Rave Britannia!

>> Justin Kerrigan on creating the cult flick Human Traffic

by MATTHEW HAYS

Two years ago, when filmmaker Justin Kerrigan was a mere 23 years old and writing his first feature, he stuck to a golden rule. "I knew I should write about what I knew," he says. "So being someone who loved to go to raves with my mates, I decided to write about that."

Kerrigan had no idea what he was getting himself into. His finished project, the no-budget Welsh wonder Human Traffic, touched one gigantic collective nerve when it hit screens in the U.K. last year, garnering respectable box office and sharply divided reviews. "It was strange to me that so many would relate directly to such a personal film about me and my friends," says Kerrigan. "I guess everyone can relate to a lost weekend."

Human Traffic features an odd ensemble of characters, all rather disaffected youth, who desperately want to escape their boring weekday Mcjobs with an intense weekend of raving. The revellers grapple with romantic rows, overbearing jealousies, parental relations and, in one particularly bizarre subplot, a nagging anxiety about the ability to perform sexually. As with Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Kerrigan has gone out of his way to burn the standard-issue cinema-storytelling rule book, opting instead for rapid-fire editing, cryptic narratives and a moral-free closure.

E versus alcohol

Throughout, Kerrigan maintains his own passionate defense of rave culture. Though things have calmed down now, when he wrote the screenplay there was a good deal of anti-rave sentiment and Ecstasy hysteria in Britain (similar to the kind seen in Toronto in the past year). "Eight people die of Ecstasy in Britain every year," argues Kerrigan. "But 30,000 people die because of alcohol." Kerrigan's defense of the rave scene finds its way into the dialogue of the film, with one character touting the eight-versus-30,000 figure Kerrigan has been discussing during interviews.

Surprisingly, Kerrigan didn't find himself fending off charges that the film glorified drug-taking. "People really responded to it as an honest portrayal of the scene. Upon its release in Britain, it wasn't as controversial as we'd thought it might be, actually. Even right-wing papers were behind it. The attitude had changed and I think people realized that raves were not a threat to society."

Kerrigan acknowledges that a big part of his film's success is due to the enduring popularity of raves and their built-in hype. "Raves are popular because they bring all sorts of different people together, of different races, sexual orientations, whatever, and everyone goes a bit crazy and has fun. There's no violence at raves."

The post-rave age

Kerrigan says his rather wee age--he was a mere 24 when production took place--helped, rather than hindered, his moviemaking efforts. "Certainly, filmmaking is always a challenge," he says. "And I had never done a feature before. I think, really, that my age helped me. The movie is about a youth culture I'm still a part of."

The writer-director readily admits that he culled the film's various storylines from his own friends' lives. But he also says he had no worries about his buddies recognizing their own lives amid his biographical notes. "My friends really dug it. It was about us, about a time when we just lived for the weekends. We've gone through that phase, now many of my friends have moved onto other things--raves didn't do them any damage. Now rave seems like a culture for the curious."

For a low-budget filmmaker making a project like Human Traffic, comparisons to its mega-hit predecessor Trainspotting would seem mandatory. But some of his other influences don't seem quite so obvious. "One of my biggest influences is Woody Allen," Kerrigan reports. "I thought a lot about Annie Hall when we were doing Human Traffic. The anxieties, the sexual insecurities, the romances. It was all there." :

Human Traffic opens Friday, May 19