STRANGER THAN FICTION

Mark Fass / Paper / March 2008

Cabbies love Harmony Korine.

That may seem like a surprising fan base for one of the country's most outré auteurs, but for the past few years, when chatty cabbies have asked Korine what films he has made, the director of The Diary of Anne Frank Part II (in which satanic kids vomit on a Bible) and Fight Harm (an unfinished film in which he picked fights with random strangers until Stranger Number Six truly kicked his ass) has always, well, lied.

"I say The Shawshank Redemption," Korine said in a recent phone call from his new house in his hometown of Nashville. "It's one of those movies that everyone loves and somehow doesn’t offend anyone. It appeals to a lot of Christians and a lot of Muslims, and there's this gay bar in town here that plays that movie every Wednesday and it just gets huge, huge crowds. So I figure if you want to impress a cabbie, here you go."

Korine, 35, knows all about offending. After skyrocketing to cultish fame by writing the skater-kids-at-the-dawn-of-AIDS classic Kids at the age of 19, he directed Gummo and julien donkey-boy; then he wrote Ken Park (which was banned in Australia for its unsimulated teen sex scenes). His latest movie, Mister Lonely, the story of a friendless Parisian Michael Jackson impersonator, opens in late April.

Paper (March 2008)

The early stage of Korine's career is the stuff of indie-kid fantasies. After a single semester at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Korine dropped out to become a tap dancer (yes, a tap dancer). Although the tap dancing didn’t pan out, he did hook up with the photographer Larry Clark, who asked him to write a roman à clef about his experience as a teenager growing up in Washington Square Park. Kids became a huge critical success, launching the careers of (Korine's future girlfriend) Chloë Sevigny, Rosario Dawson and, of course, Korine himself. Thirteen years after later, Korine says he is still hoping to make his Shawshank -- "a movie that has that kind of effect" on people.

A variety of factors contributed to the six-year hiatus between Korine's last movie, Ken Park, and Mister Lonely. For one, Korine got off drugs (though he's still prone to saying things like, "The first couple hundred times I took acid..."). His houses also burned down. Yes, houses. The first fire remains a mystery. "I don't know, I wasn't there," says Korine. "I came home and it was just gone." The second one he doesn't like to talk about. "That's just a terrible story I don't want to get into. Let's just say I just passed out and when I woke up the house was gone." He fully intends to get fire insurance for his new house -- soon, he swears, very soon.

In the second fire, Korine lost the only copy of what was, he believes, the best script he has ever written, What Makes Pistachio Nuts. As Korine describes it, Pistachio was the tale of a Trotskyite who lives in a Florida suburb, and who owns the world's largest pig, the eponymous Pistachio. The young Trotskyite places a special adhesive to Pistachio, and people from around his neighborhood watch him give pro-Trotsky speeches as he rides the pig up a wall. Korine recognizes that the premise lacks the stuff of the typical Hollywood blockbuster. "The way I'm describing it," he says, "makes it sound maybe a little less commercially viable than it was."

Korine spent $11,000 trying to recover Pistachio from his burnt laptop, but saved only a single sentence: "The speech is pointles; the finger is speechless." "Can you imagine spending eleven G's on one sentence like that?" Korine asks. "Granted, it's a good sentence, but for eleven G's?"

Now, with Mister Lonely set to open, Korine may be as close as ever to having his Shawshank. Its skydiving nuns aside, the film is certainly the most audience-friendly Korine feature yet. It stars Diego Luna (the other guy from Y Tu Mamá También) as the Michael Jackson impersonator and the hyper-talented Samantha Morton as his love interest, a faux Marilyn Monroe.

Agnès B., the 67-year-old Parisian designer, served as the film's co-executive producer. This is the first joint venture for Korine and Ms. B., who became fast friends after she fell for julien donkey-boy at the Venice Film Festival in 1999. The two make for an odd couple -- Google them together and you really do pull up a picture of Harold and Maude -- but the designer and the director make perfectly matched business partners: two idealists who care only about making meaningful stuff and who just happen to have the resources to do it.

Or perhaps Korine's next work, a feature-length how-to video (really) about a "voodoo tap dancer," presently in post-production, will be his popular breakthrough. Korine has spent the last year filming the voodoo dancer, who can cure you of smoking or send you into convulsions in seven to ten dance steps, and her husband, who has the power to turn himself into a goat (though Korine failed to get the transformation on film). The project may never make it to the public, however, as Korine fears it may accidentally hypnotize people. His wife, Rachel, he says, is already in a bit a of a trance.

"That's one of the things we're worried about. The only way you can undo this is if you watch these moves in reverse, and that's very difficult," Korine says. "There's some deep shit going on in there."