I grew up in Nashville in Tennessee, and I wanted to make a different film. I wanted to make a different kind of movie, because I don’t see cinema in the same – on the same kind of terms

or the same way that narrative movies have been made for the past hundred years. I mean, we

started with Griffith and we ended up with – I don’t know what the hell is going on now but – Harmony Korine, The Late Show with David Letterman, October 17, 1997

Harmony Korine has declared a moratorium on interviews. Or so I have been told. That just made me more determined to interview this internationally acclaimed independent filmmaker who calls the Music City his home.

I tried to reach him through IFC, the distributor of his current film, Mister. Lonely, but got an automated response in return saying someone would contact me shortly.

No one contacted me shortly or longingly.

I recalled that Denis Lim of the New York Times wrote an article on him so I thought maybe he could help me. However, neither he nor any other reporter for the New York Times can be reached directly. So I tried the e-mail to the newsroom. And the response was just was impersonal as from IFC.

Next I attempted the Belcourt Theater in Nashville, which held the southeastern premiere of Mister Lonely with the director in attendance. His previous two films, Gummo and julien donkey-boy, were shown in conjunction. And the director was given free reign for a month long series called Directions that featured a few of the films that influenced as a filmmaker.

“Korine’s selections are comprised of four unique films by four different filmmakers, two of whom have left behind an estimable body of work (John Cassavette, Husbands, and R. W. Fassbinder, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) and two who are not only very much with us, but also star in Korine’s new film (Werner Herzog, Land of Silence and Darkness, and Leos Carax, Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood),” the Belcourt’s monthly program guide for May 2008 stated.

I had seen two in the Directions selections. Cassavette’s Husband, the director said, when introducing the film as he nervously moved farther away from the audience and closer to where his wife, Rachel sat, opened his eyes that movies don’t have to be made in one uniform way.

“Is it cynical to say that more people praise John Cassavetes as the godfather of American independent cinema than have ever looked at his films?” Jim Ridley, film critic of the Nashville Scene, wrote for a review of Husbands. “There isn’t a filmmaker whose work more stubbornly resists a varnish coat of canonization than Cassavetes’ maddening, meandering, uncompromising films. If you’ve never actually seen one, this skin-peeling 1970 drama about three boozy buddies (Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara) on a grief-fueled weekend bender is a tough but telling introduction n a raw tumult of searching, discomfort and macho bluster, stocked with all the moments of honest, purposeful confusion that movies typically omit.”

The other was Herzog’s Land of Silence, a documentary mostly about the inspirational Fini Straubinger, who overcame all obstacles of being both blind and deaf. Children who were born with this double handicapped are portrayed as exotic creatures from another world. The choice seemed odd since Herzog’s early film, Even Dwarves Start Small, a plotless film about midgets breaking out of an asylum and crucifying a monkey, seemed custom fitted for Korine‘s frame of mind.

“Yeah, Stroszek’s film print was so badly damaged…it’s a crying shame that Herzog’s film prints are deteriorating,” Brent Stewart said to the Amplifier. Stewart is the author of the documentary, The Lonely, about the making of Mister Lonely. “That’s why I laud someone like Jonas Mekas whose Anthology Film Archives preserves some of the most important pieces of cinema negatives/prints for years to come…but, Land of Silence and Darkness had some beautiful moments; and is such a rare film to see projected from it’s 16mm format…nice mono-aural sound, chunky grain, and crunchy, kodachrome colors w/ a deaf-mute, Down’s syndrome child rocking, razzing with his mouth, and throwing a ball makes for a very poetic moment that I could associate w/ Harmony’s aesthetic.”

I could get into touch with one who captured the behind the scenes but not the one who made the scenes.

“I’m not at liberty to pass along Harmony’s contact info, but if there is a date for Mister Lonely in Bowling Green at a local theater, you might be able to contact IFC Films to set up an interview.  I do know that Harmony has done tons of press since last year when the film premiered at Cannes and is ready to take a break. However, can’t hurt to try IFC,” so e-mailed Toby Leonard of the Belcourt.

“Would you mind being interviewed about him?” I asked Toby.

Toby: “I don’t know that I’d have anything to say worthwhile. I think he’s a talented filmmaker with a singular vision.”

Mark: “What is he like as a person?”

Toby: “very nice. very amiable.”

A few interviews said he enjoys vaudeville and the burlesque. “When I was growing up in Nashville, there was this group of kids across the street from me who would steal curbs from cement sidewalks and put them on their patios to do these minstrel reenactments. They would call it ‘curb dancing.’ You have to have a truck, a jackhammer, and a lift, and about three guys can pick up curbs and move them. Sometimes they would paint them,” Korine told the AV Club of the Onion in May 1, 2008.

If Korine ever attended any burlesque shows in Nashville, one person would know it: Miss Lolly Pop of the Music City Burlesque. I asked her if she had ever met this auteur. Her answer was one, simple word, “No.”

Sideshow Bennie, the human blockhead and Nashville’s Ultimate Man, knows everyone in the Music City and everyone wants to know him but even he hasn’t been introduced to Korine.

“We have been in the same room but I have never really met him so I can’t be of any assistance on this one…” Bennie said. “It was a big room with lots of folks and he was pointed out to me, otherwise, I wouldn’t noticed him or particularly known who he was. I remember him as being, short…”

Let’s Way Back Machine to the past, 1995. The most controversial film of that year was Kids. The 2002 Video Movie Guide, which I just happened to have handy, said with its brutal dialogue, appalling contempt for humanity, and rough sexual content, Kids is a “frightening wake-up call [that] should be required viewing for every parent and politician in the land.”

The screenwriter was a then 19-year old Harmony Korine, who had left Nashville two years before for New York. What I remember most of the film was the Robert Altman style of storytelling, the skater who used a tampon to drink his Kool-Aid and the music. I bought the soundtrack, introducing me to Daniel Johnston, one of American’s premiere outsider singer/songwriter.

One of the stars, Chloe Sevigny, who would become his girlfriend, is no stranger to controversial roles n from the lover of Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry, to giving Vincent Gallo on-camera fellatio in Brown Bunny, to willing polygamous wife in the HBO TV series, Big Love. She appeared in Korine’s 1997 directorial debut, Gummo. The title is supposed to be the name of a lesser known Marx Brother who never made it big because he preferred to wear women’s clothes. But the movie has nothing to do with any of the Marx Brothers. In fact, trying to figure out what the movie is about always leads to discussions. Most people will agree that has something to do with white trash youth. The movie is set in Xenia, Ohio but was filmed in East Nashville.

Though I had heard of it, I didn’t see Gummo until 1999 when I took a trip to New York. Cultured friends of the Big Apple said I needed to see it. We stopped at a video store to get it and Tromeo & Juliet. I couldn’t recall much of the movie experience so I looked through my travel journal. “I tried watching Tromeo but the images kept blanking out. I took out the video and put in Gummo, a bizarre movie about kids in a rural town leveled by a tornado. Kids I understood but Gummo makes no sense.” This was You Tube before there was a You Tube. If he was a Jazz musician he would be Miles Davis and Gummo would be his Bitches Brew. Reviews remark on the glue-sniffing, cat torture, and the murder of a grandmother but what I remember most is the fight between two rednecks in the kitchen that seemed more real than staged. That scene brought back a feeling of Russellville.

David Letterman asked Harmony October 17, 1997 about this confusing film.

Letterman: And what story are you telling with Gummo?

Korine: Okay. Well, it’s not really one story, because that’s the whole thing. I don’t know care about plots.

Letterman: That’s right, in the linear sense. It’s more slices of life.

Korine: Well, like I think every movie there needs to be a beginning, middle and end, but just not in that order (laughter), and like when I watch movies, the only thing I really remember are characters and specific scenes. So I wanted to make a film-making system entirely of that, really random.

Letterman: Right. You would like the phone book better if it were not alphabetized, right?

Korine: Yes, I like the phone book. It’s good (laughter).

Letterman: Oh, you do, do ya?

Korine: Yeah. I like Eddie Cantor. I like Al Jolson. I want to do a minstrel with Tom Cruise, and I want him to play it on his knees. [He would do his minstrel show with Johnny Depp instead.]

The Nashville filmmaker would return again to Letterman on April 3, 1998, this time unkempt and unshaven, to talk about his book, a Crackup at the Race Riots. The book is now out of print and going for $50 on Amazon. Page 59 only has one word, hepburn. Brent Stewart has read the book but not as a whole: “crackup? yeah, in bits and pieces; the way it should be read. it’s like a collection of poems, very different, say than our friend, David Berman’s poems in Actual Air.”

On Letterman, Harmony seemed to be nervous and saying whatever popped in his head. The best example being when the late night king asked him about the popular movie of that year.

Letterman: Have you seen Titanic?

(Harmony is looking around and then down at his feet)

Letterman: 200 million, my friend. Right there, 200 million. Now that’s a movie.

Korine: Yeah, I knew it’d sink.

(audience laughs)

Letterman: Have you seen the film?

Korine: Oh, I liked it.

Letterman: Yeah, you enjoyed it.

Korine: I mean, I liked what I saw of it, and, um, it was pretty, ah, I don’t really remember.

(audience laughs)

Letterman: Do you, would you…

Korine: I mean I saw the previews.

Letterman: Oh you saw the previews, well that’s good enough

(audience laughs)

Letterman: Would you one day like to direct a film on that scale?

Korine: Yeah, the second one.

Letterman: Yeah.

Korine: I’d do the sequel probably.

Letterman: The sequel to Titanic?

Korine: Yeah.

(audience laughs)

Letterman: And how would that go?

(audience laughs)

Korine: I’d use a rowboat.

Korine’s behavior on Letterman has been described as performance art and he was banned from the late night show for shoving Actress Meryl Streep backstage.

Gummo generated strong polar reactions, from being called the worst movie of the year by more than one critic to earning the praise of some of the world’ best filmmakers.

“Gummo is essential viewing,” Jack Silverman, arts editor of the Nashville Scene, said in an interview for the Amplifier. “You may not enjoy it (though you might like it), but it’s the movie that really cemented his reputation as a provocateur.”

However, Ridley also of the Nashville Scene gave it a less than glowing review back in 1997:

“The most discomforting aspect of Gummo is the scene that Korine used destitute people in Nashville so he could stick them with attitudes and actions he wouldn’t dare otherwise. Korine may give himself a drunken, sentimental baggy-pants turn on camera, but when he wants someone to declare, “I hate niggers,” or to rant about gays, those words are carefully placed in the mouths of non-actors, who take all the heat.”

While not a fan of Gummo, Ridley does see potential in the director. “As craven as Korine is in many ways, though, he’s fearless in others. Even if Gummo is numbing and soggy, it’s the first American movie this year to suggest a way out of the present dead-end of conventional narrative cinema. Movies don’t have to tell stories in straight lines, and when Gummo works, it forces us to respond to images onscreen without the crutch of narrative bearings or routine musical cues. The opening, in which a half-naked boy (Nashville skateboarder Jacob Sewell) shivers on an interstate overpass, is a great short film in itself; so is a beautiful scene of the boy and two sisters frolicking in a swimming pool during a rainstorm.”

An imdb.com reviewer from Peoria, IL called it a “Surprisingly Uniquie Movie.” “I will admit that the reason I rented this movie was because of the numerous reviews that I read about how unbelievably bad and pointless this film was. It only took me a few minutes to realize why so many critics hated it, which was the very reason I liked this film. Gummo is a classic case of style over substance. If you’re looking for plot development, you’d better go rent Good Will Hunting or something like that.”

The amateur reviewer must not have known this but the film’s cinematographer also worked in Good Will Hunting and Harmony himself made a cameo. The director, Gus Van Sant, being a fan of Gummo, would have him in another of his films, Last Days. German filmmaker Werner Herzog also stands by Gummo and was cast in Harmony’s next plot-less film, julien donkey-boy, that provoked strong reactions from critics such as Marjorie Baumgarten of the Austin Chronicles:

“Julien may be a donkey-boy but it’s Harmony Korine… who is a horse’s ass. A talented one, to be sure, but nevertheless a beast that seems not fully tethered or reined in. Korine’s star has risen on the basis of his distinctive brand of abrasive cinema. He wrote the notorious screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids and then went on to write and direct Gummo, the affectless drama about cat-killing kids in Ohio. Now, with julien donkey-boy, Korine has moved on to the fictional story of a schizophrenic. Images and fragments from Julien’s life have been filmed with hand-held video digital cameras and then tossed on the screen in a haphazard-seeming fashion. The uncanny result is that we often do not know if what we see happening is ‘real’ or merely the figments of Julien’s schizophrenic imagination.”

This movie is the first American film to be certified as Dogme ’95. International filmmakers Lars von Trier (Dogville and Dancer in the Dark) crafted a proclamation on March 13, 1995 to urge filmmakers from relying on digital effects.

“In 1960 enough was enough! The movie was dead and called for resurrection,” according to the proclamation. “Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the media becomes, the more important the avant-garde. It is no accident that the phrase ‘avant-garde’ has military connotations. Discipline is the answer … we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition!”

The Vows of Chasity an observant of Dogme ’95 has to follow include:

* Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).

* The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).

* The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).

* The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).

* Optical work and filters are forbidden.

* The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)

* Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)

* Genre movies are not acceptable.

* The film format must be Academy 35 mm.

* The director must not be credited.

julien donkey-boy is not a pure Dogme ’95 film. Korine purchased cranberries as a prop and Chloe Sevigny, starring in this one as well, sported a fake pregnancy though the director claimed he would have impregnated her himself if pre-production had been longer. An apology was issued on the movie’s website.

“julien donkey-boy may be harder to find. It’s interesting, though not as essential as Gummo,” Silverman told the Amplifier. julien did earn a thumb’s up from New York film critic Roger Ebert: “Korine, who at 25 is one of the most untamed new directors, belongs on the list with Godard, Cassavetes, Herzog, Warhol, Tarkovsky, Brakhage and others who smashed conventional movies and reassemble the pieces.”

Lay fans of Harmony Korine do exist but they aren’t the most open such as Scott whose fan site comes with this disclaimer, “Harmony-Korine.com is an unofficial fan site that is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with Harmony Korine. …We have not had any contact with Korine either and do not know if he has seen the website. We also have no contact address for him so please do not write asking for this. His agent’s details are on imdb.com maybe that is of some help.”

I asked Scott if I could ask him a few questions about Korine. He said no because he was only the web designer.

Mark: I want the one who is running this fan site. I want to know why someone would be a fan.

Scott: That is me, still. The website is operated by just the one person. I could answer your questions if you want, I suppose. I don’t know whether it will make exciting reading though. Perhaps you could do an entire feature on the more dedicated fan sites out there. Do they ever tire of it? Have they received any perks as a result of having the site? What terrible emails have they received? All very exciting.

Mark: OK, I like your questions better anyway. Do they ever tire of it? Have they received any perks as a result of having the site? What terrible emails have they received? And has Korine threaten you with a lawsuit?

Scott: This doesn’t seem very professional at all, Mark. I

feel like I’ll take the effort to answer these questions and in the end nothing will come of it. To answer your one question though, there has not been any threat of lawsuits or anything of that kind. If anything the site would be a positive for Korine, I’d say.

Mark: I’ve never been accused of being professional. One last question and I’ll never bother you again: Are all Korine fans this difficult to get straight answers out of?

Scott: It’s no bother. I just get the feeling you don’t have any thought out plans for this – I might be wrong. If you really very much want I will answer questions… Or will I, Mark? Will I…

I gave up after that.

The polar reviews and the fact his films weren’t reaching a wide audience dishearten Korine. “I always thought I would make a movie as successful as the Shawshank Redemption,” he told the Onion’s AV Club. “I thought Gummo would be played in shopping malls.”

He attempted another project called Fight Harm, where Magician David Blaine filmed Korine provoking fights with random people and getting beaten up, getting his head smashed with a mandolin and having his ankle broken. He took Quaaludes to stop the pain and earned some jail time. Noted cinematic website imdb.com listed him working on Diary of Anne Frank Part II, a Sonic Youth music video, David Blaine: Above the Below, and writing the screenplay to Larry Clark’s Ken Park, a movie best remembered for its pornographic scenes of a boy having oral sex with the hot mom of his girlfriend and the threesome of two guys and a girl.

For the most part Korine disappeared. He worked at a Jewish community center in Nashville, as a lifeguard assistant, and as a shoe cobbler; sneaked into hospitals and dress up the unconscious patients with baseball hats and gloves; and spent time with Haitian voodoo tap-dancer in Baton Rouge and a group or cult, depending which article you read, of fishermen in Panama, where his parents live. These fishermen called themselves the Malingerers and sought a fish with gold scales. When he left a fisherman’s wife gave him a leash, claiming an invisible dog was on the other end, which he later claimed to hearing bark. He moved to Paris, lived in a studio apartment set up by a fashion designer Agnes B. Agnes, where he felt isolated because he couldn’t speak the language. A wake up call came when he bit into agyro and found what he thought was a bone. He complained to the vendor, who told him that was Korine’s own tooth. “I was rotting from the inside out,” he told the New York Times. Somewhere along the way he married and used her as Little Red Riding Hood in Mister Lonely.

“It may be useful at this point to note that Mr. Korine’s mythomania has always been the center of his art,” the New York Times wrote.

“Whether you believe me or whether it’s the truth, what does it matter? Everything’s just a story. It’s all a story,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

What is known is that Korine and his brother, Avi, who has a better sense of traditional narrative, worked on a screenplay together, calling it Mister Lonely which the www.cinematical.com was under the impression was about a man who lives in a giant soda bottle.

Mister Lonely could be called two movies in one (three if you count the brief interruption when Herzog, playing a priest, finds a man at a South American airport to confess he had been cheating on his wife.

“That scene was really special,” Korine told the Nashville Scene. “I was setting up for another scene in Panama, where my parents live, and there’s an airport in the jungle. And out of the corner of my eye I saw Herzog talking to this guy who was holding these plastic flowers, and he was crying. And I walked up to Werner and said, ‘What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘Please, put the camera on me quick, something special is about to happen.’”

The rest of Mister Lonely is two interwoven, unrelated stories – a Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris moving to Scotland to live in a commune of other celebrity impersonators and the tale of a blue-dressed nun falling out of a moving airplane, surviving, and starting a new faith.

“In the beginning, when I was first working with Avi, we were thinking of it as two different movies, or as something with the same story but the characters somehow inhabiting both worlds,” Korine told the Nashville Scene. “But at a certain point I knew we were going to do away with one. I knew it was going to be controversial in that the stories never necessarily come together in a cement way. But I felt that both narratives were speaking the same ideas: that there was an emotional connection, that there was a thematic connection n that in some ways the two stories danced with each other.”

A behind-the-scenes documentary, the Lonely, was made by Brent Stewart, who describes Korine as an alchemist. “Harmony and I have been working together on previous projects,” Stewart told the Amplifier. “He wanted me to be involved with Mister Lonely. I felt the timing was right, the subject matter interesting, and a doc had never been done on harmony before…while on set, I was immersing myself into the whole experience, taking photographs, video, recording sounds…it was a bit surreal having Denis Lavant (Charlie Chaplin) running around a Scottish castle on a unicycle between scenes, playing a pennywhistle, wearing golf cleats, and reciting French symbolist poetry….”

If there is one film to help the average viewer ease into Korine’s films, this one would be it. I asked Stewart if he thought Korine was becoming more mainstream.

“Mister Lonely is hardly considered a mainstream film…yeah, it was second in box office to Iron Man in New York on opening weekend; but you still got a flying nuns mixed with communal impersonators living in a Scottish castle…yes, Mister Lonely is different from his other films, but it’s not a question of becoming more mainstream, but evolving with a different context and subject matter that showed a more direct form than his other films.”

“Harmony and I,” Stewart continued, “have a regional connection, we’re both from Nashville… I immediately understood and felt a connection with his aesthetic… he retains a strong, original vision through the years that is becoming rare with young, American filmmakers as their visions become distilled and homogenized for financing purposes of the studio, themselves, or otherwise… Harmony’s films are pieces of art…that use the theater as the gallery. you can rent them, take them home with you…and not have to pay a fortune to own a Mathew Barney limited edition, or bootleg for that matter, in Nashville, Bowling Green, or whatever.”

Mark: Korine has been called enfant terrible, the worse filmmaker, and controversial. Do you feel those labels accurately describe him? He has also been compared to Goddard, Herzog, Fassbinder, Cassavettes, Warhol, Tarkovsky, and Brakhage. Do you feel it is premature to shelve him with such a cinematic pantheon when he has only made three films?

Brent Stewart: he’s 35, he’s still young…three visionary films far outweigh ten mediocre films. Brakhage told me once, right before he died, that he and Tarkovsky were polar opposites, they met once in a seedy Telluride motel; Brakhage projected Dog Star Man onto the walls; Tarkovsky cussed him out in Russian…although, all these filmmakers are/were different, they still shared the same journey.

Jim Ridley of the Nashville Scenes still feels the same about the Nashville auteur, not liking Mister Lonely but loving the beginning where the Michael Jackson impersonator rides a clown bike in slow motion. A stuffed monkey is attached to the bike on a wire. Bobby Vinton croons the film’s title. “As a stand-alone, this three-minute shot constitutes a gorgeous short film,” he reviewed. “As the opening sequence of Mister Lonely n the third film by Harmony Korine, once the reigning Man You Loved to Hate of American indie cinema n it advances the plot not a frame, tells us next to nothing about the character and (from a narrative standpoint) has no impact whatsoever on the film that follows.”

Maybe Mister Lonely is four films in one?

Mark to Jim: I found your review for Gummo and I was wondering if I could get a comment from you. It reminded me of your review for Mister Lonely because you seem to like Korine better in parts than as a whole. Am I reading your reviews correctly? What makes you think he has talent but not necessarily like his films.

Jim: He said of Gummo that he wanted a viewer to be able to reach into it, pull something out and have almost a stand-alone film, and as much as I disliked Gummo at the time, it has scenes that have stayed with me much longer than entire movies I liked more. The shot of Bunny Boy and the two girls kissing in the rainswept above-ground pool is one of the most haunting images I’ve ever seen.

I think his real strength as a filmmaker lies in those self-contained scenes. julien donkey-boy is full of those moments, where he just seems entranced by the circus he’s engineered and turned loose. At best, his movies have this anything-can-happen quality that’s been completely choked out of mainstream filmmaking. He has the patience to wait for something interesting to develop, and the nerve and shamelessness not to worry about screwing up or censoring himself. He told us he wanted to make movies that skipped all the usual business and went straight to the good parts, and that makes his movies bloom, in a way, on DVD, where you can pretty much create your own mix-tape of those moments with the remote.

To answer your question: I do think his movies are better in pieces than as a sustained whole, but a sustained whole isn’t what I want from them either. I’d rather see an uneven movie with flashes of brilliance than a thoroughly competent, unexceptionally well-made movie. I’ll forget the competent movie, but I’ll keep those moments of brilliance tucked away for as long as I love movies.

Is that enough of an answer?

When I went to see Husbands, one of Korine’s favorite films, playing at the Belcourt, he was in the audience, even introducing it. He hoped everyone would like it. Husbands isn’t an easy movie to watch. The camera is out of focus at times, the lighting wasn’t given much thought, characters aren’t introduced, the plot is barely there, and while the acting is great, you wonder where it is going. When the movie ended, no one in the audience said a word. They just left. Sitting next to his wife, Korine was waiting on someone to say something whether good or bad. On the sidewalk, I stopped and told him, “I like Husbands.”

A smile formed on his face and he replied, “Thanks!”