James Duval Is Still Grateful for Gregg Araki
As a restored Teen Apocalypse Trilogy is released this week, James Duval reflects on friendship, low-budget filmmaking, and aging.
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by Kathy Del Beccaro
When Jimmy Duval was 18 years old, he had recently moved to Hollywood with a drive to understand himself and find his place in the world. Lucky for us, he met Gregg Araki in a cafe while pondering those questions. Young and equal parts searching and self-assured, James worked with Araki on the ‘90s masterpieces Totally Fucked Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), and Nowhere (1997). In the quarter-century that followed, the Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy maintained a cult following but became difficult to see at all and impossible to view in their full visual glory until new restorations premiered in 2023 and re-energized a wider audience across generations. The Criterion Collection released a box set of the stunning restorations this month.
I spoke with James about the lifelong journey to know oneself and how friendship, low-budget filmmaking, vulnerability, and angst do and don’t change as you get older.
Kathy Del Beccaro: I got the chance to see the premieres of the Doom Generation and Nowhere restorations last year in New York at the IFC Center.
James Duval: Oh, you were there?
Mm-hmm, yeah. So I saw you and Gregg there, and during the Q&A after Doom Generation, you made a comment that Gregg had saved your life multiple times, by making these movies.
Yeah, he certainly did, actually. Yeah.
And in the movies themselves, it's friendship that seems to be the thing saving the lives of your characters and everyone’s characters. What does friendship mean to you? What does friendship have to do with surviving?
That’s everything, really. That was the really poignant moment for me in my life, meeting Gregg at eighteen. At eighteen, most of us don't know what we're doing and who we are or what friendship is. When I read his script, I identified with these characters and their struggles. And what was incredible about that for me was the idea that I really did feel alone and isolated before I met him. And that there was someone out there that listened to the same music, understood all the same struggles and could communicate it in a way I didn't know how to, but that I related to one hundred percent.
What Gregg's friendship showed me was my connection, not just with him and myself, but with other people and other struggles in the world. And that as alone as we all feel sometimes, we really weren't. And that's what friendship is.
I think a perfect example of that relating to Totally Fucked Up, the first movie, is when Andy finds out he's HIV positive. He's a loner and he can handle things, for the most part, better than most people, dealing with his isolation and his solitude and being different. But when he loses his connections with his friends — when he's trying to reach out to them and he can't call them — that disconnect is when he ends up taking his life. My mother reminded me of this recently. She said, “Remember how you always said your friends were your family?” I'm still friends with the same people, thirty two years later. It’s the friends that you can call at any time and say “I'm in trouble,” they're already on their way to see you. They're going to take care of you. That to me is friendship.
I relate to that. I think I was pretty young when I decided, in a sense, that friends would be family to me. And once you decide that young, that’s something you take with you through your life. You mentioned you were 18 when you started collaborating with Gregg, and I think he was in his mid-thirties at that time.
Yeah, actually, I was eighteen, so he was about thirty two. But the amazing thing is: I always used to see him in this café, and when I walked in I was like, “Oh, isn't this great? This is why I love Hollywood. I love coming here and I love discovering my new life and trying to figure out what I want and who I am. Because I can reside in the same place as this kid, and he knows what he wants to do. He's doing his homework.” But he wasn't doing his homework. He was writing Totally Fucked Up. And here I am loitering, trying to figure out what I want to do with my life.
And one day after a couple months, Gregg just came up to me and was like, “I see you in here all the time. And I think you have a very interesting look. And I'm actually a no-budget filmmaker and I make these no-budget films. I think you'd be great for one of the characters. Would you be interested?” I had done extra work before that. I had done theater before that. And I did want to be an actor. And then I met Gregg and I auditioned for the movie and I got it and that changed the entire course of my life.
So Gregg was quite a bit older than you while you worked on these movies, and they are spoken about as representing a generation, which would be your generation. At the same time, they're timeless. A lot of the conversation I've seen around these restorations is about what's different today: sex is different, technology, filmmaking. But we're seeing this new audience, myself included, of younger people really connect with them. So from your perspective, what doesn't change about what it means to be young?
I think it's something that Gregg had said a long time ago. Because originally it was going to be The Living End and Totally Fucked Up, and it wasn't going to be this teen apocalypse [trilogy] until he met us and started hanging out with all the actors from Totally Fucked Up. We were all between eighteen and twenty one, and these young, vibrant spirits, at a time when people were still very much repressed. If you came out of the closet, you could lose your job. And so to meet all of us who kind of didn’t care about that [must have been powerful]. We really did understand the heart of the story he was telling: the connection between the friends and the friendships we were making.
We need to evolve as a society, as a community, as a people. And I've always found that the younger generation was that. I certainly felt like I was a part of that rebelling and pushing forward. And it's like that unbridled, chaotic, powerful, endless energy is what is so — not only attractive to Gregg, but to me over all the years when I still relate to these stories. It’s why I feel like I've never really grown up in some ways — because I still get that way.
And that's okay. There's no rule that one day I can’t listen to this music anymore, or I can’t feel the way I feel, or be open about the way I feel. I hear a lot of people say, “Oh, you get older, you get more conservative.” And I’m like, that’s not for me! I think it’s much the opposite. I was pretty open when I was young, but I’m much more open now. And I’m much more at ease with things.
I imagine that when you were working on the movies, you wouldn't have thought that they would have this resurgence and this connection all these years later. Is there something to forgetting about the audience reaction that's necessary in order to create something that will actually end up being timeless and connecting with people?
I'm not sure. I think the timeless part is a fortunate thing. But I do know that what it really was about then and now is being in the moment. Whatever we were creating, we were putting everything into that moment to create the best thing we could. Not with a thought of, “This is what it's going to be in the future,” but, “This is what it's going to be now. When this movie comes out, we want it to spin heads.”
We really wanted the people that are our people to love it. Most of the people who are not our people are going to be pretty offended. And maybe they need to be. And maybe they should be forced to look and say, “This thing is different,” instead of living in this conservative, isolated box and trying to force the rest of us to do the same. Because to me, that's the most inhumane thing in the world.
As you mentioned, the characters in these movies are very cool. They have this self-assuredness that I don't see in a lot of movies about teenagers. They're struggling, of course, but they're themselves and they're very interesting, and these different personalities cover up a very deep vulnerability and gentleness, especially in your characters. You talked about how in Totally Fucked Up, Andy is very cerebral and inward and has this protective edginess that, to me, is almost an opposite of the naivete your character has in the next movie, in Doom Generation.
Yeah.
How do you feel vulnerable today, all these years later? I wonder what still feels really vulnerable to you, whether acting or friendship or sharing your art.
All of those things still. The magic is that even after all these years, I still feel that. And I think some of the power for me comes from the energy. The things that are going to be hard for you to do, those are the ones that are going to bear the greatest fruit, the most reward.
And, forgive me for a moment, but it gets difficult sometimes, and in those moments when you see it through and you move through it, that's where you find the courage and the strength. I first discovered that when I was a younger kid, like, “I'm not going to follow these rules of society. I don't listen to what I should be listening to. I don't have the friends I should have. I don't dress the way I should dress. I'm not doing what I should be doing. I'm not following any of those rules, and I think that that's okay. And I don't have to follow anything else.”
I think it requires, and I see it in a lot of the youth today, an incredible amount of courage to move against the grain. Because we also see the consequences for people who struggle to fit in and don't, and the negative side effects of that have really caused huge ripples throughout our society today. And that's repression.
Do you remember how old you were when you began to feel confident in that attitude about knowing who you were?
Well, it was interesting. I remember being in second grade and chased by all the boys in PE class who wanted to beat me up because I looked different. My mother was half Vietnamese, and the Vietnam War just ended. And my dad is also part Indigenous. So being multicultural at the time in a place that wasn't, I was forced to either accept myself or try to figure out who I was or be in really big trouble. And there were times when I was in really big trouble and I struggled.
You made these movies on very low budgets. Do you think because of that you had to or you could experiment more with acting? Now having worked on films with much larger budgets, I'm interested in what you've learned about how being more well-resourced impacts the creativity and the experimentation.
That's a wonderful question, because I've always felt that the less people you have around you, [the freer you are]. When we shot Totally Fucked Up, it was just Gregg on camera and Andrea Sperling, the producer, holding the sound, and we might have a third person helping out sometimes like Eric [Nakamura] and Marianne [Dissard], but it was usually a crew of two or three. It was so intimate that it wasn't this idea of even experimenting — we were just completely free to go wherever we wanted to go and take it wherever we wanted to take it. And there was this confidence and this feeling of being safe doing that from the beginning. When I met Gregg and met the other actors and we started shooting piecemeal, everything was very organic. We were playing these other characters, but we were living it, too, in a way.
I love shooting on big budget stuff, too — it does lend itself to a lot of really incredible moments in film. But they're different. It’s just impossible for them to ever be as intimate as it is on a low budget or no budget film, when you're not relying on camera tricks or how good it looks, but it's really more about the essence of the story.
I'm very lucky I learned that when I started watching indie movies early that were made for no budget, and finding myself moved and torn and crying and laughing. So meeting Gregg and being exposed to all of it at such a young age: it wasn't something confusing for me. I understood it. And I felt: “This is the direction I have to move in my life because I understand what I'm seeing. I understand for the first time.”
Yeah. Maybe it's when you're young, you have such a strong internal sense but you're looking for those things that are aligned with you.
And when you find it and connect it, you do it. Going back really quickly — that's a lifesaver. It saved me. It helped build and create who I am today in exactly the way that I wanted to be, the things I wanted to pursue, the person I've always wanted to be. I'm still a work in progress, but I'm happy with who I grew up to be. And I have to thank Gregg and everybody that was involved with those movies.
Do you think it's still possible for you to work on very intimate small budget movies, or for young people to make those sorts of films with three or four people?
Not only do I think it's still possible, I encourage it. There's a magic in it. And I do still make movies like that from time to time. I think I've done five movies this year, but two of them were really small. I love that we shot a whole movie in five days. I love that it was all character work. I've always been attracted to those types of films and those types of storytelling and how it makes me feel as an actor and how it makes me feel as an audience member.
With a trilogy of movies, it's easy to gravitate towards the idea of favorites. I'm wondering how you feel about “favorites” in general and if you have a favorite in this trilogy, if that's possible for you.
I do, but it would be for reasons of nostalgia for what it meant at that turning point in my life. I do have favorites, but the way I look at favorites as I've gotten older is that my favorites change over time.
But I've always said because I started with Totally Fucked Up, it was my introduction to Gregg and acting and making movies and, honestly, finding myself and connecting in a way with people that I never connected with before. That will always have a special place in my heart. And then, if I had a favorite of Gregg's movies, to be honest, it’s probably Mysterious Skin.
[Sighs.] Yeah.
I'm still so moved by that. I just think it's such a beautiful movie, and I don't know anyone who could handle that kind of subject material with that kind of beautiful tenderness and vulnerability in a way that… it still really affects me. I think it's beautiful. I think Gregg makes beautiful movies, so I'm thankful for him.
I've noticed you have a bit of an online presence and you have a bit of a tagline on your Instagram. You say, “Be good to yourselves and to each other.” What does that really look like today?
I think today a lot of us don't know who we are and that's why we're seeing all this craziness to a degree. And I don't really know the root of it. People could say it's social media, people could say it's technology. It's a variety of things. But the most important thing that I learned and that I tried to promote is: One must know thyself. If you don't know who you are, you're never going to understand anybody else.
Once you know yourself, you can be kind to yourself. And I see people not being kind to themselves. It really breaks my heart because there's no way they're going to be able to understand me. That's why the most important thing we can do is be kind and be good to ourselves. Because if we do that, we could be good to each other. And it is that simple. It's that simple to do, but it's complicated to get to know yourself. It's a lifetime of work.
Kathy Del Beccaro is an urban planner and researcher dedicated to the preservation of small business and the evolution of moviegoing in communities. She is the Managing Director of the Rockaway Film Festival.
Listings
No Film School recently published a massive list of fall film grants, labs, and fellowships. Check it out here.
A new psychological thriller short film by Diego Andaluz is holding auditions Sept 28 and 29 and shooting Oct 26 and 27. Roles include Joseph (male, 40s - 60s, Alexander (male, early 20s), Cliff (male, 20s - 50s), and Rebecca (female, any age). More on each role here. Email headshot and resume to castingbykyle@gmail.com.
Manhunt, a short film by Sonja Rose Bogolubov, is casting several roles for an Oct 24 - 27 shoot in Upstate NY. Email your reel to manhuntfilm.production@gmail.com by Sept 25.
Voice actors needed for a short animated thesis film (paid) about a boy who witnesses a woman fall from the sky and must help her deliver a star before her curse consumes her. Deadline for submissions is Oct 7 at 5pm. More info and link to apply here.
Jacob Burns Film Center is hiring a Director of Film Programming.
NewFest is hiring a Community Outreach Coordinator.
A24 is looking for two part-time interns to support the LA TV Creative team for the Fall 2024 semester — must be available up to 24 hours per week. Apply here.
Jacob Kessler is looking for unedited fiction and nonfiction short films for his students to work on at University of Iowa. Email jacob-kessler@uiowa.edu
Neighbors, a documentary series, is searching for unique ongoing neighbor/neighborhood disputes and interesting stories. Email HelloNeighborsTV@gmail.com.
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Great post! And excellent listings!