by MATTHEW HAYS In a movie season populated by such vacuous fare as Mickey Blue Eyes and The Thomas Crown Affair, the indie, low-budget Pups is entirely refreshing. Up-and-coming L.A.-based director/writer Ash has created a brutal, in-your-face examination of kids who get hooked up with guns. And though the film is rife with pop culture references, it maintains a solid element of surprise and a sense of novelty. But despite intelligent and thoughtful treatment of its subject matter, Pups isn't a film you'll be seeing anytime soon at your local multiplex. After a gripping premiere at the L.A. Independent Film Festival on April 18, it had audiences and industry reps alike abuzz. The day after, Ash and his producer Daniel M. Berger received phone calls from Columbia, Warner Bros., Gramercy and Samuel Goldwyn. Ash, it seems, had become even more of a hot property than he was after the arthouse success of his 1997 film Bang, about an out-of-work actress who discovers the thrill of power after donning a cop's outfit and slinging a gun.
Teen targets
It's certainly understandable that audiences and industry types might flinch at the goings-on in Pups. The scenes involving two terrifically naïve, steeped-in-pop-culture 13 year olds, stepping into a situation they don't realize will soon become bigger than they can handle, are alarming to watch. After finding a gun in his mother's closet, our anti-hero (played with awesome gusto by Cameron Van Hoy, in his first acting appearance ever) is smitten with the piece (a Magnum .45, no less). His girlfriend (Mischa Barton) is soon drawn into a drama of Dog Day Afternoon proportions, as Van Hoy pulls the gun at a bank on the way to school. He proves he's willing to use it after a security guard surprises him and gets it in the shoulder. Enter Burt Reynolds, who plays the negotiator who must try to avert gun-happy cops from blowing away two misguided kids. Yes, Pups is freakily prescient. But it's also got a moral centre; the one-word monikered Ash has a horrified fascination with American gun-happy culture, and his second feature is laced with commentary about a society which he feels is quite capable of driving even the nicest kids nuts.
Culture shock
Ash says he can understand how onlookers might see him as someone obsessed with firepower, after both Bang and Pups. "After Bang, I thought I'd got it out of my system. But then the Jonesboro shootings [in which two minors opened fire in their schoolyard while dressed in battle fatigues] happened, and I was horrified. Someone said that I should really write about this." As luck would have it, at about the same time some Japanese investors were looking for a precocious talent to invest in. Bang had proven a critical success in Japan, so Ash fit the bill. "They deposited one million dollars in my account," he recalls. "The catch was, I had to make the thing in three months." Ash wrote the script in four weeks. As a result of the tight writing schedule, he says the screenplay took on a fluid feel, one matched by the cinematography of the finished product, which was shot entirely on steadicam. Indeed, the camera often feels as unpredictable as the situations presented in Ash's screenplay--from shots fired by accident to bickerings between various hostages. During the writing process, Ash drew on his own experiences to trigger the script's opening scenario. "When I was 16 years old, I was visiting a girlfriend in California. She and I found a gun in her father's room. We shot it off, blowing a hole in the floor. We were deaf for about 10 minutes; our adrenaline was pumping for the entire day. The impact of a gun on a kid is exhilarating."
A touch of MTV Accenting the film's smart storyline is Ash's unconventional style. He manages to pack a good deal of humour into Pups, and situations are often alternately funny and alarming. At one point, Van Hoy demands that MTV arrive to interview the newborn bankrobbers about their motives. Reynolds summons MTV's Kurt Loder (who plays himself) to conduct the interview. Ash scores points about youthful infatuation with media celebrity while poking fun at it at the same time. Audience reactions to Pups have been predictably polarized. "Some laugh throughout it and see the humour involved. That's something I was worried that people wouldn't be able to see. But others are completely numbed by it. The 40-and-under set generally respond quite well to the situations. The older ones respond to Burt Reynolds." Ash says the real-life horror of his screenplay's concept was driven home just by watching the children on the set. "What struck me was how easy it would have been for these 13-year-old actors to get guns like the ones in the movie if they wanted to." But beyond gun control, Ash says he wants his film--which has yet land a distribution deal--to be read as a broader meditation on the perils of growing up in the late 20th century. "Kids live in a time of powerlessness. AIDS, technological advances, the threat of nuclear annihilation--this is a very weird time to be coming to grips with the world. Things certainly seemed more innocent when I was a kid."
Pups screens as part of the World Film Festival on Saturday, August 28 at 9:30pm, Sunday, August 29 at 8pm and Monday, August 30 at 3:30pm at the Parisien |
>> The indie Pups is a tragi-comic and honest look at the issue of kids and guns. But filmmaker Ash might have some trouble finding a distributor in a post-Columbine world
But the timing for Pups was off. Two days after the premiere, teens Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris marched into Columbine, killing 13 students and then turning the guns on themselves. Pups, which involves two 13 year olds intoxicated with the smell of gunpowder, suddenly became less of a hot property. All the studios backed away, citing potential public backlash as a reason. Selling Pups was going to be some kind of miracle in a post-Columbine world.
"Growing up in England," Ash explains while touring with the film in the U.K., "I had never really seen a gun. I ran in some rough circles, but the worst you'd ever see is a knife or maybe a broken bottle. In the States it seems like everyone has a gun."