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Gregg Araki

KABOOM! THE FILMS OF GREGG ARAKI at TIFF Cinematheque (TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King West), from Friday (April 8) to April 20. 416-968-3456. See listing. Rating: NNNN


In the middle of the 2010 toronto Film Festival, Gregg Araki and I are talking about how much nicer the end of the world feels these days.

The last time Araki made a movie about civilization’s last gasps, in 1995, he gave us The Doom Generation – an insistently nihilistic road movie that featured James Duval, Rose McGowan and Johnathon Schaech driving through a wasteland of American convenience stores.

Now Araki has a much more upbeat outlook on the apocalypse, as you’ll see in his new film, Kaboom, which stars Thomas Dekker as Smith, a sexually omnivorous film student led by his dick into a bizarre, culty underworld that may or may not be trying to bring about the end of days.

“I wanted to be funny and sexy and also scary,” Araki says, still jazzed from a packed screening the night before. “All these different genres, and this mystery – this is a world where anything could happen, where the rules were completely open and there wasn’t anything that was like, ‘Oh, this is too weird’ or ‘You can’t do this people will get confused.” Just let it be what it wanted to be.”

Kaboom opens at TIFF Bell Lightbox on Friday. It’s also the anchor for a TIFF Cinematheque retrospective of Araki’s films that gives viewers the opportunity to watch the director evolve from provocateur to artist at high speed. (The director will be present to introduce Friday’s screenings of Kaboom and The Living End, and appears in conversation with Noah Cowan at 7 pm Saturday.)

Araki’s is a wildly varied body of work, moving from the ragged mission statements of The Living End, Totally Fucked Up and Nowhere to a more optimistic and encouraging vision of humanity in films like Splendor, Mysterious Skin and the unlikely stoner comedy Smiley Face.

“I have a personal peeve about filmmakers who make the same movie over and over again, only with a different title and a couple of different actors in it,” he says. I like to challenge myself and do things that are different – and [Kaboom] was, in a way, almost a liberation. I set out to make something that was very creatively free-spirited. I didn’t want to censor myself or dilute the story in any way.”

The TIFF retrospective also includes Araki’s rarely seen early features Three Bewildered People In The Night and The Long Weekend (O’ Despair). For the director, going back to them has been a little odd, to say the least.

“I had to watch it again recently,” he says of Three Bewildered People, “and it literally has the same scene as Kaboom – the sorta-gay guy and his best girl friend hanging out in a coffee shop, having pancakes in the middle of the night.

“So many of the same motifs, repeated again and again.”

As long as the movies are different.

Interview Clips

Gregg Araki on developing Kaboom:

Download associated audio clip.

Araki on the film’s actors:

Download associated audio clip.

Araki on watching the film with a TIFF audience:

Download associated audio clip.

Araki on the possibility of making a studio movie:

Download associated audio clip.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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