Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Oscar-winning "Pulp Fiction" screenwriter Roger Avary attacks the teen genre -- and American complacency -- with an audacious adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' "The Rules of Attraction."
Oct 15, 2002 | "I realized that if I didn't make a movie, one thing was certain. I would get beyond the point where anyone would ever let me make a movie again. The excitement had worn off. People knew the story: Roger Avary. Academy Award-winning screenwriter of 'Pulp Fiction.' 'Killing Zoe.' The end."
In a city where last week isn't even a memory, eight years carbon-dates Roger Avary to the prehistoric mid-'90s. An era when gun-toting, nihilistic, comic violence was as big as dinosaur pictures or Pearl Jam, and people asked, "Whatever happened to Steven Soderbergh?"
Times, of course, have changed. Avary and director Quentin Tarantino have each directed one picture since their collaboration on "Pulp Fiction," although they produced, wandered through or script-doctored many others. The two also split, loudly and publicly.
"I saw Quentin at the 'Cat's Meow' premiere" earlier this year, Avary says. "We hugged and chatted and I consider him somebody that I've been close to. But it's been many years since I've talked to him." And that, for the record, is all Avary has to offer on the subject.
It's not like Avary hasn't been busy. He's made a good living as a studio rewrite man, tried getting any number of ambitious films off the ground and, along with his wife, raised their two children.
Life goes on, and now Avary is releasing his long-dreamed-of adaptation of novelist Bret Easton Ellis' collegiate romp, "The Rules of Attraction." It stars James Van Der Beek as Sean Bateman, a college student walking through two worlds. In one, he's a violent, drug-dealing, porn-loving, on-the-run-from-gangsters punk who likes angry sex and coke. In the other, he's still an innocent, sweetly wondering which girl on campus is sending him secret admirer notes filled with glitter and kisses.
It's a strange mix of innocence and loathing, especially in a post-9/11 America searching for its best qualities, not its worst. One wonders now if the works we most associate with Ellis, Tarantino and Avary are simply anachronisms from the flippant high times of a bygone decade.
"It seems like exactly the wrong film to make, doesn't it?" Avary asks. "We were shooting on Sept. 11, which was the death of an innocence. But I was making a movie about the death of innocence. Jean Renoir's 'Rules of the Game' was made just before World War II, and that's an attack on the debauchery of the ruling class. No, it's exactly the right time to make this movie."
A bold statement, as one might have put it long ago. And to embody this attack on decadent values, Avary chose one of our least likely social critics, "Dawson's Creek" teen dream Van Der Beek.
"Well, you know what it is about James?" asks Avary. "When we first sat down to lunch to talk about this movie, he came in with that puppy-dog idol thing going on. But the minute he took off his sunglasses and I saw his eyes, I saw that he's also capable of cold emptiness. And when I saw that, combined with his ingrained likability, then it hit me: I can make a highly subversive teen film. I could drive a stake through all of them."
Indeed, if "Rules of Attraction" is nothing else, it's a corrosive revision of the genre that has topped the box office for many of Avary's MIA years. Consider "American Pie," "Road Trip," "Legally Blonde," "Orange County" and a host of others -- Avary's out to answer all that dumb fun. He opens "Rules" with a grotesque, theater-of-cruelty party scene that outgrosses them all. It's what you expect from the guy who gave us the Gimp. But later, when Avary literally replays the same scene with the same too-hip-to-feel characters, you get beneath the cool and see their hearts broken. Then you get what he means when he throws around clichés like "the death of innocence."
"I watch a lot of teen movies," Avary says. "I like all of John Hughes' movies, except 'Pretty in Pink,' because Molly Ringwald should have gone off with Ducky at the end. But most teen movies are made by people who don't remember what it was like. They're making a big lie, broad comedies which aren't representative of deeper emotions. In your teen years your hormones and feelings are this swinging pendulum. You're going through fits of melancholy and intense love. I wanted that gamut of emotion, that weird, profound time when small moments and broken relationships have such incredible weight and depth. I knew that if I could get that across I could do something really different from a normal teen film."
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