Roger Avary: THE RULES OF ATTRACTION
Lions Gate Entertainment is currently releasing The Rules of Attraction, Academy Award-winning writer/director ROGER AVERY’s scathingly insightful film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s brutal and funny social satire about life and love amongst the young and privileged. Avery, who won his Oscar as a co-writer for the film Pulp Fiction, also directed the cult classic Killing Zoe, which starred Eric Stoltz.
IFQ was privileged enough to sit down with Roger and have an intimate conversation about his life, film and song.
IFQ: One of our representatives had seen the rough cut of The Rules Of Attraction and felt that it was “pushing the envelope,” so to speak. Any MPAA scenarios right now? What kind of changes do you think you might have to make if you want to achieve an “R” rating, or do you think that the film will be “R” as is?
R.A. One would think that it would receive an “R” rating since, content-wise, there really isn’t anything any more extreme in the film than anything else you’ve ever seen. Since there is social criticism, social satire approaches the hyper-realistic. What nihilist fashion takes its criticism seriously?
IFQ: What is happening with the MPAA? Are they still on the fence? What rating are they giving you?
R.A. Well, thus far we’ve been slapped with NC-17 .
IFQ: Based on what content?
R.A. Well, it’s not actually NC-17 because of content, its NC-17 because of context, which is very different. If it was on the loan, I believe we would have had an”R” right away. The MPAA is a special interest lobby, which is financed by the big studios along with the Association of Theater Artists and right-wing Christian conservatives. They have a very specific agenda. Let’s say Paramount or Universal has a problem with the rating or the classification of a rating that they’re delivering to them. They can always call up Jeff Monty and say, “You’re busting our balls,” and they’ll somehow take care of it.
IFQ: Very interesting.
R.A. That’s my opinion. I think it’s a highly flawed system, honestly.
IFQ: How many screens do you plan to show on domestically?
R.A. Anywhere from 800 to 1500, which is very wide for Lions Gate.
IFQ: What do they normally do?
R.A. It depends on the film. I don’t know the numbers for all their other movies exactly, but Monster’s Ball initially released on just fifty screens until it started getting acclaim, and then they proceeded to open it up wide.
IFQ: Let’s talk about Bret Easton Ellis and his novels. What was it about the novels that moved you?
R.A. I had read Less Than Zero when I was in college. The Rules of Attraction followed it. It reminded me of the college I went to.
IFQ: What was college like for you?
R.A. Privileged kids who were free for the first time in their lives, doing drugs and having sex, doing what college kids do when they go away to school or what kids should do when they go away to school. So I’m reading this book and it’s a social satire. It’s a criticism about the luxurious debauchery of the ruling class and how the weight of amorality/immorality causes their social structure to collapse. It’s about a class of people dancing on the river of a volcano. It struck me as a movie that I just had to make.
IFQ: How long was that whole process for you?
R.A. About thirteen years. At first, I was just thinking about it, not really writing, just thinking.
IFQ: When you decided to adapt it, how long did that process take?
R.A. About a month. With me, the writing part is just the script. It’s all in my head before I sit down and write. I didn’t own the rights to the book, so I put it in a drawer and left it there for eight months. Greg Shapiro, the producer of the film, knew that I had it. He kept nagging me for it, saying, “That’s the one I want to read, that’s the one I want to read.” I kept saying, “No, no, no. It would never get made.” I felt that it was too weird of a screenplay.
IFQ: The way you told the story using layers and working somewhat in reverse order was great. Was it like that in the novel?
R.A. No, the movie is impossible to adapt from the novel, which is why it took over thirteen years of thinking about it before I wrote it. The novel itself is written in forty, maybe fifty first-person narratives. Each chapter is told from a different point of view, and all of them are usually the points of view of similar events that are conflicting perspectives as to what had happened. The book is completely nonlinear – you’ll read one chapter from the point of view of Sean, and thirty pages later Paul’s point of view comes up and he’s referencing the same event. It’s almost a nonlinear stream of consciousness. When I sat down to write it, I was wondering how you bend parallel views of the same event into a movie without just cutting and pasting. I had practiced with this in Pulp Fiction, trying to understand different characters’ perspectives of the same event.
IFQ: With that kind of structure, how was it broken down for your cinematographer, Robert Brinkmann?
R.A. Well, when you see the screenplay, you’ll see that it was written with incredible detail. You have a blueprint and start working on it. As you run into problems with your construction, you modify your blueprint a little bit. I went to Robert and said what I really want to do is have everything in reverse. I wanted to run the film in reverse cause when you optically roll the film backwards, there’s a different effect than when you print it backward because of the way the shutters work. Our first objective was to shoot the film with two cameras so we would have forward and the reverse motions together.
IFQ: Clever.
R.A. Then what I would do is use whichever one I’d need for that moment. That way I could make up shots without printing up opticals. I also wanted to maintain the dignity of the negative.
IFQ: What was it about the color purple, and why the heavy usage in the film?
R.A. It’s in the book. Purple letters are being described everywhere. They struck me as a sort of innocence. Also, purple is complementary to green and other earth tones, so I just went with it. I love the color purple.
IFQ: Let’s talk about the character Sean, played by James Van Der Beek.
R.A. Yeah, personally, I haven’t really seen too many episodes of Dawson’s Creek. I did see Varsity Blues, which I actually quite liked. James had an intensity which I really liked, and when his name was brought up as a possibility for Sean, I was like, Dawson? And then I met with him, and immediately saw the intensity he had. Many people don’t give him credit and don’t realize that he was a Broadway actor. It’s a testament to how immensely talented he is. It was fabulous to work with him.
IFQ: How was he in working with Ian Somerhalder (who plays Paul Denton) and Shannyn Sossamon (Lauren Hynde)? They’re all so diversely different.
R.A. The trick about being a director is that there is no single way of extracting a performance out of someone. James came in very prepared with a very specific point of view. Sometimes he needed the understanding of what he was doing, but as soon as you gave him the tools, he was amazing. Shannyn, she is the exact opposite. She’s like a wild animal you can’t really control. What she does and what she brings is complete and honest truth to the scene. Something real.
IFQ: The films that you’re most recognized for seem to have characters with a sort of self-destructive nature, yet there’s some sort of intimacy.
R.A. Tragic anti-heroes? Well, it’s because they come with internal conflict. To me, it’s the solstice way of life, as internal journey and internal struggle affect external journey and external struggle. If you can conquer them both, you can conquer the universe. Anyone who journeys through the depths of characters are the most diverse, heroic individuals. There are two types of movies in my point of view. There’s the escapist, where you go to the movie and leave your life behind, and you watch the film and you kind of lose yourself in it, and then when the movie’s over it just immediately fades from you, and all it was was a method of departing your own life behind. Then there is the kind where your life begins when you leave the theater and it stays with you, and as you’re thinking about it, it conjures questions in your head. I know my film definitely polarized audiences – you either love it or you hate it. There is no in-between. But what occurs when people leave my films is half of them who love the film and half of them who hate the film leave the theater talking about it or arguing about it. What that does is it builds a bridge of communication.
IFQ: What are your final words to any writers or directors trying to get their project green-lighted, not discriminating between projects aligned with a distributor or if its an independent project?
R.A. Well, after I did Killing Zoe, I literally went through a long period where I tried to get another feature film made, and I had meetings set up with studios. Maybe not the biggest financial hit, but it brought in a lot of money anyway and had just such a high profile. It got me a lot of attention at the Academy Awards. And I was setting up deals all over the place, and I had a number of films I was trying to get made. Nothing happened with them, and what I was really trying to do at the end of the day was say fuck it! I just want to do something – anything – and I was at the point literally where the sloppiest was to direct a film, never thinking it would happen. I wrote it for myself because I didn’t own the rights to the book. So the difference between this movie and all the other projects that I’ve done is that it was for passion. I realize the reason it got made. The reason it got made is because I was passionate about it, very intensely passionate about it, and I wanted to make it for myself. That’s when I kind of realized that me, when I make movies, I’m not like a kind of mad filmmaker, and I respect people who are able to direct films for the sake of high art. I realize that why people respond to me is because of my passion and what they want out of me is personal films and experience. Because when I go to the movies, the reason I go to see a movie is to try and capture that dreamlike quality of looking through someone else’s eyes. That’s what’s beautiful and unique about cinema. That you’re looking through someone else’s psychology. And one last thing: When you go to see a movie of mine – and I don’t mean to sound like a pompous ass – but when you go to see a film of mine, you’re going to see me naked!
Steven Szklarski