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Image courtesy of @CircaFilm.

Juxtapoz Magazine caught up with Harmony Korine to talk about the “Rebel” film. You click the link at the beginning of this post to view the original article or read the interview below. The magazine have also interviewed James Franco and Aaron Young (two of Korine’s collaborators on the piece) previously in relation to the exhibition.

Gwynned Vitello: You were born in Bolinas, California, so that has to have a connection with why you’re named Harmony, doesn’t it?
Harmony Korine: Yeah, that’s right.

Have you spent much time in Bolinas recently? It’s so beautiful.
I haven’t been back in a while, I was born there, in a… I don’t know if it was a commune but…

Well it’s sort of one big commune.
Yeah. I was out on the beach when I was born, somewhere with a lot of people chanting.

And now you lead a life of no boundaries. Can you tell us how you got involved with this project?
I had been talking to James Franco for a while about making a movie. And for the last couple years we would always toss ideas back and forth, and then about 6 months ago he came to me with the concept for this thing for the Venice Biennale, based on Rebel Without a Cause. He specifically wanted me to do something that was rooted in the violence of that iconic gang fight at the observatory in the movie. When we talked about it in the beginning we talked about using real gang members, and ended up having un-simulated knife fights.

Maybe he was thinking of that documentary you started to make, Fight Harm, perhaps?
Yeah I think some of that came from there too, the Fight Harm movies where I would provoke people into fighting me.

You must have actually suffered physically…
Oh yeah that’s why I stopped. I was really out of my mind at that point. I wanted to make what I thought would be the greatest American comedy of all time. Something that was an extension of Buster Keaton or The Three Stooges; something that was just really vile and base and rooted in the lowest, purest form of humor, which I always thought was violence. You know like someone slips on a banana peel and cracks their head open.

So that’s how he approached you – the violent aspect, but there was more to it than that, because of the focus on youth…
I think that he’s specifically interested in the mythology that surrounds that film, James Dean, Sal Mineo, and the director… Something that I hadn’t really spent too much time thinking about myself, but I thought was interesting, and I liked those concepts, and I also liked the other people that were involved in the project. So it was exciting.

I haven’t seen Rebel Without A Cause in an awfully long time, it seems like you’ve watched a lot of films throughout your life. Obviously you re-watched the film before you took this on. Did it look different to you than when you had seen it when you were younger?
I guess so. It almost seemed like a comedy, so melodramatic. I always liked how most of the teenagers looked like they were in their 30s.

That’s what they did then. Natalie Wood was supposed to be 16!
Yeah, so that adds a kind of humorous element to the whole thing. There’s something that was always kind of astonishing about James Dean – it’s hard to believe he was ever was really a person. He inhabits this other domain, it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t just a cartoon or a figment of my imagination.

Or a poster in a dorm room or something… he didn’t get old and fat like Marlon Brando, so he’s always James Dean. So tell us a little bit more about your film.
I just lived with it for a couple months, I took all these different elements that I thought were related to gang culture and put them together. It’s difficult for me to articulate exactly where it comes from.

Has James directed any films before?
I don’t know, that’s a good question. I’m sure he’s done lots of short films…

But he gave you free reign. You’re the director and he said “Do whatever you want to do.”
Yeah, definitely. He conceptualized the whole project, it’s his in that he put all these things together. The idea is his.

He wanted you to focus on gangs and violence, so did he give the other artists certain scenes to explore?
Yeah, from what I understand that how it happened. The other artists dealt with different scenes and elements of the film, and the back story.

Were you aware of what the other artists were bringing to the rebel installation? Did you get a briefing, or was it like you didn’t need to know?
I knew that Paul McCarthy was building certain things… not a lot of detail about what other people were doing. I didn’t really think about it so much. I think everybody’s still making things. Even mine’s not finished yet.

Would it matter if it was in Venice or someplace else? When I think of Venice, some of it looks kind of decayed, while some of it looks like Disneyland.
I made mine keeping in mind that it was part of an installation that’s in Venice, but I also thought about how the film segments would exist separately from that. So it’s made for this location, but it will work as well on its own.

How will it be screened there?
It will be projected on this island off of Venice, there’s this decayed house… I can’t even explain really what it is.

I was thinking about the mansion in Rebel Without a Cause… thinking there’s some kind of connection with Venice there.
Maybe so, I’m not sure.

Are there women portrayed in the gangs?
Yeah it’s all women! It’s only female gangsters. We did all the castings out of South Central and Compton. We did a lot of clips where I live. It’s broken up into two gangs, Sal Mineo’s gang and James Dean’s gang. And then also East Coast – West Coast; Tupac – Biggie, it’s like a BMX slaughter in downtown L.A.

Right, which we saw in the trailer, the scene in the parking lot. So how did you cast? Was it the same way you usually do your casting, where you just go on site and round em up?
Mostly girls that had been paroled, just getting out of prison. And people that I had heard about – infamous neighborhood girls.

Was the concept of using all women something that was part of the blueprint of Rebel, or was it something that developed along with the concept?
It was just something I thought about. It just made sense – I liked the idea of these girls with machetes on bikes. It just seemed like a natural thing to do, it was exciting. Most of them don’t have their clothes on.

Well that comes out of the original Rebel because from what I understand that was one of the first films that blurred gender roles, the men were way more sensitive than they were usually portrayed. So it’s interesting to have women fulfill a more masculine role in your film. I understand there’s also a prominent musical element – what kind of music did you choose?
Well it’s scored to the film. Also all the voice-overs were taken from the original film, from the scene that preceded the gang fight and the slideshow that they give in the scene before – that discussion on the cosmos and how small man is in relationship to the stars. I re- did that text with somebody else’s voice and added a lot of other things, I peppered ebonic-type slang and then I screwed it all. I pitched it all down so it’s totally fucked up and screwed.

Well that’s so different then than Rebel Without A Cause because even for it’s time it was using stilted gang talk, so this is a little more real.
Yeah, this is next level shit.

And you let the girls, kind of talk their own talk…
There’s actually not even any dialogue.

It’s all action and music?
It’s all slow motion. Its all shot at really really high-frame rates, so yeah it’s pretty slow.

The original Rebel Without a Cause, although it was groundbreaking, was such a sugar-coated depiction of rebellion. As you are using real gangsters, real people, do you think you guys had decided to take it to a whole other level of a ridiculous take on the notion of rebellion?
I don’t even really think about it too much like that. I just honestly don’t even think about things like that too much. It’s more about just like when you close your eyes… I just allow myself to dream and go to a certain place, that’s difficult for me to explain. If the feelings right, if I’m being pulled and the sway is right then I don’t question it I just make it. And that’s how it was with this. I just dreamt it up based on this idea that Franco had, based on simulated gang wars.

When an interviewer asks questions we frame things in a way that boxes you in to answering a certain way, and I know about your filmmaking, that it’s very linear, and it’s a slice or a look at life.
It’s also that sometimes I just feel like the best things don’t exist in words. It’s like something that’s post-logic. I don’t ever care about making perfect sense, it’s like making perfect nonsense. It exists outside that. I’ve never had any other kind of motivation other than to see something in a specific way that no one else is showing me.

It’s very much like skateboarding. You don’t go out and skateboard to score a certain amount of points, you’re just out there.
Or if you’re gonna use a skateboard analogy, you could say it’s almost like Mark Gonzales, like the first time I ever saw Mark Gonzales skating on his grip tape and I was like “wow”… you realize that there are no rules, that you can do anything.

So you still live in Nashville?
Yeah, I didn’t live there for a while, but I moved back a couple years ago.

So you were there, and then you went to New York City (because everyone’s gotta go to New York City for a while)… and you’ve got a child now.
Yeah I’ve got a daughter.

Are you in the country?
No, no I live in the city. I live right by Vanderbilt University.

So back to the project, what are you finishing up on the film right now?
I’m just doing the sound, mixing it, which is great. It’s really almost done.

You’re doing just the film or are there other projects related to the installation?
The movie of course, and then I’m making these other little loops, these images that are repeated. And then I’m taking all the props from the film, including the severed James Dean head, the prosthesis and put it in vatrines, and then the BMX bikes will hang from trees. And the Tupac and Biggie shirts everywhere, it’s all part of a whole.

A longer video of James Franco’s opening speech can be seen here:

laimyours.com have also posted up a selection of images from the exhibition, many of which feature Korine.

YouTube users have slowly been uploading videos they have filmed from the premiere you can view three of them below:

The LA Times, Juxtapoz Magazine aswell as various other publications have also published stories relating to the premiere exhibition of “Rebel”. The link to the Juxtapoz site features a heavy dose of images from the exhibition.

Don’t forget that you can still attend the exhibition, it ends it’s run at 941 North Highland Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90038 on June 23rd. For more information visit MOCA.org

ArrestedMotion has posted a selection of images from the MOCA opening of the “Rebel” exhibition which premiered this week in Los Angeles. James Franco and Harmony Korine are pictured below to see the rest visit the site’s article on the exhibition here.

This past weekend, MOCA presented Rebel, an exhibition conceived by James Franco and also including Douglas Gordon, Harmony Korine, Damon McCarthy, Paul McCarthy, Terry Richardson, Ed Ruscha, and Aaron Young. Showing at the JF Chen design space, the group effort is a deconstruction and reinterpretation of the legendary 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause which starred James Dean and Natalie Wood. Set within a space that mimics a Hollywood film set, the exhibition is broken up into different rooms and sections that studies various themes attached to the narrative, the personalities set inside that world, and the real life actors that were part of the 1955 production.

Each of the artists involved during this exhibition brought something different to the table. Whether it was Harmony Korine’s reinterpretation of the knife fight scene (now interpreted with naked women carrying machetes and riding BMX bikes) or the film Rebel Dabble Dabble which makes a reference to the infamous rumors surrounding Nicholas Ray’s and his cast during their stay at the Chateau Marmont, each presentation puts into question themes such as identity, sexuality, and Hollywood celebrity to name a few. Other notable presentations include a series of photographs taken by Richardson in which Franco is dressed in drag, thus questioning the role of gender in media and film. Aaron Young also paints an abstract portrait of James Dean’s during his last moments alive which ties to a large scale sculpture of a 1950 Ford Custom Tudor Coupe, the same type of vehicle that killed James Dean. Also included was a film titled El Gato, an animated narrative filled with dark and sexual undertones, as well as two films directed by James Franco titled Sal and The Death of Natalie Wood. Anyone interested in checking out the latest showing presented by MOCA, make sure to do so before it ends on June 23rd.

The upcoming portmanteau piece “Rebel”, which features work from James Franco, Douglas Gordon, Damon McCarthy, Paul McCarthy, Terry Richardson, Ed Ruscha, Aaron Young and Harmony Korine premiered last year at the Venice Biennale. It has now been announced (via MOCA) that the film will finally return to screens.

While the piece is being screened from May 15 onwards, it has it’s opening on Sunday May 12 at 941 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90038.

Read below for more information or alternatively visit the MOCA website.

May 15–June 23, 2012
JF Chen
941 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90038
Opening event: Saturday, May 12, 2012, 7–10pm

MOCA presents Rebel, conceived by James Franco with Douglas Gordon, Harmony Korine, Damon McCarthy, Paul McCarthy, Terry Richardson, Ed Ruscha, and Aaron Young. Rebel will be on view from May 15 through June 23, 2012, at JF Chen, a newly emerging contemporary art and design space, located at 941 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90038.

Rebel is an interrogative ode to Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece Rebel Without A Cause (1955), conceived by Franco to embrace and mine the main themes and events in the original film. The exhibition reinterprets the film’s legends, the people involved, its place in Hollywood, film as a medium, and behind-the-scenes footage, in a new, fresh, and unconventional presentation of film, video installation, photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture, housed in and framed by iconic Hollywood structures.

“MOCA is excited to present Rebel,” said MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch. “This exhibition, based on an iconic Los Angeles film by artists with strong ties to MOCA, represents a convergence of extraordinary talents and has a profound resonance with the Los Angeles art world and its relationship to Hollywood.”

In Rebel, the contributions of each artist are combined to capture the spirit of the original film through references to the auto and motorcycle culture of the 1950s, which James Dean was a part of; teenage angst and issues of identity back then, related to identity now; patrilineal exchange, and the relationships of father and son, and mentor and student; male and female sexuality; fiction and fact; and Hollywood and the art world. The Chateau Marmont is one of the central points in Rebel, and perhaps the single most significant reference and home to Hollywood behind the scenes life, acting as a linking structure to the exhibition, and to several of the works presented.

Interview Magazine recently caught up with Harmony Korine, aswell as other cast and crew members, with regards to his upcoming project “Spring Breakers”. They published some previously unseen photographs from the set, one of which you can see below. You can also read the article below, but head to the magazine’s website to view the official gallery.

Chances are good that if you have an Internet connection, you’re already aware of how Harmony Korine spent his spring break. Photos from the Florida set of Korine’s latest film, Spring Breakers—some taken by paparazzi, many shot by the cast and crew themselves—began appearing online in March, quickly invading Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and virtually every other image-sharing social-media channel, and instantly generating the kind of viral buzz that ought to be the envy of every big studio marketing department in the country. In fact, Spring Breakers hadn’t even wrapped shooting (and won’t be in theaters until later this year at the earliest) when images of the film’s principals—Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson clad in neon bikinis, and James Franco done up as a gun-toting vision of Kevin Federline by way of The Dude—passed into pop culture’s visual lexicon. “I liked the idea of the film as a social experiment,” says Korine. “It was like there were two movies—the actual movie, and then the one that the media, paparazzi, and the people tweeting photos were also creating.”

Spring Breakers stars Gomez, Hudgens, Benson, and Korine’s wife, Rachel Korine, as a quartet of college students who land in jail after robbing a restaurant to fund their spring break trip. The foursome is bailed out by Alien (Franco), a drug-dealer and gunrunner, who seduces the girls into his world. Drugs, sex, and violence ensue. (Gucci Mane, Glee‘s Heather Morris, and skateboarding weirdoes the ATL Twins also feature.) “When I wrote the script, I started thinking about girls in bikinis with guns, wearing ski masks,” Korine recalls. “I was like, ‘Where would you see that?’ And the idea of spring break came to me. I just started imagining girls on spring break robbing places.”

Even for a guy whose last feature was the 2009 film Trash Humpers (in which trash is, indeed, humped), Spring Breakers represents a radical move. Korine admits that it might have the most commercial potential of any film he has directed. If so, he owes that largely to his cast: the girls are a major draw—Gomez, for one, has more than 29 million Facebook fans. And what would a weird spring-break crime film/media-art project that either is or isn’t an earnest attempt at creating mainstream fare be without Franco? “When Harmony told me who he was going to cast, I thought it was perfect for so many reasons,” Franco says. “The young actresses are so excited to do a movie like this with someone like Harmony. They were so eager and enthusiastic to be a part of it.”

For her part, Gomez agrees. “I was getting kind of repetitive in terms of the roles I was picking, and I really wanted to do something that was completely different,” she says. “It was a mark thing for me—like, ‘This is what I want to be doing.’ I want to be taking myself seriously as an actress, and this was definitely a stretch.” She adds: “I mean, I’d never smoked a cigarette before in my entire life. It was really funny—they had to show me how to do it.”

Benson, best known for her roles on the ABC Family seriesPretty Little Liars and the daytime soap Days of Our Lives, approached the opportunity to show a side of herself that’s not necessarily family-friendly with equal relish. “Harmony wanted to break us all out of the good-girl mold,” she says. “For Selena, Vanessa, and me, our audience is all in their teens or younger, so they’re not even going to be able to see this when it comes out—it’s not appropriate.”

Hewing to his raw, full-frontal aesthetic, Korine shot Spring Breakers in and around St. Petersburg during March and April, just as actual spring break was in full effect, and recruited as extras some 500 kids who just happened to be there partaking in bacchanalia. The realism extended to the details of the characters’ outfits. “I had to keep in mind where these girls are from: a small town in the South,” says the film’s costume designer, Heidi Bivens. “What they were wearing at school had to be stuff they could find where they were living. And then when they come to spring break, it changes, because they’re able to shop in St. Petersburg.” Some authentic-feeling elements proved harder to find. “The most challenging for me were the ski masks that the girls wear,” says Bivens. “They’re supposed to glow fluorescent, but there aren’t any ski masks I could find that were the color we needed in the daylight and that would glow under black light, so I had to start experimenting with dyes. I probably went through 20 different dyes to find the right one.”

Of course, Korine rose to acclaim after writing the script forKids, the 1995 parental nightmare directed by Larry Clark that introduced the world to Chloë Sevigny, Rosario Dawson, and the uncomfortable realities of a kind of teen life that Korine himself inhabited as a skater kid in downtown New York City. Spring Breakers is similarly fascinated by youth gone wild. “Everybody likes to have fun, and everybody imagines that somebody else is having more fun than they are because they’re willing to break all the rules-to the point of getting arrested,” says one the film’s producers, Chris Hanley. In a way, Korine says that Spring Breakers is his attempt to capture something that he’d missed the first time around. “I grew up in Nashville, but I was a skater, so I was skateboarding during spring break,” he says. “Everyone I knew would go to Daytona Beach and the Redneck Riviera and just fuck and get drunk—you know, as a rite of passage. I never went. I guess this is my way of going.”

Vice Films recently caught up with Harmony Korine, Val Kilmer and producer Eddy Morretti to discuss their newest venture “The Fourth Dimension”, you can read the interview below.

VICE: So apparently the impetus to make this film began with a “creative brief.” That’s pretty typical for the ad world, but I’ve never heard of it being used for a movie.
Eddy Moretti: The idea of the project was to do a couple of short films but to somehow tie them together. We went through a number of different ways of connecting them and then we just thought, “Let’s just send a set of instructions to people and let them pull elements from the instructions and put them together.”

Was the idea for Lotus Community Workshop kicking around for a while or was it created especially for The Fourth Dimension?
Harmony Korine: Well, the strange length of the movie makes it too long for a short, but not long enough for a feature. And I didn’t really know, so I just started thinking, I should make something that just works on its own logic and its own time. I started thinking about more of a monologue, and I started imagining that if I could get anybody to say these lines, who would it be? And it was Val.

Lots of reviewers have been saying Val’s monologue is improvisational. Is that true? It sounded like at least some of it came out of Harmony’s brain.
Val: It’s always nice to hear, because people can’t tell. But it’s a compliment to your writing and the acting, but I would say that it’s almost 100 percent scripted.
Eddy: I was amazed, actually, by how close it was to the script.
Harmony: My only role in writing is to react, to make it real, to make it entertaining.

Have any of you guys ever paid to see a motivational speaker?
Eddy: No.
Harmony: I took a “Stop Smoking” course at work.
Eddy: You did? It worked?
Harmony: It worked!

Where was it shot?
Harmony: We shot it in Nashville, at the Brentwood Skate Rink. I grew up there. Like, breakdancing there when I was a kid.
Val: I was concerned about the low-ceilings, because when you think “motivational speaker,” you want your audience to think all these obvious thoughts. Of course, it didn’t do anything remotely like a usual motivational speaker. One of the ideas, which there’s only one brief cut at the end, was that we would see him being filmed, and that would be part of the story. But the thing that made it so suddenly poetic and fantastic, which must have been in [Harmony’s] mind—I go down on my knees to tell the story of the Mothership [a non sequitur alien spaceship randomly mentioned by Val in the film] because otherwise there’s just no size to this story, and the ground is reflected. So these ridiculous lights become lights of the ship on the ground. It looks like there’s a Mothership above us, as if it was a big master plan.

Does that tie into the whole space-time, fourth dimension stuff?
Harmony: Yeah, I guess so.
Eddy: I never even asked you if you’ve ever really saw a spaceship.
Harmony: I’ve never seen one.
Val: I have.

Where’d you see one?
Val: New Mexico. The epicenter.

Fair enough.
Harmony: That’s true. That’s where they all are.
Val: I think the birthplace of the bomb had something to do with it. This big flash went out into the cosmos…
Eddy: And it attracted some attention.
Val: And they said, “Let’s go check that spot out.”
Harmony: That makes sense.

What’s up with the name Lotus Community Workshop?
Harmony: I was just trying to imagine what it would be called.

That seems about right. It seems like it’s something real, like in Williamsburg or something.
Harmony: Williamsburg? Oh Jesus.

Or in San Francisco.
Harmony: San Francisco.

It’s not national, to me.
Val: And you guys had a friend who was like, our moderator, kind of?
Harmony: Oh yeah! Troy Duff.
Val: Troy.
Harmony: The black guy with the dreads [who introduces Val to the crowd in the film].

He’s just a guy you’ve known?
Harmony: He like, spray paints underwear and stuff and sells it on eBay. It’s called “Duff’s Stuff.”
Val: Is he not the guy in the iPod ad?
Harmony: Yeah, he’s also the dude in the iPod ad.
Val: The very first guy that came out.
Harmony: The silhouette that starts, you know, with his hair…
Val: So did you do that ad or he just got that gig?
Harmony: No. Yeah, he just got that.

Were a lot of the other audience members just dudes from around town?
Harmony: Yeah. Hard-luck cases.
Eddy: Wasn’t there some guy at a bus shelter, when we were driving around and you were like, “This is the guy that was in Gummo.”
Harmony: Oh you’re talking about the black dwarf. Little Bryan.
Eddy: And you wanted to invite him to the set.
Harmony: Yeah.
Eddy: Yeah. He never made it.

Have you seen the completed film?
Harmony: I just saw it on Friday, yeah.

And what did you think about how the other two shorts connected with yours?
Harmony: Nice.

I liked that it wasn’t too literal in terms of connection, but it’s definitely evocative.
Eddy: It’s just, like, to create a mood—being playful, trying to distract people from making simple connections.

Another unique thing about the movie is that Grolsch helped fund it. Is that something that you find brands are more willing to do right now?
Eddy: Some of them are.

It’s kind of risky though.
Eddy: It’s very risky. And these two guys, Thomas and Ronald, ended up being really cool guys. We spent a lot of time talking about what they should do, and at first it wasn’t even apparent what they wanted to do, and then I suggested that we make a film together and they said, “That could be fun.”

And it’s not like people are drinking Grolsch stuff.
Eddy: It’s not about that. They go around and sponsor film festivals and they came to us and said, “What else can we do? Is that all we get to do, just put our logo on a film festival brochure?” And I said, “No, you can actually be a part of the film community and support some interesting film projects.” So, that’s what they wanted. They wanted to be recognized for supporting. Look, all these fucking brands have a lot of money. And what do they generally do with their money? They make 30 second spots. And that’s it. There’s a whole other world of things they could be doing with that money, it gets kind of pissed away in fees.
Val: Well, it’s an interesting statistic of how ineffective conventional advertising is. It almost all the time fails. But everybody goes around hoping that this one time it will work.
Eddy: That’s what maybe makes Mad Men so popular right now, because that’s where people are creatively. They’re still in a 50s, 60s kind of place. It’s fucking retarded. Advertising has reached a point of ultimate, maximum retardation—so something else has to happen. And these guys were cool enough to say “fuck it.”

What are you working on next?
Harmony: Just editing a movie called Spring Breakers.

Oh, with the ATL twins and Selena Gomez?
Val: The twins? You stuck them in there!

How about you, Val?
Val: I’m dong my one-man show. I’m also getting a doctorate next week.
Eddy: Are you?
Val: Yeah… [laughs] “Are you?!”
Eddy: Well they do those, they have honorary doctorates.
Val: Yeah. And now I have one.
Eddy: I could see you at the College of New Mexico.