THE OUTSIDER

Katherine Monk / Canwest News Service / May 27, 2008

He's found more back doors to fame than a clone of Kato Kaelin and Monty Hall combined - thanks to a much-publicized relationship with Chloe Sevigny and an almost indecipherable debut film called Gummo - but these days, oddball director Harmony Korine has been all too happy to fly under the radar.

In the eight years between his last effort, julien donkey-boy, and his forthcoming picture Mister Lonely - released in Toronto May 30 - Korine has been pulling the rainbow threads of his life together.

"I needed a break. I was messed up in the head," says Korine, with unmistakable earnestness as he sits on a rumpled hotel bed. "I was totally spent. I'd been making movies since I was a kid, and I just felt empty. I felt I was getting lost in the cult of personality instead of making art, and I started to question myself and what I was doing."

Korine says: "You can't create anything good when you're in that type of headspace. I needed to ground myself - and that's what I've been doing for the past eight years out of the spotlight."

Just looking at Korine, it's clear he's an older - and wiser - version of the gangly kid who would joke about near-drownings and Hasidic basketball players on David Letterman back in the mid-90s, shortly after Larry Clark's Kids became a sleeper hit. Korine wrote the script for Kids as a teenager, and with one foot already well placed in the world of controversial independent cinema, Korine went for broke with Gummo a few years later.

If you haven't seen the 1997 movie that features a young man and a rabbit suit, it's tough to describe in any traditional sense because nothing really happens. It's really just a slice of middle American life - and a rather depressing one at that, thanks to an obsession with images of decay and urban blight.

Korine says Gummo embodied his own personal sense of alienation, as well as an existential outlook on life, which at the time, was all too real. Yet as things began to spiral inward for the one-time tap-dance hopeful (who is also the son of former tap dancer and PBS producer Sol Korine), he found support from his family.

"I grew up in a sort of commune ... and my parents have always been very progressive, and very supportive," he says.

"When I needed to find that creative drive, I went to them. They actually live in the jungles of Panama now ... helping Medecins Sans Frontieres. I brought a few ideas with me - including the image of a man wearing headphones on the side of the road - and that eventually became Mister Lonely."

Korine's first film in eight years, Mister Lonely marks a significant departure from his earlier work - most notably for its tone. Instead of washed out colours and sets awash in flaking paint,
Mister Lonely is vibrant. It also has - believe it or not - an almost upbeat message.

The story of celebrity impersonators who form a support group in Paris, Mister Lonely may feature another group of oddball outsiders, but it also has hope: "I needed to have that in this movie. I needed these characters to have hope.

"I also wanted to show beauty. I know it's not something you often see in my movies, but I think there are things in life that are beautiful - and there's no shame in celebrating that."

Korine says he used to feel beauty was a lie, or little more than a clever marketing tactic - but that's only because he wasn't defining beauty for himself. He was letting what he calls a "shallow and material-driven" culture define life's most meaningful ingredient.

"That was a big part of my depression. I had no idea how to define myself as a man - or what made life important. A man looked at me and told me I had no faith, and when I thought about it later, I knew he was right. I had no faith."

Once Korine hit mental bottom, he had nowhere left to go but up - or in the ground. He decided to recreate his life instead of end it by moving back to Nashville, getting married and growing his life from the ground up.

"I didn't even have the desire to make movies at that point. I wrote, and found pleasure in that, but it was the very simple things that made me appreciate where I was - like having a real companion who accepted me, and being able to think of fun ideas without worrying about financing or who the audience would be. That was very freeing," he says.

"For the longest time, I'd tell myself that I choose not to make movies. But eventually, that feeling left me. I didn't choose NOT TO do anything anymore. I just let myself live, and that really freed me."

Korine says his new perspective changed his art for the better, which is why he's so pleased with Mister Lonely.

"No one in the film goes through what I went through, but the underlying ideas are very much the same. I wanted these characters to have hope. I think my earlier work was kind of hopeless because I was hopeless, but I'm not a hopeless man anymore," he says.

"I see the beauty. And I think there is something out there. I don't know what it is, but there is something larger than us ... and it brings poetry to the madness."