CONTROVERSIAL FILMMAKER COMES HOME TO NASHVILLE

Bill Friskics-Warren / The Tennessean / May 15, 2008

Nashvillian Harmony Korine is one of the most influential and controversial independent filmmakers of his generation. He recently moved back to town and will be on hand for the southeastern premiere of Mister Lonely, his first feature in nearly a decade, at Belcourt Theatre on Friday.

In contrast to his button-pushing movies such as Gummo and julien donkey-boy, Mister Lonely is a whimsical and empathetic portrait of a community of celebrity impersonators — everyone from Elvis and Marilyn Monroe to Buckwheat and the Pope is represented — living in a commune in the Scottish Highlands. Meanwhile, deep in the jungles of Latin America, a group of gravity-defying nuns are part of an honest-to-goodness miracle.

Korine, who wrote the film with his brother Avi, will hold a Q&A session after Friday night's screening.

Last week, we caught up with the 35-year-old director, who will also curate a minifestival of films at the Belcourt this month, and asked him about Nashville, Mister Lonely and his role as a trangressive voice in indie cinema.

Bill Friskics-Warren: What made you move back to Nashville?

Harmony Korine: I grew up here. After traveling for so many years and living in a lot of different places, I just felt like I needed to go back home. I've always loved Nashville. It's comfortable here, a little bit more quiet. Everything's not necessarily in my face. I understand it here.

Friskics-Warren: How has the city nurtured your creativity?

Korine: A lot of times when I start thinking of movies or images, it is Nashville. Even when I haven't shot here, I'm still thinking in terms of this area... It's familiar. There's also a side of it that I find very interesting.

Friskics-Warren: What do you find so interesting about Nashville?

Korine: I like the characters. I like the colors. I like the sky. I like the stranger side of things here. When I was a kid growing up here we used to skateboard. It was a much different Nashville. This was in the '80s. There were a lot of characters out in the street at that time. It was more of a dangerous place, or it seemed that way. That kind of thing stays with you.

Friskics-Warren: Mister Lonely feels at once more sincere and more straightforward than your previous films — almost plot-driven.

Korine: I hope it doesn't have too much of a plot. I think that there's a story, but man, just the word "plot" makes me nervous. I've never felt like anything in life was worth plotting. It just seems like it's worth living. The film has a more traditional story, maybe, in that there's a kind of traditional narrative. But it really had to do more with the characters than anything else. It needed to be told in that way. It wasn't like I consciously set out to make a film that was less abrasive or less experimental.

Friskics-Warren: The subject matter is certainly consistent with your previous work, in that you're still portraying people who are outsiders, people living on the margins of society.

Korine: There's a through line in just about everything I've done. There's a connection with characters that, like you said, are marginalized. People who are dispossessed: tramps, vagrants, eccentrics — characters that some people consider scum. I've always been attracted to people who just make it up as they go, people who invent their own language, people who start their own communities, people for whom the real world isn't enough. There's an inherent drama that follows these characters. You could even say it's a cinema of isolation.

Friskics-Warren: You've earned a reputation for being divisive and provocative, so much so that it's almost impossible to read about your work and not encounter words like "shocking" and "notorious." It's almost become a cliché to call you the enfant terrible or bad boy of contemporary cinema. Is that a mantle that you welcome, or does it chafe sometimes?

Korine: I try not to think about myself too much. When I was a kid, I was just trying to blow everything up. I felt dissatisfied. I felt extremely adversarial. Things were going through me, and I really didn't censor myself. I've always thought of everything I did as kind of a unified aesthetic. It didn't matter if it was a movie that I was directing or a painting that I was painting or a poem that I was writing or a tap dance or a fight that I was getting into. The randomness and the chaos of what I was feeling was all part of the same art.

Friskics-Warren: Channeling that randomness can be dangerous. At its best, though, your work makes a strong case for why we might need dangerous art in our world.

Korine: I never wanted anything in the middle. My movies don't have middles. They have tops and bottoms, beginnings and endings. I just never like to complete the circle. I always like to leave a margin of the undefined. I've always wanted to write the Great American Novel with all the pages missing in all the right places.

Friskics-Warren: Your films have involved you picking fights with strangers and depicting seemingly gratuitous violence. Do you ever ask yourself if you're exploiting your subjects or going too far?

Korine: No, I don't struggle with any of that because I don't think that I do anything wrong. I don't feel like I've ever crossed the line as far as that goes. In my heart I can tell the difference between right and wrong, and these arguments of exploitation, I haven't gotten them in a long time. They used to be a question, but in my heart I knew that what I was doing was righteous. There are people who might argue otherwise and that's fine. It doesn't really matter to me. I make stuff because I want to see it. I need to see it. If it offends someone, it really doesn't bother me.