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Gregg Araki - Biography |
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Born December 17th, 1959 in Los Angeles, California, Gregg Araki was drawn to the visual arts, comics and pop music from a very young age. He graduated in Film Studies from the University of Santa Barbara, and received his Masters in Film Production from USC (University of Southern California). Araki wrote, produced and directed his first feature 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 the Locarno Film Festival the same year. 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” presented at the Deauville American Film Festival the same year, 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 for the television with the directing of “This Is How the World Ends” (2000), he 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 next film, the wild comedy “Smiley Face”, screened in 2007 at the Directors’ Fortnight and the Deauville American Film Festival. “Kaboom” is his eleventh feature film. Filmography
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Gregg Araki Director, screenwriter & producer
Gregg Araki