About Gregg · Gregg Araki

Gregg Araki grew up in south California, and from a very young age was drawn to the visual arts, comics and pop music. He graduated in Film Studies from the University of Santa Barbara, and received his Masters in Film Production from USC. Araki wrote, produced and directed his first film, Three Bewildered People In The Night in 1987: a love story between a video artist, her lover and her gay friend. The film won three prizes at Locarno. In 1989, he shot The Long Weekend (O' Despair) in black and white, on 16mm and with a budget of $5,000 - the same as his first film.

Garnering a strong reputation for his uncompromising, nonconformist attitude, Araki truly erupted from the underground in 1992 with The Living End, a film about two HIV positive gay lovers which introduced a much more tragic element to his work. In 1994 he began his "Teen Apocalypse" trilogy with Totally F****ed Up; the subversion continued with The Doom Generation, a road movie marked by a near-despairing black comedy. Araki completed the cycle in 1997 with Nowhere, which he describes as "an episode of "Beverly Hills 90210" on acid".

In 1999, Araki directed Kathleen Robertson, who had already appeared in Nowhere, in the comedy Splendor. After a period working in TV, the director was critically lauded for his treatment of the taboo subject of paedophilia in Mysterious Skin (2005), an adaptation of Scott Heim's eponymous novel. Araki's film Smiley Face screened in Directors'. Fortnight, in 2007, and Kaboom marked Gregg Araki's second selection in Cannes.

// Kaboom Press Kit

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Smith's everyday life in the dorms - hanging out with his arty, sarcastic best friend Stella, hooking up with a beautiful free spirit named London, lusting for his gorgeous but dim surfer roommate Thor - all gets turned upside-down after one fateful, terrifying night. Tripping on some hallucinogenic cookies he ate at a party, Smith is convinced he's witnessed the gruesome murder of an enigmatic Red Haired Girl who has been haunting his dreams. What he discovers as he tries to find out the truth leads him deeper and deeper into a mystery that will forever change not only the course of his young life but the destiny of the entire world.

the womb

Mysterious Skin

"The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life. Five hours, lost, gone without a trace..." These are the words of Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet), a troubled 18 year-old, growing up in the stiflingly small town of Hutchinson, Kansas. Plagued by nightmares, Brian believes that he may have been the victim of an alien abduction. Local Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon Levitt) however, is the ultimate beautiful outsider. With a loving but promiscuous mother (Elisabeth Shue), Neil is wise beyond his years and curious about his developing sexuality, having found what he perceived to be love from his Little League baseball coach (played by Hal Hartley veteran Bill Sage) at a very early age. Now, ten years later, Neil is a teenage hustler, nonchalant about the dangerous path his life is taking. Neil's pursuit of love leads him to New York City, while Brian's voyage of self discovery leads him to Neil -- who helps him to unlock the dark secrets of their past.

Smiley Face

One woman's day goes all to pot in this resinous comedy. Jane (Anna Faris) is a college dropout and aspiring actress who suffers from a certain lack of ambition, doubtless reinforced by her fondness for marijuana. One morning, Jane wakes with a busy day ahead of her -- she has a big audition, she has to pay the electric bill on her apartment to prevent the power from being shut off, and she needs to pick up some pot after paying her debt to her dealer -- and decides to take the edge off her anxieties by getting a little stoned.

Under the influence, the cupcakes her roommate Steve (Danny Masterson) has made for his friends to enjoy at the weekend's Sci-Fi convention look too good to resist, and she gobbles them down. What Jane doesn't realize until it's too late is that the baked goods were laced with some especially strong marijuana, and what starts as a pleasant buzz turns into a world-class high that refuses to go away. As Jane struggles to make her way through the day, fate keeps throwing her into strange and surreal situations involving police officers, Steve's lovesick best friend, and a rare original manuscript of The Communist Manifesto.

The Doom Generation

Billed as "a heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki," The Doom Generation is the director's self-styled bad-taste teen film. Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) is an obnoxious teenage speed freak and her boyfriend Jordan White (James Duval) is a passive, slow-witted poseur who won't have sex with her because he's terrified of AIDS (even though they both claim to be virgins). One day, they run across Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech), a charming but enigmatic drifter who has a bad habit of killing people. Joining the young couple on a seemingly endless road trip, Xavier (or "X,"as the verbally challenged Jordan insists on calling him), proves a threatening and repulsive yet strangely alluring companion whose very presence raises issues of loyalty and sexual identity.