"It seems like exactly the wrong film to make"

Arguably, he has. It's doubtful that the content here will shock anybody, with names like Avary and Ellis attached: dorm-room porn shoots, a doped-up Fred Savage feeling for his own dick, gang-bangs, pistol whippings, a guy vomiting on a girl as she loses her virginity ... it's hard to be new again, you know?

That said, Avary's hyperrealized vision of Ellis' multiple-first-person novel is where the argument about "Rules of Attraction" will begin. Avary has put himself squarely in the middle of the loudest debate in movies, the whining over undisciplined, unpredictable, unruly form-breaking films like "Moulin Rouge," "Full Frontal" or "Waking Life."

Avary rewinds whole scenes before us, realizes multiple points of view at once, splits screens to capture two points of view and then fuses them when the two people meet. His camera backtracks to other characters and then plays the same scene with the same people from different vantages. Scenes not directly linked to the plot can feel arbitrary and pointless. Others, like the European excursion, feel like classic New Wave liberation.

For Avary it was about capturing Ellis' Faulknerian storytelling mode, not plot or dialogue. "I worked with multiple narratives on 'Pulp Fiction,'" says Avary. "And Bret's novel is composed of multiple first-person narratives, each a chapter told by a different person. And they're all talking about various events, sometimes the same event with completely different perceptions of reality.

"It's an impossible structure to turn into normal, narrative form. But to strip away Bret's structure is to rob yourself of what makes him so unique. I wanted that literary device. And if you're doing multiple perceptions of the same moment and you just cut, the way we did in 'Pulp Fiction,' then you sever the characters both in their timeline and psychology. The key isn't to cut, but to play out the scene and pull back to another part of the room. That way you're actually uniting the timelines as one and making sure everybody is connected."

That's probably more theory than most "Dawson's Creek" fans need, but it gives an insight into how Avary has learned to balance his sensibility with the marketplace. And it took a while, let's say eight years, for the lessons to sink in.

Way back when, "Pulp Fiction" clearly left Avary in Tarantino's shadow. Yet the more Avary distanced himself from "Pulp Fiction" to establish an independent reputation, the further away he got from getting a movie made. "The only movies I was ever offered were these neo-noir crime thrillers, which I never cared for. I only wrote 'Killing Zoe' because my producer, Lawrence Bender, found a bank to shoot in. It wasn't because I had this love for bank-robbery films."

Instead, Avary tried everything but a crime film. He and comics writer and novelist Neil Gaiman planned to adapt Gaiman's ethereal "Sandman" -- not exactly "Spider-Man"-type blockbuster material. When the studio balked, they wrote a screenplay based on the Anglo-Saxon monster epic "Beowulf" that went nowhere fast. Finally, there was the film closest to Avary's heart, his biography of Salvador Dalí. (He even named his daughter after Dalí's wife and muse, Gala.)

Al Pacino was set to play the legendary surrealist painter, but the film fell apart at the last minute over budget issues. "Pacino wanted more money," sighs Avary. "Not for himself. He wanted it for the budget of the film, so, and I quote, 'I can use all my paints.'"

Which brings us up to "Rules of Attraction" and Roger Avary directing a teen film. "Part of the trick of getting a movie made is establishing yourself in a genre," he says. "Then you at least have that as a marketing tool. Look at Kubrick, that's what he did: science fiction, war, horror, crime.

"I knew I needed to make a movie as if I was a first-time filmmaker," Avary goes on. "A first-time filmmaker wants to make a loud splash. I couldn't just go out and make a mellow movie. I had to make a furious, voluminous film. Something that utilizes all the talent that I have and all the tricks I have up my sleeve and do things that people haven't done before and use inventive crazy structure. I needed to make something that screamed out 'I'm here!' I'm hoping people will say 'Wow, if he can do that, imagine what he could do with our crap!'"

Avary pauses, perhaps thinking over the last eight years. "Maybe you should take out that last word."

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