“Kids” Director On Casting Teenagers: “It’s Just A Talent I Have”
“I can just kind of tell — I don’t know, it’s just a talent that I have,” Larry Clark says, via video chat from his Tribeca apartment. In the background, the screen saver on a large Apple monitor is cycling through photos of lithe young teens . “I can tell when the camera is going to like somebody and I can tell when people have a charisma that translates to film or photographs because I’ve been doing it so long.” Clark, now 70, is famous — and famously controversial — for identifying future stars among unknown teens, like the time he commissioned a 19-year-old skater he met in Washington Square Park named Harmony Korine to write the screenplay for Kids . That film also marked the debuts of Chloë Sevigny, 20 years old at the time, and 15-year-old Rosario Dawson. (While he says he’s kept in touch with Sevigny, Dawson, and Leo Fitzpatrick, he says of Korine, “I haven’t spoken to him in a while.” He hasn’t seen Spring Breakers either, he says, “but I want to see it.”) When Kids came ...