Back in Harmony
After the acclaimed Julien Donkey-Boy, wunderkind director Harmony Korine dropped from public view. He tells Lorna Allen about the flying nuns and musical fish that lay on the path to his new feature film, Mister Lonely.

In 1993, when teenage skater boi Harmony Korine struck up a conversation with a middle-aged photographer in Washington Square Park, NYC, little did he know his life was about to change drastically. The photographer was Larry Clark, out photographing his favourite subject – disenfranchised youth, and he was formulating an idea for his debut feature film. After shooting the breeze about movies and taking some shots of Korine and his buddies, he asked him if he had ever thought about writing a screenplay. Korine rose to the occasion, and within seven days he had penned what was to become one of the most controversial films of the nineties. The film was Kids, a searing, unflinching and nihilistic portrayal of urban adolescence. It divided critics, terrified parents and made stars of its young cast and writer.

Korine’s upbringing was solitary and nomadic. His parents, who he claims were hippies, introduced him early on to the works of Cassavetes and Godard, and in New York he was able to indulge his love of cinema in the many repertory theatres peppered around the city. He and his on/off girlfriend and long time muse, actress Chloë Sevigny, who he met by a urinal and cast as the lead in Kids, defined the downtown New York of the late nineties and succeeded in creating significant works which consistently challenged audiences. ‘My whole life all I ever wanted to do was be a director. From when I was a little kid, it was all I ever wanted to do,’ explains the now thirty four year-old filmmaker as he settles into a stylish but uncomfortable-looking chair in the dining room of the Grand Hotel in Cannes.

The hype that surrounded Kids allowed him to do just that. The taboo subject matter and the heavily voyeuristic style raised concerns that the film was unscripted, and that Larry Clark had merely followed his young subjects around with a camera. In fact the realism came from the disturbingly accurate dialogue which Korine had scripted. Demonstrating an uncanny knack for mastering the vernacular of his generation, the grittiness of the film was enhanced by a cast of non-actors including alongside Sevigny, Rosario Dawson (who he discovered sitting on a stoop on the Lower East Side eating a banana) and fellow skater Leo Fitzpatrick. Harmony had based his characters on people he actually knew and this all contributed to the film’s impact.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 119.