Mike Kelley Interviews Harmony Korine
With a poetic, impressionistic take on film narrative, a visual style incorporating everything from elegantly framed 35mm to the
scuzziest of home camcorder footage, and a startling mixture of teen tragedy, vaudeville humour, and sensationalist imagery,
Harmony Korine's first feature Gummo is perhaps the only recent film whose artistic strategies draw as much from the visual art
world as the film world. [A gallery installation of work from Gummo opens at L.A.'s Patrick Painter Gallery in late September].
We were thus very happy when Mike Kelley -- one of today's most essential and subversive artists -- agreed to interview
Korine on the eve of a major gallery installation in Copenhagen.
Like Korine, Kelley blithely shreds conservative notions of high and low art as he mounts major gallery shows, designs album
covers for bands like Sonic Youth, and plays in Destroy All Monsters with Thurston Moore. In fact, one of the band's songs,
"Mom And Dad's Pussy," opens Korine's film.
Korine: So how did you like your song? It starts the movie with those shots of the little girls.
Kelley: They were little boys, actually.
Korine: Oh, the boys are singing about pussy, but that image in Super 8 we kept repeating of the girl in front of the trailer -- I
just knew that that song would fit that image.
Kelley: I guess I couldn't tell the gender of the kids.
Korine: I think they were little girls. We were just driving around -- that's how I got a lot of that footage, the Super - 8 and
video stuff. Just walking around neighbourhoods, walking up to people.
Kelley: How much footage did you have of that?
Korine: I could probably make another two movies with the excess footage. Some of this material I'm going to use in this art
work. In a strange way, I want to get to a point where the next movies are even more random and more incidental without them
being overly arty. I just want things to become a succession of scenes, images, and sounds. I was thinking about the gallery
show -- the problem you run into doing multimedia projection is that a lot of the time, the style takes over. It threatens and
reduces the content. It becomes almost like a music video -- mixing all these forms for no reason.
Kelley: A post - modern pastiche?
Korine: Exactly. And it's so boring. It's like a Sprite commercial. With Gummo, I wanted to invent a new film. I know that
there isn't any true invention that hasn't been done before, but I feel that this hasn't been seen in a real commercial context. We
tried really hard to have images come from all directions. If I had to give this style a name, I'd call it a "mistake - ist" art form --
like science projects, things blowing up in my face, what comes of that.
Kelley: Something alchemical?
Korine: Exactly. When we switched forms, when the film went to video, Hi - 8, or Polaroids -- I wanted everything to feel that
it was done for a reason. Like they shot it on video because they couldn't get it onto 35mm or they shot it on Polaroids because
that was the only camera that was there.
Kelley: Did you do many effects in post production? That shot of a cat eating -- that was phasing.
Korine: That's what I mean by mistake - ist. There was a script, but as a screenwriter, I'm so bored with the idea of following a
script. I felt like I had the movie in the script so we'll shoot the script but then shoot everything else and make sense of it in the
editing process. That cat tape was a tape that a friend of mine had given me, of him doing acid with his sister. They were in a
garage band and there was a shot of their kitten. That [phasing] was an in - camera mistake. The editor, Chris Tellefsen, caught it
and said, "That's kind of interesting."
Kelley: You were splicing footage together after the fact. Kind of indexing it.
Korine: Exactly.
Kelley: How did you decide the structure of the film? I know that there is a script but you can see that a certain amount of
improvisation is going on. How did you make decisions about how things flow from one to another?
Korine: I have so little understanding of how other filmmakers make their movies. I wanted to set up a process of making a
movie that would best suit me. We went down to Tennessee -- I grew up in that area -- and I hired all these kids, family, and
friends -- people I went to school with. Everything in this movie is about access, the trust that they give me. If an actor is a
crack smoker, let him go out between takes, smoke crack, and then come back and throw his refrigerator out the window! Let
people feel they can do whatever they want with no consequence.
Kelley: A lot of the movie is about framing things that are basically performative. Here's a kind of action and let's let people go
with it. The tap dancing scene, the kids shooting the boy with the bunny ears --
Korine: Or the scene where the brothers beat each other up.
Kelley: But other scenes are more pictorial.
Korine: We go from scenes that are completely thought out, almost formal, scenes that resonate in this classical film sense, and
then we go to other scenes where it's like, total mistakes, stuff shot on video where the kids forget there's a camera there and
talk about how much they hate niggers. I felt like shooting each scene on its own terms and then making sense of it afterwards.
And I felt that the styles would blend, that there would be a cohesiveness.
Kelley: There's a cohesiveness there for a number of reasons. One is that, okay, despite the surreal element, it's a milieu that
would allow for that. It's not unusual for people to do odd things in reality so you can have a realist film and have strange things
happening and it doesn't seem surreal. In traditional narrative film, where there's a shift in style, like when the image gets fuzzy,
you see it as a shift of point - of - view, like a dream sequence.
Korine: I hate that shit! That's why I hate Fellini, because it's all like a cartoon to me. It's not based in any kind of realism. I
don't care about it if it's not real.
Kelley: That's funny. If I had to compare you to anybody, I'd compare you to Fellini.
Korine: And he's someone whose films I couldn't stand. The films of his I like are the more realist early films like Il Bedoni.
Kelley: But he uses non - actors, it's biographical, there's stylization. It's just that the stylization is really overt.
Korine: But it's surrealism, and I was never so interested in surrealism. This odd thing that I do -- it's like surrealistic realism.
Everything seems like it's normal, everything is presented as if it's 100 percent true, but at the same time, a lot of the stuff that
goes on is kind of outrageous, made up.
Kelley: How do you think the realist element comes through with all your playing with style? I think people could mistake this
as being like MTV. What would you say to someone who says, "This isn't realist. This doesn't follow traditional realist tropes."
Korine: I'd go after their ass!
Kelley: It seems to me that you could only have a feature film like this post MTV. Otherwise it would be seen as an
avant - garde film.
Korine: I don't know. Look at Griffiths, what he was doing. The commercial movies now, I see so little progress in the
narrative form unless you're talking about Oliver Stone, who to me is making films that are completely empty and all about style.
I was talking to my friend Christopher Woole about the difference between style and substance. He said, "You should never
worry about that because substance is style." Most art makes me sick because everything has become like solving math
problems. Everyone is working from the wrong direction, from the outside in. Approaching Gummo like a piece of art that
entertains, I wanted it to be more from the inside out, less about solving problems and more about going with my obsessions. I
wanted to create a cinema of obsession, a cinema of passion. No one does that anymore.
Kelley: The night before I saw your movie, I saw Sling Blade.
Korine: Oh, I hate that film.
Kelley: But there's a whole bunch of white trash movies in the last ten years. There are ones like Sling Blade, the pathos ones,
and then there are the freak show ones. It's even found it's way into fashion photography. And I saw this new Wendy's
commercial with people who live in a trailer. So I say, okay, this is a genre. If I'm looking at Gummo and I'm looking at this
other stuff, structural questions are important because otherwise your film becomes about "white trash, our new outsiders."
Korine: I felt that Sling Blade was this kind of failed, romanticized Flannery O'Conner. I didn't understand any of that film.
Kelley: Well, unlike yours, it was extremely script oriented. Which is strange because you don't see so many films now that are
so much about scriptwriting. That was the only thing I liked about it -- it was well written, in terms of dialogue.
Korine: I didn't like the dialogue either. Those scenes in the forest -- I was waiting for him to molest the little kid. I wasn't
interested in any kind of white trash chic. It was about going back to where I grew up, casting kids I grew up with, like the
black dwarf -- I went to high school with him.
Kelley: When I saw that black dwarf, I thought it was the guy from Penitentiary Three.
Korine: I haven't seen it.
Kelley: Oh, you must see it. It's fantastic. It's by this guy named Jamaa Fanaka -- a black independent filmmaker from the
'70s.
Korine: I've seen parts one and two.
Kelley: Those aren't good.
Korine: Going back to that whole thing -- I just wanted to show these kids, kids beating each others brains in. I wanted to
show what it was like to sniff glue. I didn't want to judge anybody. This is why I have very little interest in working with actors.
[Non - actors] can give you what an actor can never give you: pieces of themselves.
Kelley: I really like that about the film. When they were acting in a way that was completely unnatural, they were real people
acting unnatural. That reminded me of the best aspects of the Warhol Factory system.
Korine: You know who I love and who no one really knows about? Alan Clarke, the British director. He's a real influence. He
did Scum, Made In Britain, this film Christine, about this girl growing up in council flats with size 14 feet. She walks around with
a cookie tin under her arm and hooks her friends up with dope. She'll go into houses and kids will be lying there with a box of
Ritz crackers on the television. You'd have these really long tracking shots of her walking. And he used real people or people
who seemed right. He did this other film I like, Elephant, which is just 16 separate executions, one after the other. There'll be all
these Steadicam shots. You see a hit man walking through a gymnasium, walking up stairs and corridors --
Kelley: Are these first - person POV shots?
Korine: Exactly. And then he'd shoot the janitor and he'd fall on a pile of jockstraps. But the intention wasn't comedy. After he
died in 1988 of cancer, there was a retrospective of Clarke's work at MoMA and there were only about 10 people in the
audience. I was watching this film, Elephant, and in the beginning it was a little bit disturbing. And then I started to find this
humour in the repetition -- watching some Indian car washer get his head blown out on a squeegee. I start cracking up, and this
British bastard in front of me turns and says, "Don't you know what this represents? This is the IRA, you son of a bitch!" He
wanted to kill me. I liked that idea. He thought it was about the IRA and I thought it was about Ritz crackers.
Kelley: You're talking about inebriation a lot. Are you trying to make a movie that's a kind of visual inebriant? I wasn't bored
watching the movie, even though you couldn't say there was a plot. But, afterwards, I didn't know how much time had passed.
I was in a half nod looking at people whose lives are in a half nod.
Korine: I wanted it be more of a tapestry, so if that was the effect of watching this kind of tapestry of people .... I was as
concerned as you looking at the dolls strung up when the kid gets his hair washed.
Kelley: I loved the art direction.
Korine: It was very minimal.
Kelley: A lot of it was found but in certain cases, you must have had to play with it some. I couldn't believe some of those
houses.
Korine: Oh my God, in that house where you see piles of shit everywhere and the bugs run out the painting -- not only was all
that stuff there but we had to take out stuff to be able to put the camera in the room. I found a piece of a guy's shoulder in a
pillowcase.
Kelley: There are certain motifs that run throughout the movie, sort of structural loops that hold it together. One of them is the
recurring figure of this Bunny Boy, the other is the cat hunting. Were those elements planned from the beginning?
Korine: Oh yeah, that was in the script. I have a feeling the movie is much more scripted than you would think. It's about 75%
scripted.
Kelley: So the script would have a scene that would be imagistic, and another section would say, "Now there's going to be a
party."
Korine: No, this is what would happen. I wrote out the script perfectly. We would ask the actors to do the scenes without me
imposing my ideas of how it should be blocked. Most of the time, it was a different way than I dreamt it. In some cases, it was
worse, and we'd go with my blocking. In other cases, it would be really exciting and I'd change the scene spontaneously.
Kelley: There's a certain milieu that's pictured, but [the film's] not really of it. You're using black metal [music] but the kids are
wearing Dio t - shirts and are cutting "Slayer" into their arms.
Korine: It goes further than that. There's a whole vaudeville
subtext. Kids in Dio t - shirts doing Jimmy Durante routines. That standup Tummler does on the glass table after he goes with the
whore -- that's like a Henny Youngman monologue.
Kelley: Calling the cat Foot Foot, like the Shags song. That's a funny inside joke.
Korine: Oh, there's millions of those.
Kelley: That's one thing I wanted to ask. Are Dot and her sister modeled after Cherie Curie?
Korine: Oh completely, that was a total theft. I wanted that in there but I didn't want it to not make sense. I wanted [the girls]
to adapt to their environment. [The film] is a total mix of history and pop, a making sense of pop. To me, that is what is always
lacking in film -- there's never a relationship to pop culture. America -- and I'm not talking about New York and L.A. -- is all
about this recycling, this interpretation of pop. I want you to see these kids wearing Bone Thugs & Harmony t - shirts and
Metallica hats -- this almost schizophrenic identification with popular imagery. If you think about, that's how people relate to
each other these days, through these images.
Kelley: That's the thing I liked best about the film. How it showed how all these Hollywood clichés about middle America are
just completely wrong structurally. When you see Hollywood movies that show these white trash milieus, they make them too
uniform, not as weird as they are. That's why I hate all this neo - pop art. It makes too much sense.
Korine: You said it. It lacks this kind of cohesive schizophrenia.
Kelley: It becomes about "hip - dom" rather than some idiosyncratic person mixing multiple genres.
Korine: Yeah, I don't give a shit about that whole hip thing. I like the idea of seeing kids who still have Ratt tails and a tattoo of
Janet Jackson on their forearm.
Kelley: Wearing a shag hairdo. It makes no sense.
Korine: Yeah, but it makes sense to them. It goes to this homeschool kind of aesthetic I wanted to run through the film. For
me, Dot and Helen -- I wanted them to seem like homeschool kids. You know, those kids who never had any true interaction
with large groups. I love that -- kids within their own home sort of guessing and coming up with these hipster things. They
almost make a homeschool hip language. I wanted this inbred vernacular. I want to avoid any of the easy answers. And that's
why I think your artwork -- I always felt it was successful because it went against that kind of thing. I wanted to make a movie
where nothing was done for any purpose other than that I wanted to see it. I wanted to make the first film that would hopefully
play in malls that you would see these images with very little justification other than that these were things that I wanted to see.
That's why everyone gets upset with the girl shaving her eyebrows.
Kelley: People don't like it when you use retarded people.
Korine: Even though, I had met her months before, played Donkey Kong with her, and she had no eyebrows then. That was
her style.
Harmony Korine
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