"I never really wanted to make a stoner movie," said Gregg Araki, whose new film, the hilarious and endlessly inventive "Smiley Face," sets a new high-water mark for the stoner genre.
"Smiley Face," which screens Saturday and Sunday at AFI Fest and receives a limited run Nov. 16-22 at the NuArt, chronicles an eventful day in the life of aspiring actress and adorable pothead Jane (Anna Faris). Overcome by the munchies one morning, she polishes off her roommate's entire tray of cupcakes, only to realize that they were herbally enhanced. For the remainder of the movie, our heroine, zonked to the point of incapacitation, proceeds through a list of everyday activities -- she takes the bus, attends an audition, pays her dealer, replaces the baked goods -- that seem increasingly daunting and complicated.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, November 13, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 44 words Type of Material: Correction
Araki profile: The profile of director Gregg Araki that appeared in Friday's Calendar section stated that independent distributor First Look acquired Araki's feature "Smiley Face" after the Sundance Film Festival. The company financed the film itself and did not buy it at the festival.
Although Araki admits over coffee in West Hollywood that he's not an avowed fan of the genre, when he read the "Smiley Face" script by Dylan Haggerty (a sometime actor and first-time feature screenwriter), it struck a chord. "I have friends like Jane, and I remember thinking it would be the kind of film they'd be obsessed with," he said.
Its female protagonist instantly sets "Smiley Face" apart from its stoner brethren. The script also had a crucial quality for a reefer odyssey -- what Araki called a "wonderful randomness." To get a full extent of the film's eccentricity, consider that Haggerty's script bore the working title "The 'Being John Malkovich' of All Pot-Smoking Stoner Movies."
When it came to casting, Araki said, he was dead set on Faris, the star of the "Scary Movie" franchise who has stood out in film after film despite being repeatedly typecast as a ditzy blond. "I was looking for that person who's the scene-stealer that you wish was in the movie more," he said, citing her all-too-brief appearance as a painfully vapid actress in "Lost in Translation."
As if to compensate, Faris is almost never off-screen in "Smiley Face." "She makes it look deceptively easy," Araki said of his star. At Sundance, where the film premiered in January, "people were like, 'Oh, she's just stoned the whole movie.' But technically it's a really difficult performance. There are all these nuances to her stoned-ness, like sometimes she's dazed and sometimes she's hyper. There are all these peaks and valleys." He went so far as to compare her to Carole Lombard: "She's really beautiful but has this incredible ability and timing."
