For my next trick... - Harmony Korine interview

Published on Friday 7 March 2008 16:23

What was the enfant terrible of American cinema doing in Plockton? Harmony Korine tells James Mottram how Michael Jackson met the midges

MY SECOND encounter with Harmony Korine has been a long time coming. The last time we met was for his 1997 directorial debut Gummo. An abstract but lyrical tale of residents in a tornado-stricken Ohio town, he was full of beans back then. "I'm a trickster," he said, "I'm a showman," clicking his fingers to his own demented rhythm. Having already scripted Larry Clark's controversial Kids when he was 19, the former skate-kid's reputation as the enfant terrible of independent American cinema preced

Following Gummo with 1999's Julien Donkey-Boy, which starred Ewen Bremner as a schizophrenic, Korine has been silent ever since. Only briefly, in 2003, did we glimpse his work, as he filmed that other trickster, David Blaine, in Above The Below, documenting the magician's 44-day living-in-a-box stunt "with eye-popping pretentiousness", as one critic put it. Now 34, Korine is sitting quietly in the Soho offices of the distributor of his latest, long-awaited film, Mister Lonely, looking anything but the showman.

Has he changed? "The truth is, I still like to have fun. I like to create and I like playing around," he shrugs. "I mean, I'm still Harmony."

While Mister Lonely was originally written for Iceland, Korine abandoned those plans when he realised it was too difficult to film there, and plumped for the Highlands village of Plockton, a place recommended to Korine by Bremner. "It was an hour away from the Isle of Skye," he says, "though we were pretty isolated, so we didn't have people walking around." Idyllic-sounding, Korine says the cast came to resemble the commune in the film, with some actors even staying in character at all times. "The hardest thing was definitely the midges!" laughs Korine. "I'd never even heard of a f***ing midge until I got there, and they were unbearable. It was torture!"

With his mess of brown hair, gnomic features and slight frame, he certainly looks much the same, but Korine admits he's been through a tough time since Julien Donkey-Boy. "I started to lose faith," he says. "I didn't care about making movies. And I felt disconnected and I didn't understand what was going on in the world. I couldn't figure out what people liked. Also, I was very unhappy with where I was. People that were around me, people that were my friends, and people that would associate with me, I started to realise, for the most part, were full of shit and were phoneys. Then I started to think, 'Well, if these are my friends, there must be something wrong with me. I must be like them.'"

Korine, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was raised, admits he "wanted to disappear" during this bleak time. He took off to Europe, living in Paris for a while. It was here that he hit upon the initial idea for Mister Lonely, which stars Mexican hottie Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator. He recalls seeing the character's real-life equivalent. "Nobody was paying any attention to the guy, there was no money in his hat… and it was just an interesting way to live your life," he concedes. Look carefully and you can even glimpse a Jackson impersonator in Above The Below, as if Korine was preparing us for Mister Lonely. "I thought Michael was a symbol of identity and wanting to be other than who you are," he says.

Yet at the time, Korine was experiencing his own form of isolation. Living on a diet of sweets and McDonald's, he "flipped out in Europe" and decided to fly and meet his parents – his father, Sol, is a former documentary filmmaker – who were living in the jungles of Panama. It's at this point that Korine's story takes a turn for the bizarre. He claims he fell in with a small cult known as The Malingerers, 70-odd men who devoted their lives to finding a rare, sought-after fish with gold scales. "They said only two had been found in the last 75 years. If you found this fish, there are three spots on the side on the gills that if you press, it sounds like a piano."

So adept is he at spinning yarns – he once claimed The Basketball Diaries author Jim Carroll attended his birth and cut his umbilical cord – I'm beginning to wonder if Korine the trickster is back. "I spent seven months with them and we never found the fish," he continues. "One day, I got in an argument with one of the leaders there. He started screaming at me and said I had no faith, that I didn't believe it really existed. I never saw a picture of it and I think that they were all living in some kind of fantasy. Anyway, I was getting ready to leave, and this woman, who was married to one of the cult members, walked out with a dog's leash, and I said, 'What are you doing?' And she said, 'I'm walking my dog.' There was no dog there. It was an invisible dog. I took that as a sign."

Korine then returned to Nashville and immediately started "thinking about movies" again. "I had been through something traumatic," he claims. "I didn't know what it was or how to express it in words. All I know is that somehow the images started coming back to me."

If Korine is no longer alone – he has since married a girl named Rachel, who features in the film as Little Red Riding Hood – certainly the whole experience fed into Mister Lonely. In particular, the idea of a cult works its way into the second half, after Luna's character meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (played by Samantha Morton), who entices him to an isolated commune populated by other wannabes (including Charlie Chaplin, Madonna and Sammy Davis Jr).

Less abrasive and much sweeter than his previous work, it certainly feels as if Mister Lonely brought Korine a sense of inner peace. "I guess all the movies I've made reflect my mental state at the time," he says.

He is planning another Blaine project next, "where he sells out Madison Square Garden and has a marksman shoot him", though as for feature films, he has no intention of cranking another one out immediately. "It takes a few years to replenish and to start thinking like a human being again and having normal human experiences," he says. "I probably only think I have another five movies left in me.

"I guess I've always been attracted to the obsessive nature of certain characters," says Korine. "People that live on the fringe. Isolated individuals. And mostly people who invent their own lives. That's really always what I've been attracted to: people who set up a system of values that's outside of the social norm."

Having once dropped out of the prestigious NYU film school after one term, this anti-authoritarian streak is arguably why he befriended Blaine. "David is as insane as anyone I've ever met. He laughs in the face of death. How could you not love a character like that? I always admire people that when you say something is impossible, they look at you and laugh and then they do it anyway."v

• Mister Lonely opens Friday