Breaking the rules

Outside the stoner-student contingent, few can have had high hopes for Roger Avary’s film adaptation of The Rules Of Attraction. Despite Avary’s contribution as a writer to the magnificently groundbreaking Pulp Fiction (a contribution that was disputed, but later acknowledged by Avary’s former best mate and the script’s co-author, Quentin Tarantino), his debut feature as a director was the utterly disappointing Killing Zoe, while the source novel The Rules Of Attraction, is a thoroughly nasty and poorly-written satirical effort from Bret Easton Ellis.

Against all odds then, Avary’s film is stylistically audacious, well-crafted and even manages to wring humour out of its grim bunch of privileged American college types, who are so terminally bored with their affluent existences that even being raped barely registers.

Not surprising then, that the film sent shockwaves through the audience at the London Film Festival last year, prompting fits of puking and fainting in the auditorium. But hey, as Roger Avary put it when I caught up with him recently, you just can’t buy publicity like that.

TB: Because you were friends with Quentin Tarantino when you were both still video store clerks, I think I’ve inadvertently read your life-story through Tarantino biographies. Did you have input into any of them?

RA: Yeah, that was all so weird, because lots of books were rushed out to capitalise on Quentin’s success, and hardly any of them had any basis in reality. There was one written by one of the producers of Natural Born Killers, and she actually was the only person to call up and asked me to fact check stuff, and I was like, thank you because so much has been written that is incorrect. So she gives it to me, and I read it, and her account of the history – sorry I know that sounds so pompous – but its wrong. Really wrong. So I met her, and explained to her what really happened, and who did what, and she just goes ‘You know what? That just won’t read as good.’ Why did she even bother sending it to me? Oh, if I had a penny for ever Tarantino book that totally misquotes me...

TB: Well, there’s still time to write one yourself...

RA: It’s funny that you should say that, because I’ve actually been writing ever since I began my film career. I’ve been keeping note of everything, and I’m not going to release it until I’m into my eighties about to die and everyone else is dead. Scratch that. I’m not going to release it until I’m into my hundred and twenties, or at least until my career is over. I’ve heard a lot of creepy stories since I started on movies.

TB: Speaking of creepy stories, didn’t you and Quentin get your first gig on a Dolph Lungren fitness video? Who had to grease him up?

RA: Oh, it was worse than that. We were production assistants – which is the lowest rung of the ladder as you know – and one day we had to go to Venice Beach at five in the morning in the rain. The Assistant Director was there, and he says “Dolph is going to be doing aerobics on this little hillside here, but its covered in dogshit. Can you kindly remove it all? Here’s a couple of paper towels’ So me and Quentin end up picking up dogshit, with our hands, in the rain thinking – Oh my God! We’re in Hollywood! Everyone was laughing at us, and I quickly decided that I was not doing this again. From then on, it was writer/director or nothing.

TB: Was the Bret Easton Ellis novel a complete bitch to adapt, given that it’s completely written utilising interior monolgues?

RA: I first read the novel in college, and it was a small liberal arts college in California, so it was like a West Coast equvilent of the college in Rules. And I remember laughing my ass off at the book, because it was so accurate. I knew that universe. It was one I despised, and it upset me, but I did wallow in it a little bit. So this was something I really wanted to do as a movie, but as you’ve said it’s very complex – there are multiple first persons, often giving conflicting accounts of events. It’s really how everyone’s conflicting perceptions can create a collage of non-reality. So it’s a bit like Trainspotting – you could make twenty different movies from that one book. It took me about thirteen years to figure out how to translate Ellis’ literary devices because when you extract those devices from his work – there’s nothing left.

TB: You mean the way that he’s all style, little substance?

RA: Well, if you strip the style away, you’re stripping away a huge part of what makes his material so innovative and exciting. I knew that films and novels have distinct sets of superpowers, and I thought about cinematic devices that would compliment his literary devices, like running the film backwards, and so on.

TB: You have had trouble with the censors in the US over the gang-rape scene. Was it a difficult scene to shoot?

RA: Yeah, absolutely. It was much harder for me than for anyone else. Shannyn had absolutely no problem with it at all. It was a little bit physically uncomfortable for her, because of the way I shot it, putting her face on the sheet, but I was traumatised. It was so upsetting, because I love Shannyn. She’s a close friend, and to see her going through that over and over was very difficult for me. So at one point – and this is before the censors were involved at all – I cut out the part where she gets vomited on. But I showed it to her, and she begged me to put it back. She felt it was so extreme, and so monumentally horrible, that to remove it would trivialise the scene. So the big cut wasn’t there, it was when the razor-blade runs up the arm during the suicide scene. It was there longer originally, because it was very personal to me, as I had a friend who committed suicide that way. I was weeping when I edited it, but I had to trim about twenty two seconds. The other thing I had to cut was a couple dry-humping, and two girls with shaved private parts at the dressed to get screwed party. The US censors considered the dry-humping and the nudity offensive. So yeah, I did have to take stuff out.

TB: And yet it still had them fainting in the isles at the London Film Festival...

RA: I know. That was so weird. It’s not the razor-blade that kills you. It’s her face. Normally in a movie, you are a detached third person, you can watch with a modicum of safety. So I like to get audiences involved more directly. I had heard about people that had fainted during the suicide scene because people had e-mailed my website to say, that the scene made them nauseous, that they were very upset and crying, that kind of thing. But they were positive about it. They thanked me, and stuff, but these were only e-mails. It was only at the screening at the festival that I saw this for myself. I was standing at the back, and this guy comes staggering up the isle during the suicide scene. Then he just starts falling backwards and the next thing is that he’s out cold. I sit him up, and start apologising to him.

TB: Did you straight away think – I can’t buy publicity like this?

RA: Oh yeah, I immediately said to the guy next to me – Get me a video camera, we can interview this guy. It’ll be the perfect antidote to those trailers where you see lots of people leaving the cinema going – I loved it! But everyone looked at me like I was Hannibal Lecter. The next thing – another guy faints, and then another! Then paramedics come bursting through the door. The producer comes up to me, and says ‘They’re dropping like flies! I hope you’re happy!’ But then there was this couple making out through the whole thing. Now that’s really freaky.