Movie Maverick - Interview Magazine
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By Gus Van Sant
Harmony Korine, now twenty - five, had an auspicious start to his movie career as the writer of Larry Clark's Kids; at eighteen, he was the youngest credited screenwriter ever. He went on to write and direct Gummo, his first feature, which won major prizes at the Venice and Rotterdam Film Festivals, defying many American critics who trashed the film because of its audacity and presumption.
Korine's latest film, julien donkey - boy, depicts the life of a paranoid schizophrenic [played by Ewen Bremner] with his father [played by Korine's friend, the German director Werner Herzog], pregnant sister [Chloë Sevigny], brother [Evan Neumann], and grandmother [Joyce Korine, the director's own grandmother]. The film was shot according to the rules laid down by the Danish filmmaking collective known as Dogme 95, whose "Vow Of Chastity" insists on its members shooting on location in natural light, without music, wardrobe, or other artificial stylistic additives. The current rumour is that the Dogme believe that this first American movie to be made according to their manifesto is the most successful yet.
Harmony Korine: Hey.
Gus Van Sant: Where are you? In New York?
Yeah. I'm in New York. With my pocket pussy.
What's that?
Oh, it's just this plug - in vagina. I just bought it on Eighth Street. I was thinking about plugging it in during the interview. [Electronic buzzing noise starts]. What's going on?
Um, nothing. Oh, I read a whole book of these stories by hippie kids.
Oh really?
Yeah. One of them is about, you know, free love at nine.
[Laughs]. What? Was this girl having sex at age nine?
Yeah, and it pretty much destroyed her life.
I grew up on a commune and it wasn't like that at all. It was more Trotskyist, and everyone was out in the fields of East Tennessee making Marxist propaganda and firebombing empty churches.
Really?
Yeah, but at the same time they'd watch a lot of Bowery Boy movies and stuff like that. It was strange. They wanted to kind of invent their own culture. But I wouldn't say it was really hippie culture.
Oh, it was just politically adverse?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I remember when I first met you and I was with Larry [Clark] and I think we had lunch with Scott, who was stoned and . . .
[Laughs].
Do you remember that?
Yes, of course.
And you and I rode uptown. Scott split, of course, to go score some drugs.
Right. I remember that he kept nodding off. [Laughs]. And I didn't know why. I had just moved there from Tennessee. I thought he was some kind of narcoleptic.
He was just sleepie.
Yeah.
And then you and I caught a cab uptown and you said that I should listen to The Shaggs.
Oh, you remember that?
Yeah, because that was the first time I had ever heard of The Shaggs and you explained them to me.
Yeah, their dad gave them a Herman's Hermits album, a drum, a bass, and a guitar, and locked them in the basement and only fed them peanut - butter - and - jelly sandwiches for three weeks straight and he told them they couldn't come out until they were ready to become rock stars.
[Laughs]. You said you'd give me their album and that it would probably change my life. And then you got out of the car. I didn't ever get the album and I also couldn't find it in the record store.
[Laughs].
And I kept thinking, Well, gee, I wonder if my life would've been changed.
[Laughs].
You met Larry in Washington Square Park when you were eighteen?
Right, right. He was taking pictures of me.
And you told him that you could write a screenplay for him really quick? Which turned into Kids.
We started talking. Kids wasn't a movie that I had thought about writing or that I was particularly interested in, or a movie that I would have ever written on my own, you know. I still don't consider it to be my movie. I think of it much more as Larry's film, even though I wrote the thing and it was all about kids that I knew at that period of time.
It was like a job.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, just the notion of getting a movie made when you're eighteen. It didn't even seem possible.
I've only seen three or four scenes [of julien donkey - boy] but I was really impressed with the whole makeup of it, what was going on in the scenes and the way they were shot. Every scene had a different philosophy behind it, which was kind of amazing, and then some of the scenes were shot with lots of cameras, which was extremely amazing.
Yeah. On Gummo, I experimented a lot with video and it wasn't even so much the aesthetic of video that excited me; it was more the freedom that I felt it allowed. People talk about there being a video revolution. I think they are more concerned with the financial element of it, which to me is secondary. I couldn't care less about how much a movie costs. I think a movie should be great if it's made for a hundred million or if it's made for one dollar. It makes no difference. But what was more exciting about [using] video [on Gummo] was the intimacy that it allowed. I didn't need these huge lighting crews and I was also excited about holding the camera. I felt like the best scenes in Gummo were the scenes where no one was around, sometimes where I wasn't even around. It was just the cameraman and the actor. We'd figure out a lighting scenario and allow for the sound person to be out of the room. I would just go in between takes and give the actors direction, tell them what to improvise, and then run out of the room. I wanted julien donkey - boy to be in that style, and I wanted to have angles coming from every direction. I wanted it to be almost mathmatical. I wanted to use thirty cameras at once and have people sitting in trees and people behind windows.
That's like the guy at the security desk of a large building with all those surveillance monitors.
It's like I wanted julien donkey - boy to put an end to this notion of realism in cinema because I don't think there is such a thing as realism or one hundred percent truth, in cinema or in documentary. Ultimately, film is a lie and lies are good if you are a good liar. This is something that Werner [Herzog] and I talked about a lot - that basically there is something much greater than truth in cinema. There's a poetic truth that kind of hovers above a film, something that's almost Godly. To me, the great works of art exist on a level where you can't see the director or the artist coming up with the ideas. Somehow, it kind of takes on Biblical proportions - it seems to have always existed. When I watch a movie like The Night Of The Hunter [1955] or even The Passion Of Joan Of Arc [1928], I can't see the mechanisms; I can't see the director thinking. It feels like the movie just fell from the sky. I wanted to make a movie that has that kind of of feel to it. And I wanted to take it to the next level, so I used multiple cameras and started playing around with this idea of wiring the actors with spy cameras.
And in the end, you had something like a hundred and twenty hours of footage?
Yeah. Something like that. A hundred and fifty hours or so.
That's a lot of footage. So now you're just about to make your print.
Yeah. We're doing this insane transfer to make it seem archival. It looks like moving paintings, where the colours are bursting and melting into eachother. It's like when you take a photograph and blow it up ontoa colour Xerox. The photograph is no longer a photograph; it's like a painting because it's ink on paper so you don't really see the depth of field. It becomes much more integrated because everything is kind of condensed and flattened.
Wow, that's great.
Yeah, it's exciting because the movie itself is as close to a kind of realism as you can get in film.
It's like a live event, especially scenes where there are lots of people. It's got a sort of Wide World Of Sports quality.
[Laughs]. Right. Exactly.
Watching julien, I realized that except for sitcoms like The Lucy Show where they're using three cameras, filmmakers have always intercut takes that weren't meant to be. That's the way films have generally always been made. But if you're intercutting live angles, it's more akin to a live event.
It tends to take the viewer inside. I was influenced a lot by watching the 1992 Olympics.
So let me ask you about those two guys Lars [von Trier] and Thomas [Vinterberg], [two of the founders of Dogme 95]. When did you meet them?
It was a month before shooting julien donkey - boy. I had seen [Vinterberg's] The Celebration at the New York Film Festival because someone had told me that I'd like it. I was really down on films at the time and thinking that basically everyone has given up or, you know, that no one's trying to push it, and then I saw The Celebration and really liked it. I had seen [von Trier's] The Idiots before that, and I liked that, too. And I got a telephone call from Thomas about a week later, and he said "I heard you were going to make a new film and I spoke to Lars von Trier and we were wondering if you would be interested in starting the American New Wave and joining the Dogme 95 brotherhood." And I liked that.
Wasn't there some sort of Masonic ritual you had to attend?
I'm forbidden to . . . I can get some piece of my body chopped off for divulging that.
Like a Nordic ritual?
Yeah, it's like a Nordic, Masonic, cinematic ritual [laughs]. It kind of seemed like a joke. But in talking to them, what ultimately made me end up joining the Dogme was that there wasn't really an irony about it. I mean the whole thing is very serious. They had written this semi - Calvinist "Vow Of Chastity" for filmmakers and it was a very strict ritual. I like things like militant rescue actions, which is basically the purpose of this.
It's a militant action rescuing people from dumbed - down cinema.
The mediocrity of film. Yeah. And also in reaction to the failure of the '60s [French] New Wave and how in the end that was just bourgeois romanticism.
Oh, but that's Werner [Herzog] talking now.
Are they separate from Werner's ideas?
I think that there's a definite correlation to what Werner has been doing, except that he would argue that all his documentaries are live. They say in the manifesto that by following these rules to a T, by demanding of yourself the following of the "Vow Of Chastity," some kind of supreme truth will be forced out of the characters and out of the actors. The director denounces himself as an artist and says, "I am no longer trying to impose an artistic structure on the actors."
Right, like the actor doesn't have to hit marks. They do what they want and you're just covering them as opposed to, you know . . .
Exactly. All of these rules basically allow them to dig deeper and to find something that they couldn't before. Even though The Idiots and The Celebration were scripted, there was improvising done along the way. On julien donkey - boy there were no technical demands [I had to adopt to] to really conform to the "Vow Of Chastity."
You were already planning similar things?
Yeah, I was planning to shoot it in a very similar way, except, again, I was trying to go much further by using thirty cameras, by not having a script at all, by not having any dialogue at all, by basically just working off of ideas and images. The "Vow Of Chastity" did make the actual shooting of the film much more tense, because you can't rely on any kind of post - production tricks; you can't rely on the way that movies are generally made now. But I couldn't imagine ever having an experience that's more free. I had absolutely no one looking over my shoulder. No one telling me what to do. It's as pure a vision in film as you could possibly have.
Cool.
[Electric buzzing stops]. Are there any more questions?
No.
[Laughs]. That's good.
