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DIRECTOR'S CUT AND RUNStephen Applebaum / Scotsman / March 8, 2008
Nine years ago, Korine did a disappearing act worthy of his best friend, street magician David Blaine. At 19, he had caused outrage with his screenplay for Larry Clark's controversial directorial debut, Kids. He then puzzled and infuriated critics with two self-directed tales of marginal American life: Gummo (1997) and julien donkey-boy (1999). Some critics, and peers such as Gus Van Sant and Werner Herzog, saw them as the work of a true visionary, a talent to be listed, according to Roger Ebert, alongside the likes of Godard, Cassavetes, Warhol and Tarkovsky. Others regarded him as a manipulative charlatan. Before a consensus had time to form, however, Korine had dropped out of the scene. He seemed to evaporate into thin air until his re-emergence last year at Cannes, with his first film in almost a decade – Mister Lonely. When we meet, the former skater-kid and enfant terrible of US indie cinema looks younger than his 35 years. Given that he seems so at home with his fellow film-makers, why did he vanish? "I started to feel pretty disconnected from things and lost the desire to make movies," he says. "I wasn't really happy with where I was, the people who were around me seemed like phoneys, and I started to think that if these were my friends, and your friends are a reflection of you, then there must be something wrong with me, and the best thing I could do for myself, and for the people around me, was to disappear. So I did … I wanted to go and live another life." His desire to escape is not surprising; he had spiralled out of control. For a time, he and actress Chloë Sevigny were the coolest couple on the block, but their relationship fell apart, according to her, when the straight-edged boy who spent all his time writing and going to museums discovered hard drugs. Korine refuses to confirm what he was taking at his worst (heroin and methadone, allegedly). "I like to try things that people say are bad for me," he says, with a smile. "I'm really good at getting addicted and I'm really good at quitting. Well, less good at quitting, but I've gotten there." He seems unsure what to do with his hands, having just given up smoking. "Whatever drugs I was doing," he insists, "that wasn't the reason I was disintegrating, that was more a symptom. I just wanted to numb myself; to quiet down the voices. It wasn't the drugs, it wasn't the booze; it was bigger." He escaped to London but found himself in the same situation. In Paris, he became reclusive, living on McDonald's, pastries and sweets. "My teeth were falling out, probably because of all the sugar, and I had a certain level of paranoia," he recalls. In a last ditch attempt to get himself together, he flew to his parents' home in the jungle in Panama. According to him, he then became involved with a group of fishermen – "you could say a cult" – calling themselves the Malingerers. "I met them in Peru," he says. "They spent most of the time searching for a fish they called a golden malingerer carp. Only two had been caught in the last 75 years. Legend was that it had gold scales and Japanese businessmen were offering millions for them. There was an idea that there were three dots down the fin that, pressed correctly, would make the sound of a piano. So, um, I spent seven months with the Malingerers." A shaggy dog story or evidence of his mental state at the time? Needless to say, he never saw the fish. "One day I got in this argument with one of the leaders, and I basically said, 'This is all ridiculous, I'm wasting my time here with you people,' and he said, 'You have no faith and you should go home'." As he was packing his bags, "one of the wives of one of the fishermen came over and she had a dog's leash, and there was no dog at the end of it. I asked what she was doing, and she said, 'I'm walking my dog.' Then she looked at me and she said, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'I don't know.' She said, 'Well it's time for you to find out,' and she handed me the leash and walked away. So I took this invisible dog and I packed up my bags and I went back to America. That was when I started to think about making films again." These surreal musings clearly informed Mister Lonely, which Harmony wrote with his younger brother, Avi, after returning to Nashville where he grew up. The film follows the experiences of a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who joins a commune of celebrity impersonators in the Scottish Highlands, including Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) and her husband Charlie Chaplin, Abraham Lincoln and James Dean. Interspersing their story is a poetic sub-plot involving a group of nuns who test their faith by skydiving without parachutes. The film is less edgy and more hopeful than Gummo or julien donkey-boy, reflecting where Korine is in his life right now: happily married and living in a little house with a yard in Tennessee. People are unlikely to want him to "cease to exist" the way he claims they did after Gummo. But then neither does he expect Mister Lonely to receive universal acclaim. He was young and ill-equipped to handle criticism first time around, he says. "But because I was provoking people, I think they went after me. In the end it's like if you subscribe to the adoration then you must also subscribe to the criticism. So I guess I realised the answer lies somewhere in the middle. In the end I don't even care. I just want to do what I do." 
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