The Decline of Western Civilization:
That movie was very formative for me. When I was doing my undergraduate film studies degree at UC Santa Barbara, somebody had a VHS of it. We used to watch it multiple times a week. We could quote lines from it. When Amy Blue in The Doom Generation says “eat my fuck,” that's a direct quote from the movie. When The Doom Generation restoration played at Sundance last year, Keith Morris from Circle Jerks and Black Flag was actually in the audience and he came up to me in the lobby and we were talking about The Decline of Western Civilization. That film was seminal.
Soundtracks:
I listen to music all the time. I listen to music when I'm writing my scripts. It's always such an important part of my creative process. I kind of called The Doom Generation my industrial, Trent Reznor movie. I was super into that industrial sound back then, so it's kind of angry and very chaotic, you know? Like the opening scene with Jimmy [Duval] in the mosh pit. There's this level of chaos and violence in that movie, and there's chaos and violence in Nowhere, too. But by the time Nowhere came around, it was a few years later and I was starting to get into the late nineties, early zeros. I got really into electronica, so it was kind of starting to morph. Nowhere's a little more eclectic - it spans a lot of subgenres of post-punk and alternative music.
Slowdive:
The crazy thing about Slowdive is that they were so young when they started, you know? They were babies. They were like 17 or 18 years old. It's incredible to me that they could make this sound, the identity of Slowdive, at such a young, young, young age. There's something in it that really resonates with angsty teenagers all over the world. I remember looking around at [a recent Slowdive show] and thinking, “These are my people.” Everybody in the crowd is on the same wavelength. Slowdive are my heroes. They've always been my heroes.
Being a music critic at L.A. Weekly:
I just reviewed a bunch of shows. I saw a bunch of shows. This is the late eighties, early nineties, probably right before I wrote The Living End. It was super cool. Every day was like Christmas, because you’d get all these new records in the mail. CDs came in, too. I think I made like 25 cents a word, but it was a really cool experience to be a part of the music press for a bit. I interviewed The Jesus and Mary Chain, who were at the peak of Jesus and Mary Chain-ness. I remember we were backstage at the Whiskey or the Roxy or something, and they both mumbled. Their voices are really low, and they mumble, and you kind of can't understand what they're saying when you're in the room. And then when I went to transcribe the tape, it was noisy, so I could barely make out what they were saying. It was both of them too, both brothers. That was awesome.
LA crowds:
This will age me, but I remember seeing The Sugarcubes at the Roxy, and Björk freaking out the crowd. She was like, “God damn fucking LA people. Dance! Fucking move around. You're all so fucking cool. You just stand there acting all jaded.” I think that's a thing in LA. It's like crowds are just too cool to dance.
Punk ethos:
My whole sensibility was formed by punk rock and new wave music. I was an undergraduate in the late 70s, early 80s, and I went to USC grad school from around ‘82 to ‘85. It was right in that peak of new wave and punk rock music. To this day, I still listen to music every day from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to bed. My inspiration has always come from that sensibility, which was always DIY. March to your own drummer, do your own thing.
It's not really about giant mainstream success. It's not really about becoming top 40. It's really about expressing yourself and being a little bit against the status quo. You're always kind of the weirdo and the outsider, the queer punk. All of that was so important to me. As a filmmaker, that philosophy and that sensibility was really ingrained in me at a very early age. It’s such a big part of my identity.
Romance:
[The Teen Apocalypse Trilogy] is just really earnest. And very romantic. That's one of the things I think really sets Nowhere and The Doom Generation apart from a lot of the other movies of that period, like Kids or whatever, which feel really nihilistic. There's heart. There's this center to them that's kind of sweet. Jimmy Duvall’s character is always searching for his soulmate. One of the things I noticed when we were doing the restoration [of Nowhere] is that the relationship between Jimmy's character and Rachel True's character is full of feeling and so much teenage emotion. He's just desperate for her to love him the way that he loves her, and I think that's something that really resonates across all generations.
The music from Nowhere:
I love every song, all 50-something of them. Especially the ones you can really hear now, because there's a lot of songs in the original movie that are so poorly mixed and just sound terrible. “Avalyn II” [by Slowdive] is a favorite, for sure. When it started to play at the Academy Museum, I literally started to cry. It's mixed now in such a way that’s so monumental and magnificent. The sound of that song in the theater literally shakes the seats. It's amazing. I love when the Cocteau Twins song [“Seekers Who Are Lovers”] starts playing in the whole coffee shop. It just takes over and becomes kind of mysterious and ominous. We remixed The Future Sound of London song [“Papua New Guinea”]. It really announces itself now, and it's super fun to hear. And the Seefeel song [“Time To Find Me”] when they're playing kick the can is really cool.
Being young:
It's a very romantic period of life. I mean, I'm in my 60s now, so I have a different perspective on it. I can see the forest through the trees a little bit. But that's one of the reasons why it’s so fun to make films about young people, and people who are really struggling and really going through it. That's when your life is so big. Every emotion, every time you fall in love, every breakup, everything that happens to you, it becomes amplified.
Every decade that passes, you get more and more comfortable, more and more secure. You feel you're more and more yourself. It takes all of this experience and all these years of crazy adventures and all the stuff that happens to you and all the people that you sleep with and all the relationships you have. It's what makes you the person you're going to be.