HARMONY KORINE: COMEBACK KID

Karl Rozemeyer / Premiere / April 2008

The enfant terrible filmmaker discusses Mister Lonely, his love for carnies and his disdain for Ben Stiller as a comedic director.

The enfant terrible screenplay writer (Kids, Ken Park) and director (Gummo, julien donkey-boy) is back with his most nuanced and commercially accessible film to date. Mister Lonely, starring Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Werner Hertzog, James Fox and Anita Pallenberg, as well as a host of friends and family (including his wife), is Korine's third feature. It follows a sad-sack Michael Jackson impersonator (Luna) who falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Morton) at a car show. He joins her and her husband Charlie Chaplin and their daughter Shirley Temple in a commune in the Scottish highlands. In this surreal world of escapism, everyone is famous and no one gets old. Having survived two house fires and an addiction to heroin and methadone, Korine has settled down, is married and feeling creative once again. "I feel good. I have a simple life," he says. "I have a beautiful wife. I live in Nashville because I grew up there and have friends there, and it is easy to live, and there are a lot of colleges. As long as I have movie theatres and bookstores and I can buy music. That is all I need."

...on filmmaking: "I have done everything. I have written books, I have published books of photographs, done art shows and done music. When I look at the extra-curricular things that I have done, they always seem secondary to me. They are fun. I would write a book because I couldn't make it to a movie. Or I would write a poem because it wasn't a film. Or I would draw a picture because it was more instant. Movies take a long time to get together and I still needed some kind of creative outlet. But for me, movie [making] is the great art form.

...on Diego Luna in Mister Lonely: "I never wanted the movie to be about Michael Jackson. It is not about Michael Jackson. It is about the person impersonating him, the person that works as him. So it was important for me that the viewer was not watching and thinking: 'Wow. That's Michael Jackson!' I liked the idea of him being Mexican, him having a different kind of accent, different skin color. So you are always aware that there was a person underneath. And Diego has a kind of innocence."

...on Paris (living there and shooting part of Mister Lonely there): "My house burned down in America and I needed to split. I needed to get out. I lived in Paris for a while. I had a very similar experience to [the character of] Michael. My teeth were falling out. I wasn't leaving the house very much. I didn't know the language. Paris is a very beautiful place. It is an amazing city. And at the same time I was having a horrendous experience there. There is something bizarre about being in such a beautiful place, around all of these monuments and lights and attractive people and great food, but barely being able to communicate and comprehend, being extremely isolated. At that point, I would sit in my room. I couldn't remember my friends' phone numbers so I would [try to] think of some phone numbers and write like 45 digits under each name on all my walls. I started flipping out."

...on homage: "I have never been so much into homages. I would rather just rip something off, to be honest with you. I'll leave homages to Quentin Tarantino. He's got that covered."

...on performers: "I have an admiration for show people. I have always loved carnival people, showmen, people who go out there and stand on a stage and sweat for you, or dance for you and perform for you.""

...on falling in love: "I moved back to Nashville. I got really fat. I was eating really bad and I wasn't exercising. I had stopped drinking and had stopped going to bars. I had this friend who used to work for me and I said to him: "If you see any girls that are beautiful, let me know." He called me up and [told me] there's this girl. I don't know what it was, she was very young at the time. When I met her, I said: "I want to marry this girl!" I just knew it. She was the perfect girl for me. But it took me a year. She was disgusted by me. She thought I was grotesque. She didn't want to have anything to do with me.""

...on screenplays: "Each movie has been different. Shooting donky-boy was just bare-bones, an outline, and then improvised. This movie [Mister Lonely] was pretty scripted. It is always scripted up to a point. The screenplay is for the most part a model kit. It just contains a set of ideas and dialogue. Once we get on set and people get into their costumes and you start to inhabit the role, I like to let things go organically. It is fun for me to watch the actors take their parts in the movie and the storylines to a place that I had not originally intended for it to go, or hadn't thought of. And then I start to make sense of the chaos. I like to push things in this direction and then that direction. And then once I get into the editing room I start to figure it out."

...on coping with fame: "I never felt part of the industry. I know I am because I make movies. The problem with New York for me was at a certain point, I felt like my anonymity was blown, and I couldn't just sneak around. I started to get a sense of paranoia. For me it was easier to isolate. So once you to start to isolate, it becomes very unhealthy. It is not so good to always want to get away. The problem was I always felt that people were sucking, taking from me.

...on comedies: "I would like to make a movie of people laughing. Not the audience, only the characters laughing the whole time, never speaking just laughing. No, just kidding. It would be fun for me to make something that is really funny. It is in some ways more difficult to do comedy than almost anything else. It is hard to do. If you think about it, the amount of great comedic directors, you can count on one hand. And I am not [talking about] silly Ben Stiller films.""

....on 1995's unfinished Fight Harm: "I thought I wanted to make the great American comedy. I thought the essence of comedy was tragedy. A guy slips on a banana peel and cracks his head. It's hilarious. But the guy is bleeding. It is like getting [comedy] to its most basic, raw, primal, conceptual place. I [thought]: 'Wow, if I go out and just get beaten up over and over again, that will be really hilarious!' And so, I started to get hurt and I started to get arrested. And after about the ninth fight and it only lasted a few minutes, I was like: "Fuck, I wanted to do a 90-minute feature. I would be dead by the time it finishes." So I boarded it after a couple of those fights."