This man scares every parent

Larry Clark makes films guaranteed to give parents nightmares. His 1995 debut, Kids, followed a gang of Manhattan teenagers drinking, doing drugs and indulging in casual sex and random violence. It won a prize at Cannes but made disturbing viewing.

Now Clark is back with Bully, another tale of misfit teens. But unlike Kids, which meandered through dramatised events to a shocking finale where an unconscious Chloe Sevigny is raped by a 16-year-old, Bully tells the true story of a group of Florida teenagers in 1993, who came together in a stoned haze to kill the bully of the title.

Clark pulls no punches in its account of the teenagers' hermetic world, which consisted of smoking pot, drinking and joyless sex in the backs of cars. The film has caused controversy in the United States.

"There's nothing I can do about that," says an unrepentant Clark. "I just do the work." He makes no judgments about why a group of mostly middle-class suburban teens end up as killers. "This is real life and it's complicated and hard to figure out," he says. "You can talk about the lack of culture in that part of America. You get a few blocks from the beach and it's flat, full of strip malls, hot and boring and there's nothing going on."

Boredom, as well as brains addled by too much dope and booze, is probably the reason why it happened, but it's hardly the most palatable one. That doesn't concern Clark. "I'm not pandering to the audience, I'm trying to deal with material that is challenging."

He has a point. With independent production outfits such as Miramax and New Line having been swallowed up by the Hollywood studios, there are few outlets in the United States for film-makers like him. It was a struggle just to raise the tiny $2 million budget for Bully. But he denies that he's motivated by a desire to shock. "Not at all. It's just real life," he says. "I always wanted to show what's really going on."

This began while he was growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his mother worked as a baby photographer. "I had to make the babies laugh while my mom took the photos," he says. "God, I hated it. But it put a camera in my hand and I started photographing my friends."

Like Clark himself, they were not the best-adjusted bunch. His horribly honest photos of his speedfreak friends were collected in his 1971 book, Tulsa, which influenced such photographers as Nan Goldin and Corinne Day. By the early Nineties, Clark was in New York and more interested in making movies. "It's a bigger canvas and you can do so much more." He's already finished his next one, Ken Park, and it won't be an easy ride. "It's more like my photographs, it's very dark. I don't know if it'll play, but I don't care."