact that in every single interview you do, you get the same questions. It’s “Oh so you’re fascinated by youth culture, you’re fascinated by the loss of innocence.” And I think this seems even more taxing than normal for you. Is that the case?
LARRY CLARK: You know I’m really enjoying talking about Wassup Rockers, the new film. The only question is “Why are you so obsessed with youth culture?” and my answer, you can look at my answer.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh yeah, and that’s part of my goal today is NOT to find out why you’re fascinated by this. I want new material.
LARRY CLARK: Right right right. I mean it’s such a matter of the public record. But these kids form Wassup Rockers are such special kids and when I met them my first thought was, “People should see these kids.”
CHRIS NEUMER: Did you meet them in a professional sense or just sort of like walking around?
LARRY CLARK: No. I was actually photographing Tiffany Limos who was in Ken Park and it was opening in Paris in the summer of 2003. This French magazine Rebel wanted me to make some photographs and so they negotiated with Tiffany. I didn’t want to do it and I said, “Tiffany, I have so much work.” And she said, “I get the cover.” And I said, “That’s even more work. They’re pressuring me to go out and make a great photograph in a couple of days and that’s ridiculous.” Anyway, so the movie’s opening there and it would be good press for the movie because the magazine would be on the stands in Paris, so I said, “Okay.” So we were supposed to get the cover and 10 pages and I was going to photograph her with some of the actors from Ken Park so Tiff and I came out to LA the first of July in 2003 and met these two French women from the magazine and as the kids from Ken Park weren’t available I said, “Let’s find some skaters.” So we went down to Venice Beach and in this little skatepark and found Porky and Kiko. And Kiko was 13 years old, just this little kid and Porky was 14, or barely 15. And they just had this style. Their shoes were falling apart and part of their boards were no good, they were wearing clothes that were way too little for them and they had long hair. And they looked really poor but they had this style. So we just ended up talking to them and I photographed them with Tiffany and then they took us out to South Central where I met Jonathan and the rest of them and that’s where it started.
CHRIS NEUMER: Let me ask you this: you mentioned that they had a quality. You’ve worked with entirely professional actors, established veterans and you’ve worked with people whom you’ve literally plucked off the street, is there an IT quality that you look for that you can put your finger on that people just have.
LARRY CLARK: Probably. Visually people are interesting, and then you get to know them and you can kind of… yeah I guess so. I don’t quite know what it is. It’s hard to verbalize. I know it when I see it. Sometimes it’s obvious. Like with Jonathan Velasquez from Wassup Rockers, this kid is this man-child. He’s this great looking kid that the camera likes. Being a visual artist for over 40 years, I saw this kid and said, “Man, the camera really is going to like this kid.” We started photographing him and the end of the story about Rebel magazine is that they ended up giving us 23 pages because the pictures were so good. And they did two covers. The cover with Tiffany and then the cover with Jonathan, this 14 year old kid. They did two covers for the same issue. So with someone like him you can just tell right away. Kiko kind of came into his own. I knew this kid for a year and a half before we started filming. Kiko grew up a bit and got some self-confidence. He was very shy, and he turns out to be this natural, great actor who was just… I kept giving him more and more to do in the film because he was so funny. But that’s how I met him. It was serendipity. And then a couple months later when the magazine came out I went back and took them the magazine and they were amazed. I was amazed. Their parents were amazed. And they wanted to go skating again because we’d taken them skating for four days all over Hollywood. These kids didn’t have cars so they had a great four days when I was with the French ladies with Tiffany and them.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m sure you can do a follow up, like Wassup Rockers 2 where you take them to Beechwood Canyon or Encino.
LARRY CLARK: Take them to Mars or Hawaii or something… Tijiuana.
CHRIS NEUMER: I have to say that when I was watching this film I was thinking, “I don’t think I could have ever of conceived of this,” but I was enjoying it. I don’t even know how you could start to conceptualize this ahead of time. Like how do think, “Okay, now we’re going to have a bunch of shots of them just throwing their boards and hopping over walls.” But there’s an interesting message here and that’s that if you’re a minority and you go into Beverly Hills, you’re going to get shot or arrested or beat up. I thought, “Okay, I’m sure certain people are going to take that from the film.” Are you doing anything to, I don’t want to say “soften” that message, but to move the focus of other people onto things other than that?
LARRY CLARK: Well, as I say, when I met these kids and started thinking about this film, my first thought was that people should see these kids. You never see these kids on film. And South Central is all black and Latino people, there’s no white people there. White people are afraid to go there. So if one wasn’t living there and black or Latino, you wouldn’t know about the peer pressures that can form there which are so enormous. You wouldn’t know about the racial politics about the ghetto, which I didn’t know about.
CHRIS NEUMER: What are the racial politics?
LARRY CLARK: The blacks vs. Latinos.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s that simple?
LARRY CLARK: Yes, it’s simple as that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Then I was aware of that.
LARRY CLARK: And just the everyday struggle that these kids have. They can get shot walking to school two blocks away. Two blocks from Kiko’s house is a black high school and right after we finished filming there was a shooting there, a driveby. In the film, at 3:15 you see the kids come out of school and it’s just like that. At 3:15, the kids got out of school and someone drove by to shoot someone and missed, shot a 15 year old girl in the neck and she died two weeks later. It’s horrible. Think about sending your kids to school and the fact that that can happen and it does happen. But when I met them and started talking to them and found out about the peer pressure—if you don’t conform to the streets in the ghetto and dress like a gangster and smoke pot and listen to gangster rap, that if you don’t do that you have to fight for the freedom to be a punk rocker and wear tight clothes and look different and have long hair and try to have fun and be yourself is difficult as Kiko explains in the film. And that’s an everyday reality. The peer pressure in the ghetto, I found, is stronger than any other place. So I thought that that was interesting. So all these things kind of drew me to want to tell these kid’s stories and the first half of the film we’re recreating their stories. All those things in the first half of the film actually happened. They would tell me these stories and the movie actually opens with the little documentary…
CHRIS NEUMER: Is this up until the point they actually go to Beverly Hills?
LARRY CLARK: Up until the point they go to Beverly Hills. The movie opens with when I first met them, when I’m interviewing Jonathan and he’s telling me these stories about him and his friends. A year later we recreate these stories that he’s telling us, but when I took them the magazine back they wanted to go skating again because I’d taken them all over going skating, so I took them skating. And then the next Saturday, Kiko calls at nine in the morning and says, “We’re ready to go skating.” So I went and got him and it turns out to be our day. Every Saturday for over a year, I’d take them skating, so they really got to know me and I got to know them and they trusted me and I trusted them. That’s why the film worked. I would take them back into Hollywood or LA, wherever they wanted to go and I would take them to restaurants and stuff and I would feed them and they’d be talking about the white people.
CHRIS NEUMER: Let me just stop you here and ask you this: one of the plot strings of the movie is that you have this ragtag group of kids that goes into Beverly Hills and the “Man” sort of comes down on them. I was wondering, because I know that the way you shoot is not the way a lot of people shoot conventionally, did life started to imitate art, where you would take your group of ragtag Hispanic youths into Beverly Hills to shoot the thing and be hassled a little bit and encounter things like that.
LARRY CLARK: That’s exactly what happened, exactly what happened. I was taking them into Hollywood all the time and they’d be talking about white people and watching white people, who would act very different than they’d seen people act.
CHRIS NEUMER: We’re not all like Friends are we?
LARRY CLARK: It’s just different. They’d say, “In the ghetto people couldn’t get away with that. Couldn’t walk that way, couldn’t talk that way?”
CHRIS NEUMER: Any certain or specific—
LARRY CLARK: Well, there’s a certain way to walk down the street in the ghetto. A certain way to act. Plus there’s no restaurants there. Everything is, they shove your food through a hole, through the plastic. I’d say, “Let’s stop at a coffee shop.” They’d say, “There’s no coffee shops here.” There’s nothing like that. I got this idea to, rather than keep the film there, to get them out and have them interact. Paris and Nicky Hilton were in the news for going to clubs back then. This was way before the sex tapes.
CHRIS NEUMER: Back then? Were they still in the news for doing just that?
LARRY CLARK: Yeah, they were in the news when they were much younger for going to clubs. On ET every night and in Page Six of the New York Post they’d be there and I thought one day, “What would happen if Nicky and Paris drove by in a convertible, saw Jonathan and Kiko, thought they were hot, picked them up, took them to Beverly Hills and their boyfriends came and called the cops and they started running and had to jump over the fence in the backyards of Beverly Hills? What would they find?” And that’s how it started. That’s how the process started and I said, “Who would they find in their backyards?” And I thought, “I bet Charlton Heston has been sitting in his backyard for 30 years with a rifle waiting for a person of color to trespass so he could shoot him.
CHRIS NEUMER: Not Clint Eastwood?
LARRY CLARK: No, because I cast for Charlton Heston, but what does he look like anymore? And a Clint Eastwood look-a-like showed up and he was the best actor, so I cast him. But he’s playing Charlton Heston.
CHRIS NEUMER: Ah.
LARRY CLARK: It’s all mixed up in there. So I started tripping about who they would meet and what they would find there.
CHRIS NEUMER: But when you were researching—
LARRY CLARK: The idea was that they would go to Beverly Hills High and skate and it would start there. So the way I wrote it, they go to Beverly Hills High and they see the skate spot. They go and the girls would be there with their boyfriends and the boyfriends wouldn’t be such good skaters. The girls would be fascinated by the boys and there’d be some conflict and the cops would pull up and everyone would run. And so I took the kids to Beverly Hills High to skate because they’d never been there before…
CHRIS NEUMER: This scenario you’ve just described about the cops showing up, that was sort of going on in your mind, or…
LARRY CLARK: In my mind… but then everybody ran. And so I took them there just to show them the location to see if they could skate. So we go there and there’s always skaters there, Beverly Hills skaters are there, families are there having picnics all the time.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, they have those grassy hills…
LARRY CLARK: Exactly. But so I take the kids there one morning to skate and we get busted right away by this cop who looks like Robert Patrick from Terminator 2 saying, “Where are you kids from?” “We’re from South Central.” And I say, “I picked them up in South Central, we’re making a movie.” I showed him my DGA card. Right away, South Central, these kids are brown, he makes us sit on the sidewalk for an hour and a half and gives everybody tickets. And it was just like that scene. And he says, “I’ve been warning you skaters for three months, you can’t skate here.” They’d never been there before, what are you talking about? They come from South Central! And he goes, “Oh South Central, what else are you doing here? And why are you going to South Central? Why are you picking up these kids?” And he gave everybody a ticket. I said, “These kids have to go to Santa Monica courthouse? They live 26 miles away. They live with their mothers. How are they going to get them to court?” And he says, “I don’t care. It’s your problem. You brought them here, you take them to court.” And I said, “In the three months that you’ve been warning skaters, how many have you given tickets to?” And he said, “You’re the first.”
CHRIS NEUMER: Shocking.
LARRY CLARK: So that scene really happened. I had to take the kids to court, and then I wasn’t their parent, so I had to go back, reschedule, bring the parents to court one morning and pay their fine. And so I put that scene in the movie. That really happened like that.
