TIFF Q&A: HARMONY KORINE

Mark Olsen / LA Times / September 13, 2007

Harmony Korine is something like the Lost Boy of American filmmaking.

After bursting on the scene with his screenplay for Kids, written while he was just a teenager, he went on to direct Gummo (1997) and julien donkey-boy (1999), both cataclysmic distillations of cutting-edge hip.

Then he seemed to vanish, lost into a haze of rumors and uncertainty. He went to Paris and London, spent time fishing in Peru and is now 33, living in Nashville and recently married.

His newest film, Mister Lonely represents a rebirth for Korine both personally and as a filmmaker. The movie tracks two separate storylines -- one about a commune of celebrity impersonators, the other about skydiving nuns in the jungles of Panama -- to create a poetic meditation on identity and renewal.

Rather than the purposeful agitations of his earlier work, Mister Lonely is about healing and moving on. To that end Korine cast two of his own filmmaking heroes, Werner Herzog and Leos Carax, who themselves perhaps represent a lifeline to survival.

Besides his main cast of Diego Luna, Samantha Morton and Denis Lavant (as well as his wife as Little Red Riding Hood), Korine also cast Anita Pallenberg (as the Queen of England) and James Fox (as the Pope), slyly referencing "Performance," itself a magisterial and enigmatic look at persona and identity-construction. I talked with him in Toronto during the festival.

Mark Olsen: I guess first things first, what happened to you?

Harmony Korine: Around the time of my last film I just felt like I couldn't do it any more. I felt like I didn't care so much anymore. I had this sense of disconnect. I was in bad shape. I always feel, as far as movies go, it's really difficult to make cinema without love. And I had none to give and I didn't feel like I had any myself.

I felt like there were a lot of phonies around me and it started to make me suspect about my own self. If these are the people that are around me, there must be something wrong with me. It was time for me to split and do something else.

It's almost giving myself to much credit to say I left movies. They left me. So I just disappeared for a while.

Olsen: Can you tell me about the two parallel storylines?

Korine: It was an intentional decision to not make the stories directly intersect. It felt like there's enough of a thematic connection between the stories, almost like an allegory, that the jungle stuff served like a poetic punctuation.

I felt like in some ways, narratively, they speak to the same issues, mainly faith and a desire for these outcasts to create their own world, almost a utopia, and this idea that there may be magic in the world.

I guess all these characters are dreamers, and in my experience, the biggest dreamers are also the ones in the end who get hurt the most. I think they speak to the same things, and that was enough for me.

Everyone, I find, is really concerned with making like a perfect sense, and for me I like to make a perfect non-sense, if that makes sense.

What's interesting to me is people sometimes think my films are something to be "gotten," or that there's a riddle there or that they are intentionally obtuse. But it is never about that. It's always about a feeling, an ambiance or a mood. That's all I want.

I just want people to go in and feel some kind of connection to the characters, some kind of intrinsic understanding, maybe feel differently about things than they did when they went in and maybe not know why.

Olsen: Do you feel recharged? Do you expect it will take you long to make another film?

Korine: Oh, it won't take me eight years again. That was something special. I'm in a good place now.

There's this thing in America, maybe it's everywhere, I see all these directors become obsessed with the business aspect, the deal, and become interested in bureaucracy and the emails and the telephone calls. I just don't give a...

I think in the end you want more show than business. I would like to get to a place in my life where that side of it is at a real minimum. I don't care, big movies, small movies -- just make things, just create.