Harmony Korine: how one of the freest filmmakers around finally got his groove back

Interview, May, 2008 by Elvis Mitchell

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Tumultuous, disassociated riffs on the modern dysfunctional family, assembled in a way that dares you to sit through them, is the way many might describe the movies of Harmony Korine. After his script for Kids (1995) was directed by Larry Clark, Korine set out on a wave of filmmaking--Gummo (1997), Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)--that was discomforting, but not terrifying. It was clear he was out to direct audiences as much as he was directing the films. With Korine's latest movie, Mister Lonely, he's moved into a different phase of his work: It's a film about another dysfunctional "family" (a group of celebrity impersonators), who encounter their own emotional terrors, softened with a rapt, dreamy glaze.

ELVIS MITCHELL: Your latest film, Mister Lonely, has a really interesting cast featuring Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Anita Pallenberg, and David Blaine, among others]. What made you decide to do a movie with this group?

HARMONY KORINE: A lot of it was just people I admire and had wanted to work with, as well as some friends and family. The way I make movies is that after a while I start to compile enough talent that I begin to think of them in a collage form. Leos Carax is a perfect example of that.

EM: Is he somebody who influenced you?

HK: Yeah, definitely, in the way you could say Buster Keaton influenced me--someone who reveals layers of poetry in film.

EM: There's a kind of movement in this one that really reminds me of him, fike that one scene when Diego Luna and Samantha Morton are walking down the street and the camera pulls ahead of them, floating.

HK: Well, it's Paris. [laughs]

EM: It's great to see Denis Lavant, too.

HK: He was the one guy who kind of lived in character the whole movie and stayed in the castle where we were shooting after everyone else would go home. I would be there really late and see him riding his unicycle down the hallways, or the grip would see him playing the accordion naked at three in the morning in a bathtub. He just got into these bizarre phases, and I couldn't figure out how they were related to the movie. It was all part of his process. EM: One of the funniest things is to see a movie in which Charlie Chaplin talks the entire time. How did you come up with that?

HK: I'd always heard stories about how Harpo Marx was the most talkative of the Marx brothers. I found it interesting that someone you never got to hear speak in films would never not speak in real life.

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EM: It's interesting how poetic this movie is--in a way the other ones you've directed really aren't.

HK: When I started making movies, I was pretty young, and at the time I felt like there needed to be more confrontation in cinema--or I needed to make something more disruptive--so in the beginning, those movies were me wanting to play with the rules. I also felt strongly about narrative at that time, about things coming from all directions. There was a certain chaos to those films that I was living. [laughs] When I made this one, I just felt different about things.

EM: Diego Luna's character talks so much about being afienated and dislocated that it was almost as if he was describing you when you first got started in the movie business.

HK: I still feel like that. I just haven't let myself get to a place where I've felt a part of any kind of a community, so I've always stayed outside of it. I do have friends who make movies, but for the most part I never really wanted to feel like I was part of an industry. My knock with filmmaking is the whole bureaucracy around it, so in some ways staying outside of it is easier for me. I went through this really horrible phase where I didn't know what I was doing and I wasn't sure if I wanted to make movies anymore. For a few months, I spent time with this small cult of fishermen known as the Malingerers. It was a group I met in Panama who were searching for this fish called the Malingerer fish, which was supposed to be a golden fish that had these three dots on the side. The story goes that if you press the three dots in a certain way, it sounds like a toy piano.

EM: Did you find any?

HK: No. In the beginning it was interesting to watch these guys, and I started to believe this fish existed. But I became disenchanted by the whole thing, and one day I got into an argument with one of the leaders, and his wife said, "You don't believe anymore. It's time for you to go." And I said, "You're right," and that's kind of when I started feeling like maybe I could make movies again. But it had taken me a good six or seven years away from it.

EM: Do you think making those earlier movies took too much out of you? I think about what you were trying to do with Fight Harm [which Korine abandoned].

HK: Yeah, Fight Harm almost killed me. But Mister Lonely was a pleasure. The only thing that was difficult about this was that it was more ambitious, so it took a lot of time to get to the point where I was filming it. But when I was actually on set, I enjoyed every minute of it. It was nice to wake up in the morning and have this big camera waiting for me.