JULIEN DONKEY - BOY
Skeletons In The Closet By Domenico Monetti
julien donkey - boy is the second full - length film by one of America's youngest and most transgressive directors: "The film centres on the figures of my uncle, brother and dad. Until he was 20, my uncle was an ordinary person, then he started hearing voices in his head. It was the first sign of schizophrenia," says 25 - year - old filmmaker, Harmony Korine. "The idea of mental illness has always fascinated me; its downward slide and the consequences it has for a person and their family. Initially I wanted my uncle to star in the movie, but he's been in a psychiatric hospital for the last 25 years. His mental condition was too serious. I gave the part to Ewen Bremner. Ewen had already worked for five months in a mental hospital." The figure of Julien is very complex: He works as a caretaker in a school for the blind, helping them move within the world around them. Julien is schizophrenic and lives with his pregnant sister Pearl [Chloë Sevigny], his high school athlete brother Chris [Evan Neumann], his grandmother [Joyce Korine] and his overbearing and violent father [Werner Herzog]. The renowned German director had already played a sadistic father in the Australian film Man Of Flowers. "In julien donkey - boy I wanted to push the idea of reality and truth in film to the limit,” explains the director. "I don’t think that reality exists in film, except maybe in the poetic reality and beauty present in the films of Dreyer, Ozu and Bresson. I used 30 cameras at the same time in this film because I wanted the editing to be a kind of mathematical operation: Camera 16 to camera 20, camera 12...” In julien donkey - boy there isnit a script. All of this seems paradoxical as Korine began his film as a scriptwriter: "I'm a scriptwriter who doesn't believe in a written script. A script is something dead, paper and ink are inanimate objects, while the actors and cameras are right there in front of you, alive. Why impose a script full of dead ideas onto real life?"
Interviews
