Opening at the Lumiere tonight is Larry Clark's latest, Wassup Rockers. Larry has made a career of getting under the skin of American teenagers, from his photography work in "Tulsa," through movies like Kids, Bully and Ken Park. Like Kids, Rockers attempts to blend straight fiction with cinema verite. The protagonists of the movie -- young latino boys living in South Central -- portray themselves, and many of the situations in the movie were derived from their real life experiences. If you get the feeling that it sounds like "Kids II: Electric Boogaloo," you wouldn't be far off the mark.

While at times funny and entertaining, the movie seemed to shy away from the provocative sensationalism of his earlier work, which may have something to do with Clark's difficulty getting US distribution for 2002's Ken Park. Still, for those of you who love his sensual, lingering shots of barely-clothed jailbait, you won't walk away disappointed. After the title card, we meet Jonathan, the main character, who discusses his friends and their sexual experiences while sitting on his bed in boxer shorts.

For the rest of the movie, we follow Jonathan and his crew of skater punk friends on an odyssey from the ghetto to Beverly Hills, where they clash with caricatures of rich Los Angeles society. Encounters with ersatz Hilton sisters, cops, Clint Eastwood and the real Janice Dickenson turn violent. Lots of time is spent cruising on skateboards (and we mean lots of time). All set to the scream of guitars and a pulsing punk rock beat laid down by local bands and the kids themselves.

After the jump, we sat down with Clark for a few minutes to discuss the fashion world, New York versus LA and race and class in America.

First of all, we have seen some reviews on IMDB, so we assume that there have been some preview screenings?

The film opened in New York on the 23rd [of June], so it's been playing for four, five days.

Which theaters? The Angelika?

The Angelika, yeah, for the first week and then it'll go wider. It opens in LA this Friday the 30th. And we got good reviews from, we've been getting good reviews from the Toronto Film Festival. The New York Times. We're getting really positive reviews, people are really liking the movie.

It's kind of funny, we were in school at NYU when Kids came out. We were probably about Harmony [Korine]'s age at the time, when it actually got released. It was certainly something that some of the students identified with, being a bunch of foul-mouthed, oversexed, forty-drinkin' pot smokers. So we wanted to know if we could put this film in the context of some of your previous work.

Sure.

Now this has been pointed out elsewhere, but compared to Bully, Kids, Wassup Rockers certainly has a lighter feel to it.

I don't know if it's lighter, but I know what you mean. Kids was about those kids, about that downtown Manhattan group of kids, and the secret world of kids that adults aren't allowed, don't have access to, and I was given access. Bully was based on a book by an investigative crime reporter Jim Schutze. And those were those kids. Wassup Rockers is about seven latino kids, cause they're different kids growing up in a different environment. It was making a film about these kids, and what these kids are about. It's a very dangerous environment, they could get shot at any time, there's gangbangers everywhere, there's driveby shootings. They're very poor kids and this is how they navigate their daily existence. And I just found the kids so compelling that I wanted you to see these kids and find out about South Central. Because no white people go to South Central. There's no white people, period, just black and latino. And people think that this place is so dangerous they'll never go there. And they don't really know about it. But there's a lot of people living there who aren't in gangs, don't want to be in gangs, good people. And these kids don't succumb to the peer pressure of the ghetto, which is to be a gangster and wear baggy clothes and cut off your hair and smoke pot and act all gangster. And everybody acts the same. Because they don't want to do that. They want to be punk rockers and listen to punk rock because they love the music, and wear tight clothes and just be kids. Kids have a right to do that, almost anywhere, but in the ghetto it's difficult to fight to be themselves. Everything you do in the ghetto, you've got to be a certain way, but these kids manage to do that, to be themselves.

So compared to other films you've done in the interim, between Kids and Wassup Rockers, where you were following more traditional narrative structures -- Bully was based on a piece of nonfiction. Ken Park, as we understand, was an episodic narrative.

Yeah, Ken Park were all stories. My stories that I'd had for a while that I wanted to tell those stories on film.

But you're sort of returing to a similar style.

Well, I met the kids on a fashion shoot. They hadn't really had much contact or interaction with white people which I found interesting. And it was interesting for them too. We'd go all over LA and Hollywood filming and they would comment on white people and how they acted. Which is not the way, particularly, that one acts in the ghetto because you wouldn't survive. And they found it interesting. So for the second half of the film I wanted them to interact with people and take them on this crazy adventure that I totally made up, but based on reality.

So you talk about how they talk about white people and their behavior. Were some of those discussions built into the caricatures they encounter in Beverly Hills. For example the cop at the nine steps, the Clint Eastwood-esque character, the pervy photographer, that kind of thing.

Well, the cop incident did actually happen. I took the kids to see the location, and there's always skaters there. And one morning we got busted. When the cops found out they were from South Central and he saw that they were brown, or 'Mexican.' The cop said, "I've been warning you kids for three months," and they'd never been to that place. And I explained what we were doing, told him we were going to shoot a movie here, and he didn't want to hear it. He gave them all tickets, and we were stuck there for an hour and a half. It was totally racist, and I asked him how many tickets had he given out in the last three months, and he said, "You're the first." It was a hassle, they had to go to court, and I couldn't pay their fines because their parents weren't there. It was eight o'clock in the morning, during rush hour traffic, 26 miles from South Central, so I had to reschedule, take them back to court, bring all their parents the next morning and pay their fines, talk to the judge and all this. But, it's a great scene in the movie. So things that happened in the movie happened in real life. Like the shooting in the beginning of the film. It wasn't in the screenplay until about three weeks before we started shooting. Because this kid that we knew go shot. And they called me and we went out there and got a camera. It was a way to show you the dangerous environment that they lived in.

But the Beverly Hills girls were really patterned on Paris and Nikki Hilton, who were in the news for going to clubs all the time, smoking pot and looking for hot boys. And this is when the sex tape hit as well. So we were at Hollywood High and I thought, "What if Paris and Nikki came by and saw these boys and thought they were hot, picked them up in their convertible and went to Beverly Hills." And that's how the idea started. I was sort of having fun.

Also, you mention the fashion thing. When I met the kids and photographed them for that French magazine, I had some fashion photographers call me and say -- this one guy called me, a big-time fashion photographer, and said, "Jonathan's so beautiful, I want to photograph him. I could do a campaign with him." I said "I don't want you to do that," so he said, "Oh, when you're finished with him can I have him?" So they went over a wall and there's a fashion party going on. They came over all busted up from a fight, wearing the ripped up clothes, bloody noses and black eyes. So how would the fashion guys react -- by putting them in the next campaign!

That offers us a good segue. The fashion industry is certainly no stranger to controversy in terms of the sexualization of youth.

Open any magazine, and they're selling products and selling clothes by sexualizing kids, naked kids in magazines. Which I got blamed for too -- I'm not a fashion photographer, and I got blamed for heroin chic! I'm like, "What?!"

In terms of your treatment of the sexuality of the subjects in this particular film, it's not necessarily as explicit as you've done in previous films. Was that a narrative decision?

The kids are young, there's no doubt about that. I mean, c'mon, the kids are fourteen, fifteen years old. You have to figure out a way to show sex without really seeing it. It depends upon your imagination. And I had to figure that out. And I had trouble with that, because as an artist, it was a creative challenge to do that. There's still sex, and it still reflects what was going on in these kids lives, and they talk about it. Jonathan has sexual encounters, and Kiko does. The one scene where Jonathan is with the blonde, rich Beverly Hills girls where they have sex -- I was so proud of myself for figuring out how to do that. It was just dialogue, perfectly clean with no cuss words in it. But when that's happening, in your mind, you see exactly what's going on. And I think that can be more powerful and stronger than showing it. I mean, if you show you show it, but if you figure out a way to do it like that, where less is more, your imagination kicks in. That scene really worked, you know -- it's funny and it's sexy. I wrote that little line, and you know the girl's fourteen, Jonathan's fifteen, and I'm talking to the girl's mother: "I'm going to do this, I'm not going to really show it. They're going to have sex but you're not going to see it." And I had this dialog that I wanted them to say and I took the mother into the other room and told her the line. She just looked at me, and that's probably as nervous as I've ever been. Because I really wanted them to say this, but I didn't really know what the mother was going to say. She looked at me for about 45 seconds and said, "I can relate to that."

After wrapping up the interview, Larry got a call from Kiko, one of the kids in the movie. They were all scheduled to attend the LA premier to do press before the screening. In a funny moment, Larry promised to "make some calls," because no one had arranged their transportation to the theater yet. You can catch Wassup Rockers at the Lumiere starting tonight.