It’s halfway through my video interview with indie film-maker and artist Harmony Korine and so far, I have seen one of his eyes, one nostril and some eyebrow hair. I can see he has sunglasses on his head and his hair is silver these days. I’ve caught the plumes from the giant cigar he’s smoking (he’s obsessed with Cuba’s ‘super old women smoking cigars… it’s a good look.’). And there was one swoosh where he showed me the waterfront, and a flash of a kid riding past on a giant bike in even bigger sunglasses whom he thought had a cool look (‘Those massive, massive sunglasses on that tiny little head’). But mostly I have seen blue Miami sky. Palm trees. And now, the — as he calls it — ‘Tiffany blue’ industrial underpinnings of a pier which he’s hovering beneath. It’s a unique, destabilising point of view, but once you get to know Korine, aesthetically and emotionally, you’ll know that’s how he wants it.
Korine’s early film career was built on chance encounters and riffing on his environment — picking out characters, much like with the cool kid on the bike — and building a youth collective to showcase subcultures set against American decay. His script for Larry Clark’s New York cult classic Kids was born out of his own mooching as a skater. He knew those characters because he was those characters. The actors in Kids and Korine’s films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy and later Spring Breakers were newcomers like Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, who then became friends and collaborators — one muse, Rachel Korine, is even his wife. Now his latest phase is built on tapping into underground youth, but this time it’s to facilitate his creative process to go far beyond a movie on a screen.
