Tribeca 2005 Report: Mysterious Skin

Doors opened about thirty minutes late for Saturday night's screening of Gregg Araki's latest, Mysterious Skin. Waiting outside Pace University in the rain, the woman in front of me had no problem voicing her dissent. "Four years it's been like this!" she said. "The screenings always start late, the venues are awful, the films are oversold - there's no way everyone in this line is getting into this thing."

She was wrong on that last one - when we finally were allowed to enter the auditorium, I spotted several empty seats. But it seems like most of the "buzz" going around Tribeca has less to do with Tribeca's films, and more to do with various faults with the festival's administration. Araki actually made a snarky comment about it at the start of his Q & A: when he, actors Brady Corbet and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Mysterious Skin author Scott Heim hit the stage, there was only one microphone for the four of them. After asking a volunteer for additional mics, Araki muttered, "We're so well run here." Ouch.

But for the most part, like the film itself, Mysterious Skin's Q & A was a joy to attend, because everyone involved seemed incredibly enthusiastic about the film. With good reason - I think it's a rather astonishing piece. I'll post a full review of it soon, but I'll say that it's a huge leap forward for Araki, a filmmaker best known for The Doom Generation and other mid-90s exercises in countercultural excess, and surely the strongest film I've seen at Tribeca thus far. Click through for excerpts from the post-screening discussion after the jump.

The first question tackled the elephant in the room: how did Araki deal with shooting scenes depicting child sexual abuse - which are absolutely crucial to the film - using actual eight-year-old-boys, without actually subjecting the actors to anything inappropriate?

Araki answered that it was important for him to present the scenes in a direct way - "I didn't want to have a kind of Lifetime movie hazy flashback". He explained that, through careful storyboarding, he was able to protect the two 8-year-old actors from the actual content of the film. "It was very important to me to not make a film about childhood trauma and traumatize two young boys in the making of it." That said, the actors (who each have quite a bit of screen time) are in the odd situation where they're really too young to actually see it. "Maybe I should make a film about the first time they watch the film," Araki joked.

Music is crucial to Mysterious Skin - and yes, Araki's still listening to all of our favorite early-90s shoegazer hits - but it's used somewhat differently than in his previous films. Araki admitted that the soundtracks to his other films were comprised of source cues - snippits of previously recorded songs - and said that this is the first film he's made with a specially commissioned score (by Harold Budd and Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie).

A viewer asked the assembled filmmakers if they had been inspired by Lolita. Araki politely brushed it off like the silly question it was ("The film is a very faithful adaptation of Scott's fabulous book"), but Levitt joked, "I was. I was inspired by Lolita. She was a very sexy girl in that book."

Set mostly in Kansas, the cast admitted that the film was shot almost entirely in LA. "We were the only non-pornographic production in the Valley," joked Corbet, who was 14(!) at the time of the shoot.

Scott Heim, who published the novel on which the film is based in 1995, played a major role in the making of the film. Levitt (who stars as Neil, the teenage hustler with the heart of coal-encrusted-gold) went to Kansas and spent a week with Heim and his family; the writer and actor became friends, making a cheapie horror film together. Heim's view of Araki's adaptation? "I'm so happy with it. I love it so much." he gushed. "I think it would be easy for a director to get the story right, but it's so hard to get the characters and atmosphere right."