Director Larry Clark kept the audience laughing with stories peppered with a few words that would have to be bleeped out on television as he accepted a career achievement honor at the annual American Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter said.
The 70-year-old director accepted the award from French fashion designer Agnes B.
Clark, who just wrapped his latest film The Smell of Us starring Michael Pitt in Paris, said filming in France has been a dream since his first film, Kids, was screened in competition at Cannes in 1994. “I mentioned this to some well-known French people in cinema, and it was unanimous,” he told the crowd. “They said, ‘No. No. You’re not French. You cannot do this. It’s impossible. Please do not.”
“So 19 years later I’ve made my film, in France, with a French crew, French actors, French language. I’m the only gringo in the crowd, so don’t fuck with me.”
His latest film, 2012's Marfa Girl, was envisioned specifically for digital distribution and released by Clark directly on the internet but is receiving a big-screen showing at the festival here. “It’s my best film – until this next film is finished,” he said.
“The American filmmaker Larry Clark has long been characterized as a rule breaker, as much with the content of his films as with the way they are created. Since the release of Kids in 1995, Clark (who was a photographer before turning to film) has developed his own cinematic language: a visceral and honest portrait, something between subtle poetry and decadence, of American youth.
Although his work has gained the admiration of directors as well-known as Martin Scorsese and Gus Van Sant, and his films have won a number of international prizes, the high content of realistic sex and violence in his films have limited him from becoming widely popular in the big Hollywood sense. Clark has continued to forge his own path, however, using documentary tools to create fictional films emblematic of the subcultures of our society. And his success is partly due to the confidence Clark has with youth, helping them realize their own projects and incorporating them into his crews as if the making of his film were about a collective voyage of discovery,” Faea.com said.
