PEACE, LOVE AND HARMONY KORINE

David Michael / Oyster / August 8, 2007

Having emerged from a Panama jungle where he spent seven months hunting a mythical fish, the enfant terrible of the indie film scene, Harmony Korine, talks about marriage, nuns jumping out of airplanes and his new lease on life. David Michael writes.

When your best friend is a magician and a decidedly insane one at that, there’s no surprise that you’d pick up a few crazy tricks along the way. But even David Blaine would be impressed by pal Harmony Korine’s disappearing act since he made his last film Julien Donkey Boy. Eight years later, and Korine is finally back with us, with his new film Mister Lonely, premiering at this Cannes Film Festival. When we meet in the sun-basked garden of the Grand Hotel in Cannes, even before introductions have been exchanged, I have to ask him: “Where have you been? What the hell have you been doing all this time?”

“That is the biggest question a person could ask,” he smiles. Harmony Korine used to be Mister Popular. Aged 19, his script to Kids brought him instant acclaim, and he was soon to be found smoking cigars on The David Letterman Show and courting LA agents. Directing soon followed, and his two anarchic, off-kilter films Gummo and julien donkey-boy rubber-stamped his ‘Enfant Terrible’ status. He stepped out with New York’s proclaimed ‘IT’ girl, actress Chloe Sevigny, and the couple were swiftly given the moniker of ‘The Bonnie And Clyde of Indie Film’. He won awards at international film festivals and appeared on the covers of cool magazines, along with garnering respect from leftfield director’s such as Gus Van Sant and Werner Herzog. Herzog proclaimed him the ‘last foot soldier of cinema’.

Korine also used to be Mister Nice, a straight-edged skater who fuelled his inspiration to create with visits to the cinema, museums and galleries. But as his acclaim grew, New York’s hipster crowd drew themselves to him, bringing along liquor and drug-fuelled fun. Life quickly turned from sweet to sour. His relationship with Sevigny strained and eventually snapped. Two of his homes burnt down, with the flames of the second claiming all his belongings. There was a rumoured double dose of rehab. It all took its toll on Korine’s creative output, which was limited to the idea of a film called ‘Fight Harm’ entirely composed of him picking fights on the streets of New York with the purpose of being beaten up. With his broken ankle, bruised ribs and resulting arrests, it gave new meaning to the proverbial filmmaking recipe of ‘blood, sweat and tears’. Something wasn’t right and then Korine seemed to simply disappear.

“Eight years ago, something happen,” reflects the 34-year-old Korine, now. “I started to loose faith. I didn’t care about making movies, but also it was something bigger than that. I felt disconnected and I couldn’t understand what was going on with the world.” Quietly spoken, but chatty and fun, the diminutive and still youthful looking director doesn’t bare the scars or strike you as a man who’s been through hell. The first course of action Korine took to shake free of his confused and suffocating life in New York - where he’d lived for nine years, and grown as an artist since he was discovered aged 18 skating at Washington Square by photographer Larry Clark - was to swap America for Europe in 2001.




Oyster (August 8, 2007)



“The people that were around me that were my friends and would associate with me, I started to realise for the most part were full of shit and were phonies,” sighs Korine, of the impetus behind his New York exodus. “I started to think, if these are my friends, I must be like them. So I wanted to leave.” The first stop was London, although that soon replicated his time in New York. Local hipster magazines like Face and I-D had long championed him and he walked straight into an all too familiar scene. “I was running away from America, but I soon realised my experiences in London there weren’t so far off from my experiences back home,” he says. “What I was really running away from was myself. I began to feel like I was a total phoney.”

Next stop Paris, where he ended up spending 11 months. Not knowing the language or many people made Korine “withdraw even further”. Paranoid and reclusive, and living on a diet of McDonalds, pastries and sweets, he came to the conclusion it was time to turn to his family for support, so flew to his parent’s home in the jungle of Panama. Life though, only got weirder. “I met a group of Peruvian fishermen that were in a small cult, known as ‘The Malingers’, and I started to hang out with these guys,” recalls Korine, of life in the jungle. “They dedicated their lives to finding a very rare fish with gold scales. This fish had three spots on its side, and if you pressed them would sound like a piano. They said only two of these fishes had been found in the last decade. I spent seven months with them. They would go out everyday, but we never found the fish.”

It says something about Korine’s state of mind at the time - that it would take him seven months to come to the realisation, something wasn’t right. For starters, he’d never even seen a picture of this mythical fish. “One day, I got into an argument with one of the leaders, and when I told him they were living a fantasy, he screamed at me that I had no faith. I was getting ready to leave, when this woman, who was married to one of the cult members, walked out with this leash. When I asked her what she was doing, she replied: ‘I’m walking my dog’. It was an invisible dog. She looked at me and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I told her, I don’t know, and she said: ‘You better find out’. So, I took that as a sign, and I flew back to America, to where I grew up in Nashville and I started thinking about movies again.”

Korine’s first blips on the radar of culture vultures, as he returned to the fold, was shooting a music video for Cat Power’s Living Proof and documenting his best buddy David Blaine’s 44-day fast in a perspex box hanging next to London’s Tower Bridge, in Above the Below. But it’s his latest film Mister Lonely that fully marks his rehabilitation. The film’s starting point was a script long lost to one of his house fires, about nuns that jump out of airplanes - a sort of poetic punctuation on faith. In the film, the sequences of the nuns led by a priest played by Werner Herzog weave in and out of the main story. It is very much a personal metaphoric mediation on Korine’s recent personal experiences and redemption although, you’d be hard-pressed to guess that from the film’s synopsis.

Starting out in Paris, Mister Lonely follows the journey of an out of luck and lonely Mexican Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who when he’s not busking in the streets with his act, is doing performances at the only gig his agent can get him - at an old people’s home. It’s there where he meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton), who persuades him to come with her to Scotland where she lives on a commune populated by other impersonators, including: her husband Charlie Chaplin, Madonna, Sammy Davis Jr, James Dean and the Pope.

The film is less anarchic than the brash and twisted tone of Korine’s previous films, Gummo and Julien Donkey Boy, but equally as out there, using the look-a-likes to good surreal effect. Scenes feature Little Red Riding (played by Korine’s wife Rachel) and James Dean hanging up the laundry, as well as Sammy Davis Jr mowing the lawn. And just when you thought skydiving nuns were surreal, there’s a sequence with the nuns riding bicycles through the air.

Despite its outlandish appearance, the film beats with a sweet and tender heart. Watching the film and reading between the lines, it’s clear that Korine is now very much at peace with himself. I suggest to him that Mister Lonely is perhaps a cathartic exorcism of sorts, with the film’s conclusion suggesting that although he remains the same man, he’s ready to start afresh.

“Yes, but I never thought about that really,” he says, of the notion. “There are things that these characters do and places they've been, that echo things that have happened to me. It's about being lost in a lot of these places and trying to find yourself.” He’s happy to admit that one thing that has helped him come to terms with himself is his noticeably younger wife Rachel, who also from Nashville, hovers in the background while we talk. Anytime she’s mentioned, Korine turns to see where she is, before embarrassing her by calling out her name.

So how’s married life, back in Nashville? Isn’t it weird living back in the place he grew up? “I find it comforting,” he concludes, with another glance to his wife. “Life is great, in some ways it’s never been better. I got married a few months ago; I have a little house with a small yard…” As he trails off, conscious of being all bashful, it seems if Korine ever made a sequel to his latest film, he might just call it ‘Mister Happy’.