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he Oklahoma-born photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark has been scandalizing the culture since 1971, with the publication of his first book of photographs, Tulsa, depicting the drug-soaked, dead-end lives of his friends. But he really burst into the stratosphere of cultural relevance with the 1995 film Kids (which also introduced us to such young actors as Chloe Sevigny, Rosario Dawson, and Justin Pierce). Since then, Clark's provocative ability to depict youth culture and its sense of sexual abandon has guaranteed him both a serious cult following and a sizable group of detractors. His 2002 film, Ken Park , which turned up the provocation knob up to eleven with scenes of explicit sex, is still not released in the US — not for any ratings issues, but because its music was never cleared by an AWOL producer.

Clark's latest, Wassup Rockers , takes a look at a group of teenage Latino skateboarders in Los Angeles, who find themselves as outsiders to ghetto culture thanks to their unique style of wearing tight clothes, growing their hair long, and listening to punk music. The film takes the kids on a day of traveling through the well-heeled neighborhood of Beverly Hills, sparked by a sexual encounter with two rich white girls - think The Warriors meets Alice in Wonderland , but with more skin. It's a surprisingly lighthearted film for Clark. Luckily, he's showing no signs of going soft; this year will also see the release of Destricted, an omnibus film about pornography for which he contributed a stunning documentary segment — one that sees him trying out young men interested in becoming porn actors, then having the winner go at it with the porn star of his choice. Larry Clark spoke with Hooksexup in New York. — Bilge Ebiri

Am I crazy, or is Wassup Rockers the most upbeat picture you've ever made?
Yeah. The first half of the film does basically recreate these kids' lives in South Central; but then I take them on this crazy adventure through Beverly Hills where we fuck with the white people. It is a positive film. I wanted you to see these kids.   It's about them trying to navigate a very difficult environment, among the white people of Beverly Hills.

You run the gamut of styles here. The film starts off with a straight-up documentary interview.
The opening four minutes is a documentary. It's Jonathan [Velasquez], when I first met him, telling me about his friends and his life. That little interview wasn't meant to be a part of the film. But some of the things that happen in the film were things he told us about, a year earlier. After I shot and edited the film, I revisited that video I made with him. It was interesting to me as a filmmaker to put it in.

So, where did the idea for the film itself come from?
I was photographing Tiffany Limos, who was in Ken Park, for a French magazine, when it was opening in Paris. I was going to photograph her in LA with the kids from Ken Park, but they weren't around. So I decided we'd just find some skaters. We went down to Venice Beach and met Porky and Kiko. They really stuck out; their clothes were too little for them, they'd written all over their jeans with magic markers, and their shoes, which were falling apart, had been painted with a can of spray paint. Visually, it was really interesting. They wound up taking us out to South Central, where we met Kiko's brother Carlos and Jonathan's brother Eddie. And we took them all over LA for the next four days, to all these skate spots, photographing them. The magazine was so enchanted that they gave us twenty-two pages and two covers. They had a cover with Tiffany and a cover with fourteen-year-old Jonathan, this man-child whom the camera just loves. Girls love him, too. The parents were amazed, I was amazed, the kids were amazed.

Afterwards, I started taking them skating again, and eventually began thinking, "People should see these kids." One of the first things they had told us was about the peer pressure in the ghetto. Because they wore tight clothes and grew their hair long. They were punk rockers, and they had to fight to be themselves. The style in the ghetto is gangsta. Baggy clothes and you cut off your hair and smoke pot and act all gangsta. These kids didn't want to do that. They got teased all the time. The peer pressure there seemed to be stronger there than anywhere else. That's where the story started out.

It's interesting that we don't see the parents much.
I'm showing the world from these kids' perspective. Somebody wrote something. They had liked the film, begrudgingly, and admitted I was the first guy to deal with this stuff. But then they asked why I didn't show the parents, and their struggle as immigrants, and what they thought of their kids' music and all that. All I could think was, "Make your own fucking movie!" That's not what my film is about.

How was your own relationship with the parents of these kids?
Very good. I know the parents well. I know the kids well. I took a long time to get this movie done. We've been at it for three years now. And the parents know I'm concerned about the kids and that I care for them.

The kids keep saying, "I'm from the ghetto." Like it was some kind of mantra. It was interesting to hear them refer to their own neighborhood as the ghetto. As a white person, I'd be uncomfortable at calling it that if I were around them.
Kiko said, "I'm from the ghetto," when I first met him. That's what they say. They are from the ghetto, from the hood. And that's a specific area where there are street gangs everywhere. I just kept adding it in when we were shooting. The film is in part about the racial politics of the ghetto, which you wouldn't know about unless you were black or Latino and happened to live there. Sometimes I think I've made the real Crash . It does show the reality of living in South Central from these kids' perspective. But then I take them on this crazy adventure in the second half of the film.

Which also reminded me of The Swimmer , for some reason.
It's Walter Hill meets John Cheever! When I first decided I wanted them to go to Beverly Hills and meet some white girls and have sex with them, I was thinking about Paris and Nicky Hilton, who were in the news all the time — way before the sex tapes, just from when they were in the news going to clubs every night. I was trying to find a narrative way to get these kids out of the ghetto, and I thought, "Well, what if Paris and Nicky drive by in their convertible?" That was the beginning spark.

Once I got them out of Beverly Hills, and into these backyards, where they had to get back home, I was thinking first of The Warriors. I always loved that film. They're trapped, and who's going to help them? Who else is in Beverly Hills? It'd be the gardeners, the maids, and people like them. But then I started thinking of The Swimmer, which was one of my favorite movies. Burt Lancaster swimming back home pool by pool, through the backyards. He was pretty incredible in that movie.

Joan Rivers was pretty good, too...
That's right! Joan Rivers was in that, wasn't she?? [Laughs.]

What did the kids think of Beverly Hills?
We were going out of the ghetto every week, and they thought seeing all these white people was pretty funny. They'd never been to a restaurant where you didn't have to pay first. Where they live, you pay first, then you get your food through a slot, through bulletproof plastic. They were always asking questions. Especially about the ways people dressed. I explained to them about the clothes in the skate shops. About how the fashion industry has taken this skater style and now is making millions of dollars. I told them, "The way you're dressed, the way you draw on your pants...the fashion world will see that and copy what you wear. They'll have designers doing the same things you do and charging 300,400 bucks for them." And sure enough, the last eight or nine months now, there are all sorts of articles about fashion designers doing it. And I swear to God, someone just asked me a couple of weeks ago, "Larry, if these ghetto kids are so poor, why are they wearing $300 pairs of jeans?" I swear to God I'm not making that up!

The fashion world's appropriation of a style is something you're familiar with, from what happened with your photos.
Yes. On and on and on and on and on. I was making those photographs as reality. I wasn't selling a goddamn thing, especially clothes. Fashion photographers took that and started selling it as heroin chic, and I got blamed for that! Now it's just part of the culture, naked kids selling clothes. When I was doing it, I felt like I was just showing what these people looked like. And I got challenged, too. Because when you say you're trying to represent reality, you get challenged. But I was right. I was early. On Kids we showed and talked about things that were all over the news within a couple of years. The same is true now. The Latino population is all over the news now.

Are you worried about comparisons to Kids?
The only similarity is that these kids aren't actors, either. Or they're natural actors, which is a better way to put it. Every generation has strange kids. I saw this week that Kids was one of the most controversial movies of all time. Right up there with Birth of a Nation ! I'm just grateful that I'm able to make these movies. Is it true Wassup Rockers was the hardest shoot you ever had?

Yeah, cause the kids were so wild. They've got one foot firmly in childhood, one foot firmly in adolescence. I had to make the movie when I made it, before they got a little older. I wanted them to still be little kids to a certain extent. But that also meant I couldn't tell them to shut up and sit down, and then tell them to act crazy on cue. They had to be themselves. It was their little world and everything else was a prop, unreal. It was great for the film, but it was very tough on the crew and tough for me. It's hard, hard work, to get these kinds of performances.

Explain your episode of Destricted. It's generally acknowledged as being the craziest of the group. How did that come about?
Someone in the art world, Neville Wakefield, had the idea of doing this film and asking these artists and filmmakers for their take on porn. You could do anything you wanted to do, it just had to be twenty minutes or less. That was the only rule. I broke the only rule. [Laughs.] Mine was like thirty-eight minutes. It's an educational film in that way. I'm amazed and shocked by it myself.

I had this premise, and I was curious to explore it. The premise was that anybody born in 1980 or after has grown up with easily available pornography. You see it whether you want to see it or not, in many cases when you're a young teen. Seeing hardcore porn that available — tons of it — at that age...how does that affect your perception of what sex is like? How does it affect your attitude towards everything? In the film we see these kids talking about it, about how it's affected their lives. It's so interesting. It's worked out so well. I had no idea what it was going to be like.  n°