Hey folks, Harry here... How cool is Roger Avary? Ya know, people often talk and measure success by the amount of box office a film does, the filthy lucre with which the shallow like to wallow. Well RULES OF ATTRACTION came out in the United States and I still get letters from folks that are enjoying the hell out of it. That get it. RULES OF ATTRACTION is a film one discovers or that one wakes up to. It is easy to dismiss on surface level, but then you discover you're wrong and you reconsider, you take that second look, and you realize that it was simply a completely different film than you were expecting and that it does indeed have merit, that it indeed has something on its mind, and that we're just conditioned to look at these movies as vacuous empty sticky substances, when in reality... Like Lex Luthor says, sometimes the ingredients of Bubble Gum unlock the secrets of the Universe. Here's a fellow in London that got to experience the Avary Reality, where he's proud of a damn good film. Confident that he's right, and that presents the film as what he did, not what others wrongfully accuse him of. HERE YA GO...
Rock n' roll
...So I get to the Odeon in Leicester Square for the first showing of Rules Of Attraction and I'm kind of bummed that my seats are on the back, back, back row and then an eight foot giant and his equally tall girlfriend slump into the seats in front of me blocking out the entire screen so I kind of half-sit half-stand just to get a view as the lights dim and Roger Avary comes bounding onto the stage at the front and it's when he starts talking that I realise that this is a guy who really deserves to be directing films as he has a real passion for it that's contagious and in the space of a few seconds the whole cinema crowd is buzzing with anticipation for this film. Most other directors take the opposite route, going for the laidback "yeah, I made a film, so what?"-approach. Not Avary.
Damn, I wish I'd brought my notebook as it's hard to remember all the stuff he was saying as he said it in machine-gun fashion, with hardly any full-stops or commas in his talking, kind of like the way Brett Easton Ellis wrote the original book, which this film really captures in spirit even if it does deviate from it quite radically.
And the way he introduced himself was pure gold. Anyone who can stroll out in front of a 300 hundred strong audience and hold his arms out wide proclaiming, "I am the God of all Hellfire" gets my vote. He seems really, really excited with the film he has created saying that when he first started the adaptation process he wasn't fully aware of what it would become and only as he worked at it and worked at it did it start to grow and expand in new directions.
He said that his aim in making the film was to capture the reality and the melancholy that goes with being a student as opposed to all the other films that deal with college/university life making it into a comedy. As he said, "are these really the kinds of films that we want to represent us and the experiences we've all had?" The man has a point. Stuff like The Breakfast Club and American Pie seem so alien to my way of thinking they may as well be set on Mars.
He described films as falling into two categories. The first being the escapist film, where people go see the film and just escape from reality for two hours. The second, and the one he's interested in, is the kind that starts after you've left the cinema (in his words, "spreading like a virus and occupying your thoughts for days and weeks after"). This film is definitely one of those.
Talking about the adaptation process, he went on to say that he started reading the book 13 years ago and then began writing it two years ago when he felt he was old enough to be distant from his own college days but not too old to be out of touch with the audience he was trying to reach.
He did say that he was glad to be back in London after he'd originally been here filming the Victor-cam holiday montage and described how he'd follow Kip Pardue with his camera while he went on the pull and, on one occasion, wound up in a hotel room recording the actor and whatever-girl-he-had-nabbed getting ready to get down and dirty while, in the background, he would bark orders at them "okay, now take her blouse off. Get your hands up in there." Shit, this film sounds like it was a blast to film.
There was other stuff, but it was all said so quick that it scrambled my brain.
... And so we watched the film and I won't review it here as I know you've already had about twenty reviews on the website, but I'll say that I genuinely liked it and especially liked the references to The Wicker Man and Walking Tall while picking up on a few geographical references in Victor's montage that may have passed others by (a 'Bateman Street' street-sign in London is given a momentary close up. It does actually exist in London, my girlfriend works one road down from it. And Victor goes into Virgin Megastore in Camden (same name as the college in the film) Town, London). I especially liked the scenes with the drug dealer and his henchman: "I need you like I need an asshole on my elbow, you muthaf*ckin' muthaf*cka!" Priceless.
And this is where I became convinced that Roger Avary is the real deal. He stayed and watched the whole film from the back of the cinema, about three feet from where I was sat. Now, this may not sound like news, but I've been to a hell of a lot of premieres and film festivals and 99% of directors in attendance run away as soon as the lights go down. Avery stood there grinning like a cheshire cat, getting off on the audience's positive vibes. And even more rarely, he even stuck around to chat to people afterwards. The guy's a gent.
Deal with it.
Jim Lowe
