BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE

Charles Mudede / The Stranger / May 23, 2008

Charles Mudede: What happened to you? You were gone from the film world for so long.

Harmony Korine: Around the time of my last movie, I was having trouble relating to things. In some ways, I just started to feel like it would be best for me to turn my back on film, on movie making, or just to walk away and do something else. I couldn't really connect to anything and I wasn't so happy where I was in life. So I spent the last 10 years – eight years, however many years – doing odd jobs: mowing yards, I worked as a lifeguard, I interned with a cobbler, and then I spent six months in Peru with a group of fisherman looking for a special kind of fish. Then that was it. After a certain amount of time had passed and years clicked away, I felt ready again. I started to think in images again and started to feel like I could make movies again.

Mudede: What is the source of Mister Lonely?

Korine: Early on I had started thinking of this idea of nuns jumping out of airplanes, nuns riding bicycles in the clouds and doing tricks in the sky. But that was pretty much it; that was the extent of it. I didn't have a story or any kind of narrative. And I was working on a script before then, right before my houses burned down. It was a script about a pig named Trotsky and this kid who invented a special kind of adhesive that he would put on to ride outside of these walls. He would ride around and walk through the swampland in Florida and firebomb houses. A lot of that script burned down with my house.

Mudede: Your house burned down?

Korine: I had two houses that burned down. It was within a six-month period. The second one I kind of know about but the first one, I don't really know how it happened. It's still a mystery. There were a lot of strange forces at work during that period.

Mudede: Werner Herzog is in Mister Lonely.

Korine: I called him and asked him if wanted to be part of the movie and he said he was very excited to play an alcoholic jungle priest.

Mudede: Samantha Morton is in Mister Lonely.

Korine: She was an old friend of mine. I've known her pretty much since she started acting. I always thought she was one of the best actresses and someone whose career I followed. I was always impressed by her so I asked her to do the film and it was very good.

Mudede: In Mister Lonely, what connects the celebrity impersonator story to the one about the flying nuns?

Korine: They were both about obsessive dreamers creating their own society – people who wanted to transcend the limits of who they really are. It's almost like they wanted to create a world that was like the real world but slightly tweaked, slightly altered, like a subtle science fiction. That was both of them.

Mudede: I heard you had a film idea about you picking up fights with random people?

Korine: That was actually something I did, it's just never been released. It was a film called Fight Harm. It was shot around 1998 or 1999 and it just consisted of me getting beaten up by every single demographic. For instance, I would go to Harlem and fight a lesbian and the next day I would get my head smashed in by an Arab guy with a mandolin. It was supposed to be a feature film that just consisted entirely of fights. That was pretty much it. After that I just didn't do anything.