Mysterious Skin
Short description
Mysterious Skin follows two young men whose lives were shaped by a single childhood summer. Brian, once a shy boy on a youth baseball team, woke up in his family's basement at eight years old with a nosebleed and no memory of how he got there. The gaps in that night became frightening dreams, a fear of the dark and a conviction that he was taken by aliens. Neil was his teammate, and as a teenager he drifts through casual encounters with older men, unable to form attachments. When the two meet again as eighteen-year-olds, what they remember of that period begins to fit together, and the connection between them turns out to be more painful than either expected.
Gregg Araki wrote and directed the film, which sits between Nowhere and Smiley Face in the run of features he has directed. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Neil and Brady Corbet plays Brian, with Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Lynn Rajskub and Elisabeth Shue among the supporting cast. It was made for about 3 million dollars and took roughly 2 million worldwide.
Reception was solid: on IMDb it holds 7.6/10 from 85,000 votes, close to the 7.6/10 critics' rating drawn from 116 reviews, while on TMDB it sits at 7.7/10 from 1,368 votes.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is based on Scott Heim's novel "Mysterious Skin" (1996).
- In the US, the film received the most restrictive rating of NC-17. A similar R+ rating received by the film in Australia was contested by the country's Attorney General, who sought a complete ban on the screening of "Mysterious Skin." The resulting scandal was resolved with a compromise – the film was released in Australian cinemas, but its screenings were prefaced with the commentary: "Adult themes, scenes of sexual violence." There were no problems with screening the film in Russia. It had a limited release on May 26, 2005. Less than a month later, on June 15, the DVD was released. The film premiered on Russian television on May 25, 2007, on the TV-3 channel as part of the "Other Cinema" program.
- Director Gregg Araki personally edited the film on his Macintosh computer.
- In the spring of 2007, the film took first place in the popularity ranking compiled by the gay.ru website, based on a survey of over 6,000 Russian homosexuals.
- To prepare for the role, Joseph Gordon-Levitt spent about a week visiting cities in Kansas led by writer Scott Heim, who showed him places and people whose characters formed the basis of the book.
- In one of the scenes of "Mysterious Skin," Brian and Eric watch the horror film "Dead Man Next Door."
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
