Imperfect Harmony

Harmony Korine may be the most gifted US film-maker of his generation. Born in California in 1974, he moved to New York when he was five. At the age of 19 he scripted Kids after meeting director Larry Clark while skateboarding. He's since directed Gummo and Julien- Donkey Boy, under the rules of Dogma 95, and conducted an on-off relationship with actress Chlo Sevigny.

Despite pioneering film-making methods such as picking fights with the biggest guys on the street while a hidden camera rolls, Harmony Korine tells Nick Johnstone why he shouldn't be regarded as the poster boy of modern cinema

THE first contact I had with Harmony Korine came in the form of an email from Paris. Not just any old email but one in which every vowel has been replaced by the letter Q. I spent a few hours scratching my head and looking for a cryptic code which might shed light on where this maverick genius is getting his ideas from. But there wasn't one.

By the time I'd admitted defeat, Korine had returned from France and was back in the house he recently bought in Connecticut. He emailed me again, this time choosing to drop the Q code in favour of a despondent, vowel-friendly message: "I haven't been feeling that well for the past few days but I will get my spirits raised and then we can begin." I'd heard that Korine suffers depressive spells, during which he finds it impossible to talk to people. This, like everything said by or about him, may be untrue. He is an ace image manipulator. This, after all, is the joker who when Gummo, his debut film as writer-director, was released in 1997 told a score of journalists that he was raised in a carnival.

The most credible version of events has Harmony Korine being born in Bolinas, California, in 1974 to Iranian-Jewish parents who ran a boutique. The family moved to Nashville when Korine was 13 and then to New York a few years later. It was there that, enamoured with punk, death metal, rap and arthouse cinema, he became a skateboard champion. After a chance encounter with photographer Larry Clark in Washington Square Park, the two of them struck up a friendship and Clark asked the then 19-year-old to write a screenplay about his generation. The result was Kids, in 1995, which starred a then unknown Chlo Sevigny - Korine's on-off girlfriend - as one of a group of New York teenagers drowning in a sea of vapid pop culture, drugs and promiscuity. It sparked a global media debate over what was taken, albeit superficially, to be a document of an alarmingly nihilistic youth culture.

Five years later, Korine is promoting his second film as writer- director, Julien Donkey-Boy, a haunting portrait of a schizophrenic, played by Scotland's Ewen Bremner complete with American accent, who works as an attendant at a school for the blind. Uncompromising and harsh, it has divided critics.

Korine was already planning to make Julien Donkey-Boy when Dogme 95 godfather Lars von Trier asked him if he wanted to make the first American Dogme film. It was a ringing endorsement of the young man who has already been called the most important film-maker of his generation.

"My acceptance was politically motivated," Korine says. "There were religious constructs found missing in current cinema and along with my Dogme brothers, in an almost Calvinist adherence, it was my intent to redeem myself through a certain cinematic vernacular." This is a typical Korine answer, both evasive and playful. In a similar vein, when I ask him if it's true that the film was shot in 25 days in New Jersey and New York, he corrects me, saying: "No. It was shot under the roof of God's majestic arc."

Late in 1997, after the beating that Gummo took when it was released in American cinemas, Korine and Sevigny (who followed her Kids debut with roles in The Last Days Of Disco, Boys Don't Cry and American Psycho) left their Greenwich Village apartment and moved to Connecticut. Korine bought his house and Sevigny moved back in with her mother. This period was hard for Korine and rumours abound of heavy drug use. Gummo had been misread by American critics as a nihilistic portrait of a diseased middle America with most of the criticism focused on characters in the film, in particular a father who prostitutes his Downs Syndrome daughter, kids who kill cats and sniff glue, and even Korine himself who drunkenly tries to seduce a black gay dwarf. For many, the film was offensive and deliberately provocative.

But for the minority who "got"it, the film was a dazzling truth- bomb from the side of life denied a voice by Hollywood. It was during this time that Korine worked on a film called Fight Harm. He had recently finished his postmodern novel, A Crack Up At The Race Riots (in reality, his collected notebooks, though most critics might prefer the term "ravings"), directed a Sonic Youth video, had several art shows in LA, Tokyo and New York - and become totally burned out. Not the best state of mind in which to broach a documentary where you approach the biggest, meanest guys you can find on the streets of New York and bait them into fighting you, while a hidden camera captures the whole sorry mess. After several hospitalisations and two appearances in court, he was forced to abandon the project after a mere six fights. Von Trier had thrown down the gauntlet at a time when Korine needed encouragement. It inspired him to scrap all the dialogue from his screenplay (which was based on Korine's schizophrenic uncle, Eddy) and instead hand the cast and crew a series of poetic scene sketches. This gave Bremner, like Sevigny (who plays Julien's pregnant sister, Pearl) and maverick German filmmaker- actor Werner Herzog (their demented taskmaster of a father) the freedom to improvise.

Korine, who approached Bremner with the project, was blown away by his performance: "It was wonderful to watch him. He was never false, always true." Bremner, like all involved, had to put up with Korine's bizarre shooting schedule. Each morning, Korine assembled cast and crew before a spinning wheel, on which he had pinned the different locations. The day's location was determined by where the wheel stopped.

Bremner, for his part, recognises that instinct plays a huge part in Korine's film-making. "He's very bright," he says. "He's quite an intellectual. But when he works, he works. On instinct, rather than intellect. I don't think he will be fully recognised in his own time."

One thing Korine is sure of, however, is why he worked with Werner Herzog. "He, more than any other director, has influenced me both creatively and personally. I see myself in his work more than anyone else's and I believe this is why he contacted me after watching Gummo and said, 'You are the last foot soldier in the army'. I love him very much and believe him to be the greatest. His films exclude fashion and that for the most part is why he has never been in vogue. He continues regardless of what people say or think."

Julien Donkey-Boy looks unlike any film you'll have seen before. The film's look - grainy, atmospheric, blurred - was achieved by an array of techniques. Although Korine had cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who also shot early Dogme classics Festen and Mifune) shoot colour material (using hand-held digital cameras as specified in the Dogme 95 manifesto), they also shot black-and-white footage (not allowed by Dogme rules), fitted spy-cams on members of the cast, dropped Polaroids in during the editing stage and froze and superimposed shots in camera.

But as pioneering as the filming and editing methods are, Korine insists he dislikes being a poster boy for a new kind of cinema. "I always get the feeling that when people speak of my films in terms of new cinema or new wave, they aren't paying attention to the meaning of the stories and the characters, and just being revolutionary for the sake of revolution is meaningless. All I want from great art is to be moved, to be taken inside and shown something I had never before been privy to."

Julien Donkey-Boy, like Gummo, shows things that you won't see in your usual multiplex blockbuster: a man with no arms plays the drums, Herzog's tyrannical father listens to old blues records while wearing a gas mask, a blind ice figure skater, a man performs tricks with a lit cigarette, blind people go bowling. When I ask Korine what draws him to these orphans, he confesses, "I only create what is not given to me by others. I love all those characters in my films and identify with them all. The good and the bad, it is all inside me."

Julien Donkey-Boy opens in Scotland later this year

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