Lovers Film Festival 40, interview with actor James Duval

At the 40th Lovers Film Festival, FRED Film Radio interviewed actor James Duval where he presented the screening of “Totally F***ed Up”, a drama film written and directed by Gregg Araki considered a seminal entry in the New Queer Cinema genre.

Totally Fucked Up has the power to make you feel less alone

Thirty years after the release of “Totally F***ed Up“, the film is still in the spotlight. “I think it speaks to our present because it’s so honest”, says James Duval. “I was 18 when I met Gred and made the movie. It changed my life. I think there’s a raw, naked honesty and emotion laid wide open and bare for everybody to see is what this film helped. I think people respond more now than they ever have to. At the time I was looking for direction. I was very young and impressionable, but I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know if I accepted myself. I was a bit suicidal. I didn’t know if I was going to make it to 21. And all of a sudden, I read Greg’s screenplay about kids my age feeling completely left out and outcast. And everything that was in that script made me feel less alone, a little bit more connected to a world that none of us felt connected to”.

A script that challenged the status quo

The “Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy“ has become a cult classic in cinema. What kind of impact did it have on the actor? “That film was a catalyst of change for me as a person, on a personal and professional level. After I had finished making the series of films with Greg, I found it difficult to make movies because I wasn’t getting meaningful scripts”, remembers James Duval. “I wasn’t getting scripts that were challenging the status quo, and pushing things forward, and really getting into the internal core of what we felt and who we are. I will always have a special place in my heart for movies like Totally Fucked Up or The Doom Generation because of what they meant to me and how they changed me as a person. I don’t want to sound crazy. But after I had done Independence Day and Gone in 60 Seconds, I got a little freaked out by the business. Because the movies were fun, and they’re different. They weren’t meaningful in the same way. There was so much more money involved, and so many people were so connected on how they could use these movies to keep themselves relevant”.

A new generation ready to fight for rights

There is a war on human rights in Europe and the United States. There is a real emergency that is putting the lives of millions of people at risk. “It’s quite shocking because I never thought we would be back here, to be honest. We’ve made great strides, but I think in other ways it’s worse than it’s ever been. It’s gone back to before I was born”, explains James Duval. “When you have students who are being silenced, who are being removed from the country because of things they say, because of what they feel, because of who they love: that’s a big problem. Maybe I’m lucky from my limited scope living in Los Angeles, which is a very liberal city, but I can say that the new generation is bigger than the baby boomers. The generation was so large that they could change the functioning of society. Everything that was happening in society could be changed because they were a large enough group to impact it. But the new generation is larger than the baby boomers. They’re doing it in a way that we were fighting for our whole lives, and it’s very natural to them. We have to continue to speak up, which goes back to something I learned when I met Greg during the AIDS epidemic. Silence is death, so don’t be silent”.

The incredible story of Donnie Darko

One of the unforgettable roles of James Duval‘s career is Frank in “Donnie Darko” by Richard Kelly. How has the actor seen the film grow over the years? “I signed on to the movie because Jason Schwartzman was playing Donnie Darko. But after I signed on, he fell out. And we got this really talented kid named Jake Gyllenhaal. And it just became a different movie”, remembers the actor. “My heart broke after we played at Sundance, and nobody wanted to pick the movie up. Christopher Nolan, who had done Memento at the time, is responsible for helping us get distribution. It came out in the theater three weeks later. We made no money. The movie disappeared. Two years later I was walking through a store and somebody just said: ‘Frank’. I turned to look and it was a security guard who just saw the movie. And what had happened slowly over time, I just started to hear more and more about the movie. And then a couple of years after that it became a huge hit on DVD. So to go from a complete failure to being more successful than I could imagine is a strange thing”.