Harmony Korine

Interviews

Eric Kohn

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626743489
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Harmony Korine: Interviews tracks filmmaker Korine's stunning rise, fall, and rise again through his own evolving voice. Bringing together interviews collected from over two decades, this unique chronicle includes rare interviews unavailable in print for years and an extensive, new conversation recorded at the filmmaker's home in Nashville.

After more than twenty years, Harmony Korine (b. 1973) remains one of the most prominent and yet subversive filmmakers in America. Ever since his entry into the independent film scene as the irrepressible prodigy who wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark's Kids in 1992, Korine has retained his stature as the ultimate cinematic provocateur. He both intelligently observes modern social milieus and simultaneously thumbs his nose at them. Now approaching middle age, and more influential than ever, Korine remains intentionally sensationalistic and ceaselessly creative.

He parlayed the success of Kids into directing the dreamy portrait of neglect, Gummo, two years later. With his audacious 1999 digital video drama Julien Donkey-Boy, Korine continued to demonstrate a penchant for fusing experimental, subversive interests with lyrical narrative techniques. Surviving an early career burnout, he resurfaced with a trifecta of insightful works that built on his earlier aesthetic leanings: a surprisingly delicate rumination on identity ( Mister Lonely ), a gritty quasi-diary film ( Trash Humpers ), and a blistering portrait of American hedonism ( Spring Breakers ), which yielded significant commercial success. Throughout his career he has also continued as a mixed-media artist whose fields included music videos, paintings, photography, publishing, songwriting, and performance art.

Nashville. Harmony’s House. Present Day. Part I.

Eric Kohn / 2013

Interview conducted January 11, 2013. Previously unpublished.

Eric Kohn: Your first interview was for Sassy in 1993. Do you remember what it was like to do that?

Harmony Korine: Yeah. I think I had just written Kids. Chloe Sevigny wasn’t even my girlfriend at that point; we were friends. She was an intern at that magazine. I think that’s how they heard of me.

EK: What did you make of that early interest in your work?

HK: It seemed like a game for me. It was way pre-Internet. It seemed like nobody even read it. It felt like it wasn’t much different than doing some interview with a high school newspaper. It was fun. At the very beginning, with those interviews, you have to remember: A year earlier, I was getting grounded, wrecking cars, running stop signs. It wasn’t like not knowing what you’re in store for. It was just a game.

EK: How did your family feel about the early stirrings of your career ambition?

HK: They were definitely supportive of me wanting to be a director. When my dad found out I wanted to make movies, it wasn’t a big surprise to him. He probably helped me. I made my first film when I was a sophomore in high school.

EK: How did that come about?

HK: I was a sophomore or junior at Hillsborough High School taking a creative writing course in 1990. My teacher’s name was Miss Bradshaw. She’s still around. She’s still teaching. Until that point, I was a pretty mediocre student. I had never been given any type of encouragement by a teacher before. In public schools, teachers really don’t have that much time to pay any attention to you. It’s more like you’re cattle. At schools before that, I went to a place where if you were late teachers would smack you. So I was coming out of that whole thing, so I didn’t trust teachers so much. They were the same thing as police or something.

But in this class, I wrote a short story and she said she liked it. She thanked everyone for their assignments but said there was this one special piece of writing. I was falling asleep, dreaming about girls. Then she said my name and I was like, “What the fuck?” And she asked me to read it. I thought it was completely retarded but she saw some merit in it. She asked me to stay behind after class and asked me what I wanted to do. I said I really wanted to make movies. She gave me this story I wrote and asked if I could turn it into a script. I said, “Of course,” but had no idea what it took to write a script. She said, “I could probably get you a grant, a couple thousand dollars from the school board.” I somehow broke down the story into some type of shooting script and she took it and got something like $2,000 from the school system. Then my dad showed me how to work a 16mm Bolex film camera. He showed me how to edit. And this guy named Coke Sams, who [worked on] all the Ernest movies, like Ernest Goes to Camp—my dad knew him and I see him all the time now [in Nashville]. My dad asked him if we could use his machines to edit and he was cool with it. So we would go in there at night.

EK: What was your script about?

HK: It was called A Bundle a Minute and about this kid, a runaway. If you saw it, I think you could probably see a type of thematic relationship to what I’m doing now. I had this jazz soundtrack and me talking on top of it. It was only five minutes long, this Cassavetes, Woody Allen thing, except shot in the South. I put on a fake accent and sounded like W. C. Fields. So I finished this thing and it was a surprise to everyone. My dad helped on the technical side and then I played around with the equipment and figured the rest out. I’d watched movies so I thought I knew what I was doing. I probably had read a couple of things. I don’t remember at that point what was available, even.

EK: When did you see the results?

HK: I shot some of it in New York, where we finished it, where my grandma lived. My dad and sister acted in it. We shot in Manhattan, on the Lower East Side. I remember I had it processed at Duart. I was like fifteen or sixteen at this point. I went to go pick up the film and the guy there—I’ve never said this to anyone, but I’m remembering it now—the guy handed me the roll of film and said, “You’re pretty young.” He thought I was just a runner. I said, “No, this is my thing, I can’t wait to see it.” He asked me if I wanted to see it projected. I was like, “What?” And he said, “Let me show you what it looks like.” He was encouraging me. He said, “I saw it. It looks really beautiful.” And this was just some guy there. So I saw it in some screening room all alone as he projected it. This was the first time I had ever seen any footage I had ever shot. It was unbelievable. I couldn’t believe it was even in focus. It was the greatest. I asked him to rewind it three or four times. I sat there for like an hour. This was raw footage. I don’t remember how long it was, maybe forty-five minutes, but it was just unbelievable. I saw the camera moving. Things were working. There was no sound, no sync, but I remember thinking, “I can do this.” It didn’t look too far off from other movies I had watched. It didn’t look too far off from She’s Gotta Have It, which I remember seeing recently. My dad had rented a VHS copy of that. It had snowed and we were out of school. He rented it for himself. He was in his mid-thirties then. By the time my parents were my age now, I was already in college. Actually, by the time they were my age now, I had done Kids already. It’s pretty crazy to think about that now. It just blew my mind that it worked—I could somehow translate my ideas visually.

EK: And did the film open further doors for you?

HK: So because I wasn’t a particularly great student, here’s what that did: The only college I wanted to go to was NYU, mostly because I wanted to live in the city but also because at that point there was something romantic about that school. I applied and sent that film. They offered me a scholarship and I didn’t want to apply anywhere else. I remember my dad was trying to push me to apply elsewhere. I had wanted to go to the film school, originally, because the idea was that I’d go somewhere and find all these like-minded movie kids who wanted to do what you wanted to do. You think in your mind that they’re all going to be waiting to start some kind of movement or something. That couldn’t be further from my experience. My dad said something good. I had already started making films in high school on my camcorder. He said, “Why do you want to go learn things you already know? Why don’t you learn to be a writer?” I didn’t read all that much. I was a skateboarder. There were books that changed my life, like S. E. Hinton and Jim Carroll books, but mostly I wasn’t a huge reader. So the idea of being a writer seemed really foreign to me. But I realized there was a point in that as far back as I could remember, I didn’t want to be dependent on anyone else for anything creative. The idea that I would have to wait for someone to write something for me was horrible. Back then, I was thinking about movies in different ways. So I realized maybe I should go to the writing program, the dramatic writing undergraduate program. I only went to college for one year since I wrote Kids in my first semester.

EK: What was it like to transition into college mode?

HK: I didn’t have any money. I moved in with my grandmother. My dad wouldn’t pay for anything, so I lived with her in Queens, commuting from Flushing into the city every day on the F train. I graduated high school in 1992 so this was right after that. It was the best. For me that was the time of my life. I had been coming there for years as a skater and even before that so I already loved it. My experience in college was closer to high school. I wasn’t in dorms. If I had a class in the morning and then nothing until the afternoon, I had to take a bus and a train, which would take at least an hour. So I couldn’t go back and forth; I’d just stay in the city all day. When everyone else went back to their dorms, I would just stay out and watch movies. There were specific places I would go alone and spend all day there. I’d go to Avery Fischer Media Hall and watch movies in the library. They would have those huge catalogs of VHS tapes. For me it was amazing, watching three or four films in a row. When I didn’t go there, I’d go to theaters. My favorite was a place on St. Marks Street, which would show double features every day. It’s been gone for ten years or more now. But they’d have, like, Marx brothers movies playing there back to back for like two dollars. There’d be dope fiends in there nodding off the whole time. It was incredible, that place.

EK: How often did you go to classes?

HK: I went to all of them. Pretty much right away I realized that while there were a couple of nice kids there, it didn’t have any relationship to what I was doing at all. Nothing. Not even the teachers. There was one kid who became a close friend of mine and we’d go see movies together. I don’t know what happened to him. His name was Jared. He was really, really smart and had insane taste in things. He and I would walk around and watch movies, go to music shops and bookstores, stuff like that. But outside of him, I had no relationship to anyone there. Not to sound mean, but a lot of it was crummy, what I would hear people talking about, it just wasn’t interesting. Now having said that, remember I only went for a very short period of time. Because up until that point I knew nothing about writing scripts, the very first year there, they just taught fundamentals of narrative. Even though my films are not narrative, it was very important for me to understand those fundamentals. They set up the rules for me, you know?

EK: You mean structure?

HK: Structure, yeah—beginning, middle, and end, traditional three-act structure. After school I went wild and pissed all over it—but it was helpful for me that I knew the rules going in.

EK: What sort of texts did you read?

HK: The classics. All the Greeks, Aristotle, Poetics. That was really helpful for me.

EK: That would explain the literary references in early interviews, catching journalists who expected more crass responses by surprise.

HK: At that point, when you’re that young, nobody really expects anything from you. You go in with the most base expectations so even though a lot of what I was saying at that point was half-baked, people were still surprised that there was something else there.

EK: Your entire career took off during a three-month period in the fall of 1992.

HK: Exactly. That was when I met Larry Clark in the park. My first assignment [that semester] was to write a twenty-page script. In between classes I used to hang out in Washington Square Park with all the skaters there, just smoke weed and hang out. I was pretty motivated. I knew at a young age that I’d make movies and that I probably wouldn’t go to college for all of it. I don’t remember what I told my parents. In my mind, I knew I wasn’t going to go through with it. I was just like, “Fuck that.” It was boring.

EK: Did you still harbor aspirations of being a professional skater?

HK: By that point I’d already quit skateboarding. I used to write for some skateboard company and I’d grown bored of it. They used to send me sponsored skateboards. I realized at some point I’d never be that great. I wanted to make films. I remember I had a package sent to my house around my sophomore year [of high school] and I just called all my friends and said, “Here, take everything I have, I’m not going to do it any more. I’m going to make movies.” I gave everything away.

EK: So the story of Clark discovering you “skateboarding in the park” isn’t entirely true . . .

HK: No, I wasn’t literally skateboarding, but the skaters were my friends—like Harold and Justin, those people who were in the movie. Harold was a legendary skater by that point. There was this company in New York called SHUT that had all my favorite skateboarders riding with it. I got pretty close with them and some others. So when I moved up there we would still hang out.

EK: At what point in your semester did you meet Clark?

HK: Maybe two months in. I had written a script about a kid who on his thirteenth birthday, his dad takes him to a prostitute. I was hustling—when I was a kid, I wanted to make films. I didn’t want to wait. It’s hard to explain it. It was impossible to shut my brain down. It’s still hard now, but back then I couldn’t be subdued. All I wanted to do was make things. I’d just sit in my grandma’s house and paint all day. I’d cut things up, make collages, sing into tape recorders, play the banjo into my answering machine. I’ll tell you how obsessive I was: I would literally change my answering machine message like once every hour at my grandma’s house. No one would ever call me. But I kept changing it. I would write a poem or sing a song or record something off the television. Then I’d stick it in the answering machine and hope someone would call it. I can’t explain to you . . . it was wild, man. I felt like I was around all these influences at that time and I was voracious. There will never be a time that will compare with that.

EK: You were firing on all cylinders creatively and then suddenly Clark asked you to write a screenplay.

HK: Yeah, and I didn’t even know what that meant. I could barely tie my shoes. My grandma would feed me, she’d come in with plates of fruit because I’d forget to eat. I can’t explain what was happening at that point, but I felt like I was on fire. I’d go to sleep at night and my mind would be racing, dreaming things up.

EK: How quickly did your collaboration with Clark come together?

HK: So I would take those films that I made in high school—this was before cellphones, so I had a pager. I’d stick my pager number and my grandma’s number on the tapes of my films. Anytime I saw someone that I recognized, I would just run up to them. Like one time I saw that band Salt ‘n’ Pepper. I’d seen them on Yo! MTV Raps. I handed them a videotape of my films. They called me the next day and were like, “This is really good.” I remember calling my parents and saying, “Salt ‘n’ Pepper are calling me.” They were like, “Who?” They asked me if I wanted to do a music video. I never did it, but I was so excited to have anyb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Filmography
• Nashville. Harmony’s House. Present Day. Part I.
• Nashville. Harmony’s House. Present Day. Part II.
• Nashville. Harmony’s House. Present Day. Part III.
• Additional Resources
• Index