Sick and Twisted, Just Like They Intended

Wearing sneakers, jeans and a blue T-shirt with the letters “C” and “B” etched inside a large purple heart, Miguel Arteta does not fit the image of your typical Hollywood director. With his boyish looks, thick, messed-up hair and unassuming manner, he could be your newspaper boy riding his bike in the predawn hours of your neighborhood.

And on a sunny, breezy day at a trendy Santa Monica restaurant, Arteta admits he’s having a hard time growing up.

But then again, he’s in good company.

His buddy, screenwriter Mike White, turned 30 this week and he is still sucking on lollipops. His two other college friends, Paul and Chris Weitz, became Hollywood darlings with their homage to horny teenagers in last summer’s hit “American Pie,”

Put all of these guys together and you’ve got the makings of a very unusual, quirky movie--not to mention a very interesting lunch. “Chuck & Buck,” which opens Friday, is their ode to childhood friendship. And as they admit, it’s a film that lets the “sick and twisted” parts of their personalities shine through.

“This may be the first movie ever made that has a kind outlook toward a stalker,” said Arteta, with a wry smile.

Directed by the young Puerto Rican filmmaker Arteta, written by and starring White and the Weitz brothers, the movie takes a humane look at the life of an emotionally stunted young man, Buck, who tries to find his childhood friend, Chuck, after years of estrangement.

Shot digitally for less than $1 million, the movie is another example of the mark young filmmakers are making in Hollywood. Without having to rely on large studios for financial backing or distribution, the filmmakers were able to write the movie they had dreamed of without changing their film to accommodate the studios.

“It was such a thrill to read a fully formed script of the real world and with a precise eye for characters,” said Paul Weitz, who plays an actor who cannot act.

The filmmakers were also emboldened by the tremendous success of last year’s edgier and innovative movies like “The Blair Witch Project,” “Boys Don’t Cry” and even DreamWorks’ Oscar-winning “American Beauty.” Sick and twisted is good, they say--well, sick and twisted with a little tenderness.

“A lot more challenging movies made the mainstream [last year],”said the 30-year-old Arteta. “I love movies about misfits and damaged goods in our society.”

As one of the lead writers for TV’s edgy high school comedy “Freaks and Geeks” (canceled after its first year), White has gravitated toward fringe characters as well. In the case of “Chuck & Buck,” White got his inspiration from the bizarre people he has met in the industry: In the land of beauty queens and bodybuilders, there are always dirty little secrets behind the facade. The starlet was a fat farm girl, the leading man was really a geek with zits.

The past never really fades from their psyche.

“Living in L.A., you see that whole allegorical alter ego of the same person,” said White. “It’s the person we project publicly and who we want to be and the person we are afraid we might be.”

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Arteta, White and Paul Weitz met in the early 1990s while studying at Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts college in Connecticut that, according to Weitz, “encourages eccentricity.” The friendship followed them to Hollywood where, eventually, they all found work. White had a small part in Arteta’s first movie, “Star Maps,” as an obnoxious television producer. “Star Maps” turned into a minor indie hit and Arteta came out of it a hot young property.

It was during the editing of “Star Maps” that White gave Arteta the script to “Chuck & Buck.” Arteta knew instantly he wanted to make the movie. “I responded immediately,” recalled Arteta. “I’d never seen a character like Buck. There is a little bit of Chuck and a little bit of Buck in all of us.”

The film is about two childhood friends, Buck (played by White) and Chuck (Chris Weitz). Though inseparable as children, they’ve grown apart as they got older. Chuck moves to Los Angeles and becomes a hotshot record producer engaged to a pretty blond and living in a stunning Hollywood Hills home. Buck, meanwhile, never really grows up, always longing for those days he spent playing with Chuck. One day he decides to relocate his long-lost friend. The audience is unaware of the nature of their friendship until the very end.

Although all of them are loath to call the film “gay-themed,” it does deal with some heavy questions about bisexuality and homosexuality (all handled in a humorous manner). But the film mainly deals with the topic of prolonged childhood. Arteta says it is a generational issue.

“My generation is hugely up on the idea of not growing up,” he said. “I mean, you see these CEOs wearing sneakers and sucking on lollipops and at raves you see people with pacifiers.”

Arteta reckons this might be a rebellion of sorts for Generation X.

“Our parents’ generation was the ‘70s generation, the psychotherapy generation, always looking to heal themselves,” he said. “I think we all want to remain a little twisted. It’s that little child inside of us that makes us special.”

White’s “Buck” is not a “sanitized” version of a person with a social dysfunction, said Arteta. He is a child trapped in a man’s body with all the desires of an adult.

“Usually, the man-child characters you see in films are safe characters. They are really more ideas than characters,” said Arteta. “Buck has a real danger and sexual presence in him which makes him more interesting.”

Once the script was finalized, they started on the long road to finding money for their film. When they took the script to studios, executives wanted big names attached. They also wanted to water down some of the more risque aspects of the story. White and Arteta decided it might be better to try to find “the right kind of money.” The movie was financed by Blow-Up Pictures, which also financed such indie films as “Three Seasons” and “Down to You,” and Arteta’s Flan de Coco productions.

“We wanted the story to be the star,” said Arteta.

Shooting digitally was not only cheaper, but it also gave the film an intimate feel. Although the colors are a little fuzzy, not as brilliant as shooting on film, Arteta was able to capture an almost eerie closeness to the characters.

“I wanted people to feel so intimate with Buck that you almost felt like you were intruding in his life,” said Arteta. “Someone at a screening said it was like reading your friend’s diary. And I thought that was a very good description and what I wanted to do.”

“Chuck & Buck” was picked up by Artisan Entertainment at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The studio has had ample experience with offbeat films such as “Blair Witch,” Jim Jarmusch’s “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” and this summer’s upcoming John Waters movie, “Cecil B. Demented.”

Judging by his last two films, it seems that making movies about people on the fringes of society has become a trademark for Arteta. But his life growing up was pretty unremarkable. The son of an auto repair mechanic and a homemaker in San Juan, Arteta was 5 years old when his sister took him to see Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” A seminal film for many moviemakers, “2001” put a spell on the young Arteta. He asked his family to take him back again and again.

“They were kind of dumbfounded,” he recalls.

In the early 1990s he left Puerto Rico to study in the U.S. He graduated from Wesleyan in 1993 with a degree in film.

His 1997 debut “Star Maps” focused on the life of a young Mexican immigrant who desperately wants to be a movie star. He gets pulled into a hustling ring by his father, who promises him he will introduce him to the right people.

Arteta’s mother, who now lives in Costa Rica with Arteta’s father, nearly fainted when she first saw her son’s movie.

“She said to me, ‘You’ve really shocked me now,’ ” laughed Arteta. “She hasn’t seen ‘Chuck & Buck.’ ”

As one of the few Latino directors to make films in Hollywood, Arteta has not made his cultural background an issue. Although he is proud of his heritage, he resents having “the burden of representation” placed on his shoulders. His goal is to make films, not make Latino films.

For “Chuck & Buck,” Arteta cast veteran actress Lupe Ontiveros in one of the lead roles. But for the first time in her 30-year career, Ontiveros was not cast a maid or the mother of a gangbanger. (In “Chuck & Buck,” Ontiveros plays the manager of a local stage theater.)

“I’m thankful to him,” said the actress, who says she has played more than 200 maids in her career. “He has given me my second wind. If I had gone to read for [the character] Beverly Franco under the normal casting circumstances, I would have never been considered. [Studios] don’t take those risks. My image is that I’m Latina. I’m no longer a young woman. And I’m an articulate individual. That doesn’t fit their image of the stereotype.”

Added Arteta: “We are at a point when we need to see good movies with a personal point of view from Latinos,” he said. “But we are a diverse community and we should tell stories that reflect that diversity. I just want to tell stories that are important to me.”