Just making the movie that he wanted to make

GREGG ARAKI insists that he never went away, never stopped working. It has been several years since the release of the writer-director’s last feature film, and many of the reviews for his latest, “Mysterious Skin,” have hailed Araki’s comeback.

“Everybody thinks I took a vacation” since the last feature, “Splendor” (1999), he says, laughing, “but I’ve just been working the whole time. I did a TV pilot, which turned out really great, but like 99% of pilots, it didn’t make it to series. People think you haven’t been working, when really you’ve spent all this time doing this thing nobody sees.”

“Way back in the mid-’90s,” as he says, when he burst onto the scene, Araki was the bad boy of the ascendant “Queer New Wave” group of gay-themed filmmakers. Now in his mid-40s, he has perhaps mellowed some, and “Mysterious Skin” certainly is devoid of the self-conscious irony and candy-coated pop culture saturation that were hallmarks of such earlier films as “The Living End,” “The Doom Generation” and “Nowhere.” Nevertheless, Araki balks somewhat at any notion that he’s “matured” during the prolonged interval between features. He orders a tofu scramble for a recent late-afternoon lunch, and proceeds to add brain-scrambling amounts of hot sauce.

Elaborating on the time elapsed since his last feature, Araki says, “I’m a true indie-indie. It’s just me. I don’t have a company. I don’t have any employees. So I’m always developing a bunch of stuff at the same time. I’m always working on five projects at once. And when one project becomes active, when things start happening, everything else stops and I become focused on just the one thing.”

An adaptation of the novel by Scott Heim, “Mysterious Skin” tells the story of two young men in the small town of Hutchinson, Kan., and the ways in which sexual abuse at the hands of a beguiling Little League coach many summers before has scarred them in distinctly different ways. For one of the boys (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) the abuse becomes a crucial marker in the process of his own coming out; however, he has emotionally hardened into a ruthless street hustler. The other boy (Brady Corbet) has sublimated his experience so completely he believes he was abducted by aliens.

Araki came across the novel in 1995. After that, he kept crossing paths with the project, such as when he recommended Heim to the Sundance Writers Lab. Although he was keenly interested in bringing the book to the screen, it wasn’t until that ill-fated television pilot that he solved what he saw as very specific problems in how to shoot the film, in particular how to present the scenes involving 8-year-olds in a way that was emotionally powerful and darkly disturbing on screen while innocuous and harmless to the young actors.

“It helped me doing the pilot because I was working a lot with subjective camera and point of view and eyelines,” explains Araki. “It was through the visual planning of that, that I figured out a way to shoot ‘Mysterious Skin.’

“It was really important to me to keep the scenes with the small children, because for me that was one of the things about the book that made it so unique. It was really important to me to do those scenes, but I didn’t want to traumatize a child actor. I figured out how to shoot those scenes using subjective camera, so the kids could basically be protected from what the movie is about.”

As editor of his own pictures, Araki was able to precisely modulate between the dramatic demands of his script and the practical demands of his production. “It was very tricky,” he says. “Obviously, the parents knew what was happening. I storyboard all my movies very carefully, so it was all very controlled and very planned out.

“It was almost like shooting two different movies. I wrote this whole alternate script so the boys’ lines had a motivation, and moment-to-moment had the right emotional beats, but I knew as the person shooting and editing it exactly what I needed from each shot, and I knew exactly what parts of what shots I was going to use.

“It was all carefully planned to keep the kids protected.”

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The story changes his style

While many viewers may see “Mysterious Skin” as the first film from a “new” Gregg Araki, for the director himself any perceived changes in his filmmaking style were simply in service of the story.

“I loved the book so much, I really wanted to make a faithful adaptation of the story. I really wanted to bring this story to the screen in a way that was true to what the book was about. It wasn’t like I wanted to make a Gregg Araki movie and throw in a couple things from the book.”

As for those reviewers who have used the occasion of even positive notices for “Mysterious Skin” to bash his earlier work, the director is unbothered.

“It’s a little weird for me, that certain reviewers, who will go unmentioned, feel the need to embrace ‘Mysterious Skin’ at the expense of my other movies. I’m just happy for ‘Mysterious Skin,’ but if people don’t like my other movies it’s not like I lose sleep over it.”

Those earlier movies were filled with depictions of fluid sexuality, cartoon violence, drugs, stylized sets, and in-joke cameos from such tabloid-infamous figures as Heidi Fleiss and Traci Lords, as well as actors plucked from retro pop-gems “The Brady Bunch,” “The Love Boat” and “Three’s Company.” If the overall effect could sometimes be likened to downing too many Pixy Stix too quickly, the affectation of ironic nihilism and despair in the films now seems time-capsule quaint.

Though he is hesitant to use the “m” (for mature) word, Araki can see the ways in which audiences may be shocked by the emotional wallop of “Mysterious Skin,” and, not surprisingly, he enjoys the idea.

“I like that it was a real departure for me, and that people didn’t expect it. I really appreciate that aspect of it, that I’ve never done a serious drama before. I do think that the film totally makes sense with all my other movies, there is a thematic similarity and the sensibilities of Scott and myself are really attuned to each other. It’s not as if I’ve directed ‘Chicago.’ ”

And though he is “at peace with it,” Araki hopes the day will come when he will be seen simply as a filmmaker and leave the “Queer Cinema” tag behind. “All of us at the time -- Tom Kalin, Todd Haynes, myself -- we always said this is not a movement, we never planned this. A true new wave, like the French New Wave, they sat around and planned to change cinema. Whereas we were just independently doing our own thing.

“It’s stayed with us to this day. Literally every interview for ‘Mysterious Skin’ has asked about the Queer New Wave. And it has been a huge benefit, but it’s also sort of insulting, like I have to exist only as this identity. I understand why it happened, the dynamics of how it happened, but what I’ve always said is it’s something we never came up with, it’s not our idea.”

Following one more forkful of hot sauce to stoke the fires, Araki, with slight exasperation, says, “I’m just the wrong person to talk to about these things. I remember when ‘The Living End’ came out, my producer at the time said, ‘You’re this gay punk filmmaker that really [upsets] gay people.’ ”