Last Words: Considering Contemporary Cinema

After spending much of his youth in Nashville, Tennessee, Harmony Korine moved to New York aged 18 and studied English at New York University for one semester before dropping out. During this time, in which he was living in his grandmother’s basement in Queens, he met photographer Larry Clark, and wrote the screenplay for Kids (1995). A provocative tale of teenage sex, the film became one of the most provocative works of its decade.

Korine made his directorial debut with the equally controversial Gummo in 1997. Featuring the return to the screen of Linda Manz, the film is set around the impoverished residents of Xenia, Ohio. Featuring incredibly naturalistic performances from its young cast, the film presents an authentic look at blue-collar life and poverty-line existence. Realism and poetry effortlessly mesh.

The first American work to be certified by the filmmaking collective Dogme 95, Korine’s Julien donkey-boy (1999) confirmed the director as one of the most unique voices in contemporary American cinema. The story of the schizophrenic Julien (Ewan Bremner in a role partly based on Korine’s own uncle), his pregnant sister Pearl (Chloë Sevigny) and their maniacal father (a terrific Werner Herzog, who would remain a recurring figure in Korine’s life), the film is an intelligent observation of life on the margins.

Filmed in Panama, Scotland and France, Mister Lonely (2007) is another tale of misfits, this time a group of impersonators, amongst them Samantha Morton, Diego Luna and Denis Lavant who form their own little community. Premiered in Cannes, the film had less of an impact that Korine’s previous work and the director withdrew into other disciplines, including a collection of short stories and various other art projects.

Emerging again in 2013, Korine delivered his least divisive and most commercially successful work to date with Spring Breakers. A look at the spring break tradition in the United States, it’s a neon-infused tale of crime, sisterhood and debauchery.

HARMONY KORINE: I had been collecting spring break imagery for a while, mainly for art projects and paintings. I started to look at all the imagery together and that world with its hyper-sexual and hyper-violent subject matter. There were also all these pop kind of details and pop culture indicators such as nail varnish, dunkin’ donuts boxes, puke and they just spoke to me. I started to dream things up such as girls on the beach in bikinis with guns robbing fat tourists. These images were striking and they stayed with me. From there I came up with a storyline.

HK: It’s a common thing in America. I grew up around it. It happens once a year. Kids go off, cut loose, destroy everything and then go home as if it didn’t happen. At the same time I didn’t want to make a movie that was an expose of spring break. It’s a pop poem, an impressionistic reinterpretation of those things. It’s pushed into something more imaginary. What happens in the film is far removed from what actually happens on a spring break.

HK: I have always been obsessed with tones and feeling in films and I wanted this move to be a kind of post-articulation in the way that it was more inexplicable and like a drug experience. It had to have a transcendence, reaching a peak before disappearing into black. Much of this has to do with the feel of the locations and the ambience of the film. I have said that this film is about the culture of surfaces and the way things look. There is a candy-coated reality and all the pathology and menace and the violence is the residue of this. I wanted the film to look like it was lit with skittles. I wanted you to be able to taste it. Location is a big part of this process. I like to go down on my own a couple of months earlier and get lost. I don’t ask any questions, I just drive around and this is how I happen across quite a lot of my locations.

HK: It was crazy. There was stuff I had never had to deal with before. The chaos that follows these girls is insane. I certainly wasn’t used to it. It was a challenge. We were shooting in real locations and the crew was relatively small and so a lot of the energy in the film actually came from being chased. There were times when crowds would start to line up and vastly outnumber the crewmembers. Selena had one or two difficult moments where the crowds made it hard for her to concentrate but the actors were really bold and totally went for it.

HK: He is a maniac. He attacks life. Culture has become so corporate and generic and even the actors that people think of as outspoken are usually lame. Culture seems to be run by accountants and actors have themselves become accountants. Franco refuses to exist in that way. He invents things as he goes along which is something I understand. I always admired him as an actor and he had liked my movies so we had spoken about doing something together. He’s a handsome man so gets leading man parts but I always thought of him as more of a character actor and his tendency in his personal life is to be adventurous and extreme and risky and so I wanted to do something where he could push that aspect of himself.

The Alien character was based on kids I used to ride the bus to school with. They would just rap. They would end up coming into school with guns and I always wondered what would happen to these kids if they didn’t die by the age of thirty? I thought they would become just like Alien. I called Franco up and described the part. I also did something that I never do and spoke to him before I had written the script to make sure that it might be something that he was interested in. He immediately said ‘Yes’. I then went at it. I didn’t want him to be just one thing. I wanted him to be like a gangster mystic. He is a sociopath but he is also a poet and a clown. I wanted to exude a charisma and represent some strange kind of cultural mash up. For the year prior to the film I would send Franco YouTube clips and audio clips of rappers and video clips of girls getting into fights in parking lots at three in the morning. Things that I felt spiritually pertained to his character and would shape his worldview. Franco never responded. Every now and then I would get a message back saying something like ‘Peace’ and I was like, what does that even mean? Is he even watching this shit?

About a month before shooting he came down and didn’t want to rehearse. We would just drive around St. Petersburg at 2am and he would sit in the back with his windows rolled down and I would say things like ‘That’s the house you cooked crack in when you were twelve. That’s the broadwalk where you robbed your first tourist. This is the school you got expelled from and here is the playground where you used to get beat up as a kid.’ That was it. He would just quietly breathe it all in. On the day of shooting I was nervous but really hoping he would pull it off. We put him in his costume and he just walked out and he had obviously been consuming it all and taking it in the whole time. I was like, ‘holy shit’. I was blown away.

HK: He is one of my favourite rappers. He’s the rap Frank Sinatra. I had always wanted to do something with him so I called up his manager but found out he was in jail. I managed to talk to Gucci in jail and told him that I had a party waiting for him when he got out of jail. He got out and did it. He’s back in jail now. It sucks.

HK: The twins are my friends. They are scumbags. But they are amazing scumbags. They are what make America great. They live with no filter. Their philosophy boils down to the idea of double penetration. They exist only to double penetrate. They don’t drink water. They exist on Vicodin and Redbull and piss kidney stones all day long.

HK: He’s an amazing cinematographer. He really is one of the best. I wanted the film to have this kind of liquid narrative and to work in a way that is perhaps closer to electronic or loop-based music. I am a friend of Noe and I had always talked to him about working with Benoît who is really super inventive, especially when it comes to colour. It is like he is making paintings. He is also completely fearless.

HK: It’s something I have been trying to develop for a while, the notion of film as a physical experience, as something inexplicable. There is a false notion that I am obsessed with truth in cinema. I don’t care about truth in cinema and never have. I think that truth is boring for the most part and what I am trying to create is something more energy-based, a kind of energy. I wanted to give the sense that the image had exploded and that energy and sounds were flooding in from all directions. I didn’t know if it would work in a feature but I had been playing around with this idea in some of my shorts. I had also tried it in some of the advertising assignments that I do every once in a while. With pop music the repeated audio hooks become like mantras and this really fascinated me. Some of the lines can be very simple and base, but after they are repeated they are in some way elevated.

HK: Again, I was looking for a special kind of energy. I wanted the sound to be bombastic and at the same time beautiful. I wanted there to be an invisible line where sound design and music become one and the same. I wanted it to be very physical. As a kid I used to live in an area where kids would have these huge boom boxes just playing bass and it was like bombs going off. I wanted that rattle; I wanted that thing in your gut. I wanted it to rattle the fuck out of you.

HK: In the old days I would watch movies compulsively before I would go out and make a movie. Now, I watch less and less. About a year before I start shooting I tune them out. Films obviously mean a lot to me but I never try to consciously reference other works, not just films but other art works. The stuff that has really influenced me has manifested inside, it just kind of lives there so I don’t feel the need to consciously reference it. I prefer now to let myself dream and develop my own ideas. The only thing I did watch a lot before was Michael Mann’s Miami Vice [2006]. I would watch it with the sound off. I love the way Florida looks in that film.

HK: I don’t like to invent characters and then condemn them. That’s not to say that there isn’t condemnation present in the film but I don’t necessarily feel I have to punish people for doing things, at least not in an obvious way. In life I have noticed that good people do terrible things and that terrible people also do good things and what’s to say that these people won’t eventually be punished, in the case of this movie, five seconds after the movie is over. I hate it when people get arrested and go to jail. I’m sure it will probably happen but I don’t want to waste time showing that. I want things to exist in a way that allows you to dream it up yourself.