Friday, February 29, 2008
Interview with IONCINEMA











Did an interview with IONCINEMA. Their tag line is: "We heart subtitles." Me too!

1: What are your feelings on Gus Van Sant's interpretation of your
work? What did you like? What (if anything) did you not?

I really liked it. I thought it was fascinating to watch Gus deal with the
problem of how to "show" the thoughts and feelings of this kid, which
in the book, I could describe from the first person point of view. It was also beautiful and had a great flow to it. It was loose and fun,
despite it's subject matter. I loved it. At Cannes, when the Elliott
Smith song started to play at the end, I cried.


2: Do you feel film adaptations "owe" anything to their source
material? If so what?

No. They owe you the money! No, seriously, if they bother to buy the
rights to a novel from you, they obviously value it. I've found that
film people are very respectful of book writers. Perhaps more than
they deserve. Even in the film they made of my first novel, Girl,
which didn't turn out very well, everyone involved was trying very hard
to key into the appeal of the book. But film making is hard!!! Way
harder than writing books. I mostly feel sorry for filmmakers, all the crap they have to deal with, and I wish them luck.



3: Did Gabe Nevins incarnate Alex the way you envisioned him?


Not at first. But that always happens. You have to flush all the
novelist thoughts out of your mind as your watching them shoot it, or
watching the film. You have to forget your book and try to see it as
the director and the actors and the crew is seeing it. In the end I
thought Gabe was great. He's a really interesting kid. He definitely
had this strange enigmatic quality to him that really worked. But at
first I was stuck on things like: he's too tall. His hair doesn't
look right.



4: Was your own experience as a teenager comparable to his? (minus, of
course, the murder)

Yeah, I guess so. But in a way, this book is one of my least
autobiographical. I tried to make the kid an "everyman" type of
character, as ordinary as I could. But the way his brain processed
stuff, after he kills the guard, that's pretty much me, just trying to
imagine what I would think, or what I would do. The interesting thing
is, as different as we all are, we're all pretty similar in how we
think in a really bad situation. Stress reduces us to our most basic
self.



5: Some writers have good experiences with the filmmaking process,
others negative. What has your experience been like and will you
continue to work with film/tv in the future?

I've had good and bad. When I was first starting out, I made the
coolest short film with Jem Cohen, who's now a much esteemed
experimental film director. It's called "Never Change" and it's fantastic. Then MTV made a video out of some spoken word stuff I did
and it was terrible. The worst! Then the Girl film happened and that
went straight to video. It wasn't anybody's fault. They were all
good people, and talented, sometimes things just don't come together.
And now Paranoid, which has been like winning the lottery. Gus is my
favorite film maker. Elliott Smith (who has several songs in the
soundtrack) is my favorite musician. It was like if someone gave you
the ultimate "wish list", that's basically exactly what I got.



6: What other filmmakers do you think would be well suited to adapt
your work?

Anybody that's good and pays attention to character. I'd love to do
another thing with Gus. I also think Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor
are really great at that sort of thing. I just saw Into the Wild and I
thought Sean Penn handled that character's slightly deranged
earnestness perfectly. There's a lot of earnestness in teens, it's a
quality nobody ever dares to show. Unless they're making fun of it.




7: What are some of your upcoming projects?

I have a new book that everyone is excited about called Destroy All
Cars, which is probably my best teenage boy voice I have ever done.
The kid is very funny and sad and charming in that great teen way.
He's kind of heartbreaking, even when he's not trying to be. Which
means the book's probably pretty good.



American Paranoid


Here's the American movie poster for PARANOID PARK. I'm not sure what sort of look this is going for. Sort of horror? I think I liked the Euro one better. But as a kids book writer, I've learned that there's these weird rules of "cover art" that you sort of have to stick too. Certain kind of "looks" that signal to people what they are in for. I think in the Euro Poster, Gabe looks like a prince or something, or a medival knight or monk or something. I love that one. But I guess this gives you a better idea what the movie is going to be.



Euro Paranoid


Here's the Euro Version of the movie poster.


Wednesday, February 27, 2008
DOMINANT JEFFERSON CHEERLEADERS


Still going to see high school basketball games. I have some favorite teams of the various schools, and I like the team from my old high school, Jesuit, who are not all-star all-state types like they have been in recent years. They are young and struggling to make the playoffs which makes them fun to watch.

The Athletic Director there, Mike Hughes, was in my class. He did such a good job that the school was named by Sports Illustrated the best all around high school sports program in the country. They even hung a banner up. But since that day, they have not won a championship of any kind. "It is the SI curse," Mike told me. Which if you're not a sports fan means that if you are ever featured in Sports Illustrated, you are going to lose.

Anyway, so last night I went and saw two teams I hadn't seen before, Jefferson vs. Madison. These schools are from a less affluent school district and don't have the squeaky clean facilities of the nicer schools in the suburbs. But they have very good basketball teams and were really fun to watch.

The cheerleaders from Jefferson were the best cheerleaders I've seen all year. They basically took control of the gym with their amazing power and energy. They crushed the poor Madison cheerleaders, who were pretty good themselves. They didn't do anything fancy, no lifting the girls up, or throwing them around, or doing cutesy modern dance moves. They just did their chants and clapped and stomped and goofed around a little, and they were totally cool and utterly confident and you couldn't take your eyes off of them. They just ROCKED!!!!! And their team killed too. Wow. What fun.

Madison, incidentally, was the school where they filmed PARANOID PARK. I didn't bother to tell anyone there that though. I doubted they would know anything about it. But I did walk the halls a little reminiscing. One interesting thing I came upon, a huge poster showing Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Bo Diddly, and Jean Michel Basquiat. It said something underneath about black history. I was blown away to see Basquiat there though. Do current teenagers even know who he is?

I used to work with Basquiat's girlfriend at this bar in NYC in the late 80s. I used to stash his bike in the coatcheck when he would come visit her. I remember sitting with him at the bar and noticing his terrible acne. He was doing too much drugs, his girlfriend would tell me. Everyone was worried about him. Andy Warhol had already died, and he had been Basquiat's best friend. He did not look good.

The picture they had in the poster at Madison was one of the early pictures, when he's all handsome and wearing a beautiful suit. Boy, I bet he never thought he'd end up in some small town high school on a poster between MLK and Malcolm X. His girlfriend would always tell me to talk to him more, that he was lonely, that the art people freaked him out. I was afraid to say much though. I thought he was the greatest artist of his generation by a mile.

My favorite Basquiat story was one his girlfriend told me: Very early on in his career, before he'd even showed in a gallery yet, this girl from paris appeared at his door and wanted to do her PhD Dissertation on him. Nothing like this had ever happened to him and so he said sure. He was very flattered and intrigued by it. He did all these interviews with her and took her around New York and introduced her to all his friends. The only thing he asked of her was that she send him the dissertation when it was done.

So sure enough years later, the manuscript shows up in his mailbox. The girlfriend and he bring it inside, it's all published and nice and they open it up and it's in French. They can't read a word of it.


Thursday, February 14, 2008
zine scouts


Here's some zine girls I found a picture of while I was looking for a picture of Clutch McBastard, sorry Clutch, couldn't find any.

These girls are San Francisco zine people, they sure have that san franciso look about them, check out how meticulously they did up their "Zine-Scout" costumes. That's the way all stuff like this is in San Francisco. I remember when I was a punk rock teenager and bands would come up from SF to play portland and they'd have a million props and costumes and stuff and we, being sullen portland punks, would be like: who has time to make a bunch of costumes? People in SF.



zine stuff


This is Nicole Georges who has a zine called INVINCIBLE SUMMER which is great. Being out of Portland I had sort of lost touch with the zine world but there is a lot of great stuff in Portland, and elsewhere which I have been missing since I am a big city sell out, or was, or whatever.

She did a talk at the big Library downtown with the guy who does the CLUTCH zine, Clutch McBastard is his name. CLUTCH is a "diary zine" which is a daily summing up of his life in four panels. I love stuff like that. Dailiness. Routine. It was an awesome presentation. The group of punked out girls and young people who showed up to see them was awesome too. So much cool stuff hidden in little corners of the world.



The New Chevy Idiot


Went down to San Francisco to interview Gus Van Sant for the New York Times. A "sweet gig" as people have said. Flew down early and drove around in the city in my economy rent a car. The "Chevy Idiot" I think it was called. Then went and talked to Gus which was fun, and a little hard as I am not a professional interviewer and sort of babbled a bit, and worse, interrupted his answers occasionally. I kicked myself when I was listening back to the tape. "Damn! He was about to say something good!"

After that I walked around the Mission which was sunny and hot and it's been freezing in Portland for like a month so I just sort of collapsed on a park bench and drank in the sun shine. I need the sun. I go bad in the cold dampness. Interestingly, I had asked Gus a bunch of questions about Portland and the climate and what it might do to one's "art". But he wasn't buying my climate-effects-the-artist theories. He thinks you are what you are. I guess he's right. I like to think that things affect me. Maybe nothing does. Maybe I am locked in, stuck in myself forever.

Drove around in the Chevy Idiot some more. Went to some of my old haunts in North Beach. I lived in a transient hotel on Broadway for four months when i was young and out of my mind. So I really know the Vesuvios--City Lights--Chinatown area. The transient hotel, as it always did when I lived there, had several police cars and an ambulance out front. Someone was getting arrested. Someone was crying. Someone was screaming and threatening someone else. This is the San Francisco I remember, when I was young and apparently trying to get myself killed.