Leave it to Gregg Araki, the independent filmmaker who’s been charting the dysfunctional weirdness of Southern California youth for more than 25 years, to give Shailene Woodley her most mature role to date.
“White Bird in a Blizzard,” Araki’s 11th feature, focuses on the somewhat bizarre, yet incredibly rich and persuasive coming-of-age of Woodley’s Kat Connors. Set in late 1980s and early ’90s Loma Linda (though shot mostly in Eagle Rock and the San Fernando Valley), it covers Kat’s intellectual and psychological development as she transitions from high school to college, along with her vigorous sexual awakening with several men.
Hovering over everything, if not exactly the center of the curious teen’s universe, is her relationship with her mentally unraveling mom. Played by French daredevil Eva Green (“Penny Dreadful,” “300: Rise of an Empire,” “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For”), Eve Connors grows increasingly, erratically dissatisfied with her marriage to Kat’s dad Brock (Christopher Meloni of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”).
Then one day, Eve just disappears, which nags at Kat but doesn’t really seem to upset her life much.
Despite Eve’s nutty behavior and upfront discussions (and depictions) of eroticism, “White Bird” plays far more sedately than Araki’s off-kilter sex-and-violence fests such as “The Doom Generation” and “The Living End.” It certainly bears only passing resemblance to the director’s “Smiley Face,” the stoner comedy starring Anna Faris.
“White Bird,” which Araki adapted from a novel by poet Laura Kasischke, is closest in tone to his acclaimed 2005 drama “Mysterious Skin.” That’s not a coincidence, as both movies were based on other writers’ books.
“I’ve done two books now, and the adaptations do tend to be a little more serious in tone,” explains Araki, who has the words “here” and “now” tattooed across his knuckles. “They’re a little less anarchic and crazy, just given the fact that both adaptations are very faithful to the books. The book really sets the tone, and ‘White Bird’ is much more solemn — much more mature, let’s say — than ‘Smiley Face’ or the film I just did, ‘Kaboom.’
“It’s a different set of muscles, I like it a lot,” Araki says of filming other people’s stories. “The thing is, it has to be material that really resonates with me. The voice of the author has to be harmonious with my own.”
To that end, Santa Barbara-raised Araki switched “White Bird’s” setting from Ohio to Southern California and picked a Simi Valley girl for the lead. But geographic desirability wasn’t the main reason he cast Woodley.
“I think the reason why Shai has taken off in the way that she has is that she is so her own person,” Araki says of the star, who shot “White Bird” before making her big hits “Divergent” and “The Fault in Our Stars.” “She’s so not like anybody else out there. She’s so fresh, real and natural, and the camera really picks up on that.
“She reminds me a little bit of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who I worked with on ‘Mysterious Skin.’ They both were on TV shows for years, so they’re not driven by money or fame, or any of that stuff. It’s all about the art. They’re both very focused on doing projects that they love and they really approach it from a very pure place. Shai was just so excited to take the plunge with this, and was so focused and serious and great to work with.”
Araki is one of the few filmmakers of whom it honestly can be said was never in it for the money. From his first no-budget feature, the 1987 “Three Bewildered People in the Night,” Araki’s work could be tagged with such labels as pre-mumblecore whinery, new queer cinema and punk rock aesthetic — none of which intersect mainstream commerciality.
He says he’s not against working for a studio, and has tried to get some television pilots off the ground (they never flew), but he seems happy enough to be the thoroughly personal, genuinely independent filmmaker that he is.
“I really just try to be as true and authentic as I can be,” he says. “I think my films certainly present a worldview, but I don’t specifically set out to, like, say anything. My formative years were in the late ’70s and ’80s, and I was very, very influenced by punk rock and alternative music. The whole message of that music was about be true to yourself and march to your own drummer, so in general all of my movies have been set apart from what everybody else is doing.
“I’ve always been interested in the sort of outsider thing too,” Araki adds. “Being gay and Asian-American and a punk has always sort of set me outside of things and, as an artist, that’s sort of advantageous. You can be much more critical if you’re not sort of in the middle of everything. So it’s not just an interest; it’s what my inclination is.”
But at 54 years old, how many more coming-of-age stories does Araki have in him?
“I’m certainly no spring chicken, I’ve been doing this a long time,” says Araki, who’s fit enough to appear half his age. “I actually kind of go out of my way to try to not do movies about teenagers now, because I get asked this all the time.
“It’s just that this story really moved me,” he says of “White Bird.” “It felt more along the lines of ‘Ice Storm’ or ‘American Beauty,’ movies with younger and older characters. It was really, to me, about that family, that house, suburbia and the American dream. To me, it was really different from the films that I’ve become so identified with.”