Harmony Korine on Spring Breakers: “I’m a soldier of cinema”
If you thought the teens in Kids were horned-up wait til you get a load of Spring Breakers' fresh-faced hedonists. We speak to Harmony Korine about his Day-Glo "pop-poem" to the annual American-teen tradition
“You can be simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by something,” drawls Harmony Korine down the phone while on his recent visit to London promoting Spring Breakers, his brilliant new movie/hate crime [delete as appropriate]. “I am all the time.”
No kidding! This dichotomy is the story of Korine’s fascinating career. He was a skateboarding teen when he wrote Kids, a harrowing portrait of a group of nihilistic New York youths, for Larry Clark. With a gritty, documentary-like aesthetic, Clark’s leering visuals were as ugly as the vile behaviour happening on screen. Korine, by contrast, has always found poetry in depravity.
Take Gummo, Korine’s bracingly innovative directorial debut. In that 1997 film he captured the blasted beauty of a dirt-poor white-trash suburb in Midwest America. Using gonzo vignettes, he pieced together a cockeyed town fit to burst with cat-killings, mental illness and sexual abuse, but also found room for moments of humour and lyricism. There’s the adolescent who works out to Madonna songs using handfuls of cutlery, the smooth-talking twins with a racket selling candy bars, and, at the centre of the action, an ethereal boy who wears a pink bunny hat. Few critics saw past the film’s grim exterior, however.
“I don’t care about any of that stuff,” says the 40-year-old director when I ask about Gummo’s critical mauling. “I’m a soldier of cinema. I just make movies and that’s all I care about.”
Soldier of cinema is an apt description. His mercurial path to Spring Breakers has been a battle through drug addiction, a mysterious house fire and the general public’s indifference to his artistic output. But 16 years and five movies on from Gummo, Korine has amassed one of the most interesting filmographies in American cinema. His wildly experimental styles and in-your-face provocations have led to comparisons to Godard at his most mischievous and acidic, and gained him a long list of fans (including auteur royalty Gus Van Sant, Werner Herzog and Lars von Trier).
If there’s a through-line to Korine’s oeuvre it’s an obsession for fringe communities. As well as the sex-obsessed New Yorker teens in Kids and their rural photo-negatives in Gummo, the Nashville-based filmmaker has turned his warped vision to a story about a commune of celebrity doppelgängers living in a castle in the Highlands (Mister Lonely) and a moc-doc following a band of young people who dress as grotesque pensioners and have it off with wheelie bins, as well as with trees, fences, driveways, anything really (Trash Humpers).
With Spring Breakers, another community goes under his microscope: those children of Dionysus who make the annual pilgrimage to the sun-soaked sands of Florida and Mexico every March for the week of hedonism known as spring break.
Although Korine spent a considerable amount of time researching this American college tradition – he wrote the second draft while knee deep in revellers in Panama City, Florida – Spring Breakers is no gritty exposé. “I wanted to take that spring break imagery and filter it through to the movie to create something that’s closer to a pop-poem,” he explains. “It’s more impressionistic; it takes you into a realm that’s more hyper-real, hyper-extreme.”
Indeed. This is a universe where a quartet of sweet-looking college girls who sing Britney songs and wear My Little Pony apparel are more terrifying than machine gun-wielding gangsters. “That’s what the movie is about, really, those two worlds working together: that really violent, hyper sexualised behavior combined with these more childlike pop-culture indicators. It’s like they're coded inner languages and I like how they work together.”
These worlds also collided on Spring Breakers' set. Korine cast real life sleazebags and criminals in the gangster roles (The ATL Twins have cameos; rapper Gucci Mane was in prison when Korine offered him the role as the film's antagonist), while two out of the four girls gone wild are former Disney princesses – Selena Gomez (Wizards of Waverly Place; Justin Bieber is her former beau) and Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical).
“Obviously I wanted those girls because I thought they were best for the roles,” explains Korine. “They were perfect for the parts. But on top of that there’s a kind of conceptual layer to the film where those girls in real life are representative of the pop mythology that the film is based in. Plus, I like that they're playing against type and that they go against what expected of them.”
It’s not only the casting that surprises. Spring Breakers is continually asking its audience to step outside the viewing experience to examine the fissions in narrative happening on screen. “I never wanted you to feel comfortable or feel like you actually knew what was going to happen,” says Korine – and boy does he succeed. After opening with a delirious, candy-coloured tits-and-ass montage, Korine flips to an overcast Nowhereville, USA where a trio of blonde airheads (played by Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Korine’s wife Rachel) rob a diner using water pistols and a sledge hammer to pay for their spring break getaway; good girl Faith (Gomez) gets dragged along for the ride.
“I’m a soldier of cinema. I just make movies and that’s all I care about” – Harmony Korine
You’d need the prescience of The Skinny’s own Mystic Mark to guess that from this teenage wasteland of sex and violence Korine will spin a Day-Glo fairytale that reaches an emotional and comedic crescendo with James Franco singing an a cappella version of Britney Spears’ plaintive ballad Everytime while sat on a white baby grand piano. “You want to make movies that can spark the imagination or can allow people to dream,” Korine tells me when I ask about Spring Breakers' whiplash-inducing plot machinations. “I wanted good people to do horrible things and I wanted horrible people to do good things. I wanted there to be a level of moral ambiguity and abstraction.”
Step forward Franco, who gives the comic performance of the year as Alien (his name’s really Al but, in truth, he’s from another planet, y’all), a gangsta rapper with more shit than a dairy farmer's slurry pit, who gets embroiled with the girls when he bails them out of prison. Despite his ridiculous getup (cornrows, gold teeth, Hawaiian shirts louder than a Led Zeppelin concert), Franco manages to bring menace to the role along with mirth. It’s easily his finest onscreen performance. “I had this idea for a character who was something of a gangster mystic, who was kind of a sociopath and a clown, and someone who was utterly charismatic,” Korine tells me. “For like a year before I would send [Franco] images and audio clips of regional white gangsters with black mannerisms and he just interpreted it in a way that’s insane and amazing.”
If this all sounds a bit trippy that’s because it’s meant to be. Korine wanted to make watching the movie feel like a physical experience that mimics a kind of hallucinatory state. “Narratively it has a story that propels itself forward in this very linear way,” explains Korine, “but all around the edges you have this kind of liquid narrative.” This “liquid narrative” takes the form of a dreamy mosaic of micro-scenes and elliptical voiceovers that loop and reverberate; the divisions between past, present and future become elided. “It’s closer to something you might see in electronic music, things that are sample based. I wanted scenes and dialogue that would come back and repeat, a kind of bombardment, something that was completely immersive. I wanted it to be transcendent.”
Korine’s skeptics are likely to scoff at that last statement. It’s easy to understand their cynicism. If you were to come across Spring Breakers while channel hopping one night you might confuse it for a teen skin-flick or a particularly lurid hip-hop video, but taken as a whole its blend of asinine teen-culture with a gorgeous, avant garde aesthetic that calls to mind Terrence Malick at his most abstract and Michael Mann at his most badass has a dizzying cumulative effect. I suggest to Korine that it might be his unashamed mashing of the lowbrow with the highbrow that gets his critics in such a tizzy.
“Yeah, people get upset by that," sighs Korine, "but, you know what, I don’t really see it like that anymore. The whole thing's been exploded. There’s no such thing as high culture and low culture: things are either interesting or they’re not interesting. That old way of thinking is irrelevant. It’s a kind of elitism for snobs; a stance for coddled bastards. There’s definitely transcendence in pop-culture imagery, and there’s a lot of emptiness in things that people find profound. Now the onus is on the viewer. You have to make sense of it yourself.”