Gummo’s Whammo by Herzog: Tell me about your upbringing.

Interview / November 1999 Korine: If someone asked me what my father did, I wouldn't be able to answer. He would leave for 's directorial debut is the fall film long periods of time, and sometimes my mother most likely to disturb and disgust the most would disappear too. It's not that they weren't people. Here Korine talks to one of his newest good; they were just doing something else and I fans, fellow moviemaker and rule-breaker Werner didn't know where they were. But I liked them Herzog when I saw them, and when my father came home he'd bring money and presents, so that was If Harmony Korine's screenplay for 1995's Kids nice. I recently asked my dad what his profession announced the arrival of a shockingly precocious was, and he wouldn't tell me. There were other observer of teenage wasteland, his first film as a things I didn't know, so I asked my mother to director not only confirms his precocity but send my birth certificate to me so I could find out establishes him as both and unrepentant my real age and make sure everything was nihilist. The nonnarrative, super-squalid - legitimate. I got it a month and a half ago and it cryptically named for the absent member of said my father's occupation was fur trader, but Korine's beloved Marx Brothers - is a biliously I've never seen him wear fur or heard him talk Burroughsian snapshot of post-twister 1974 about it. Maybe he's embarrassed by it, I don't Xenia, Ohio, depicted as the kind of hellhole that know. Anyway, my parents let me do whatever I makes the Manhattan of Kids seem like wanted, and I was mostly off on my own. Disneyland. Actually filmed in and around Korine's hometown of Nashville, Tenn., this Herzog: What was the first movie you saw? fiercely anti-Hollywood "genre fuck," as Korine calls it, offers a scornful parade of surrealist Korine: I think it was Harry & Tonto [1974]. My images that posit the gifted tyro as a brave new father told me I flipped out about something that Godardian, though one who has something to happened to the cat in it. The first movies that learn about telling (or not telling) a story. really changed my life were yours, Fassbinder's, Godard's, and [Charles Laughton's] The Night Of Korine numbers among his influences the The Hunter [1955]. My father loved the movies. obsessive German filmmaker Werner Herzog, We didn't talk much when he was around, but who interviewed him in front of an audience at every day after school, when I guess most kids the recent Telluride Film Festival. The following would go home and do their homework, we'd go was adapted from their conversation. to the movies. By the time I was sixteen, I was seeing three or four films a day, including a lot of Werner Herzog: When I met you for the first art films. I saw all your films. My dad rented them time, Harmony, I was stunned because you have a for me at first, and then he took me to the theatre strong physical resemblance to me when I was to see Even Dwarfs Started Small [1968] - which is your age. I had a great problem getting a start in my favourite movie of all time. It was when I filmmaking because my puberty came late, and heard the girl screaming in the cave and saw the until I was sixteen or so, I looked like a very monkey being crucified in that film that I knew I awkward child... although I think it's the wanted to make movies. hunchbacks who make the movies. Did you have a similar experience? Herzog: It's obvious to me that you never attended film school. Harmony Korine: My mind was very fast, but I looked like a little boy until I was sixteen, too. I Korine: I hate that shit. It's eating the soul of grew up in Tennessee, but I didn't want to live cinema. Filmmaking has become like a process, there, and when I got out of high school I flew to and it's all garbage. All these rich kids who were New York City to live with my grandmother. I going to be doctors now want to be filmmakers, was taking photos in a park one day when I met but they have very little life experience and they're . We started talking about films, and I just writing really shitty wit for each other. That's wrote a screenplay [Kids] for him. I then went to perfect for when they go to Hollywood and meet to meet agents, and met , the people who finance films, 'cause those guys who became my producer. I was smaller then, and are fucked up too. That's why films are the way must have seemed childlike. He probably thought they are now and why I've largely stopped going I stepped off a school bus or something, because to see them in the last two years. at first he didn't believe it was me. Herzog: I know you've expressed some desire to relationship with that other world. Early on I said get away from writing screenplays, but you have I was going to make a specific kind of film and if always been a writer? I couldn't do that, or if I had to soften my vision, then I would just quit. There's nothing wrong Korine: I've never wanted to tell other people's with quitting if you can't do the kind of work you stories. I'd read books,and there'd be things in want to do. What's amazing is that I got to make them I could relate to, but it still wasn't my story, Gummo as a pure vision and that it wasn't so I figured the only way for me to talk about my touched - especially since I'm young and it's a new life and adventures was to write. Writing's a great aesthetic. In a way,it's a miracle that this movie thing. I even have a novel that's going to come exists in the current climate. out next April called A Crackup At The Race Riots . I want to do everything: It goes back to [Charles Herzog: What I like about Gummo are the details and Ray] Eames [architects, designers, that one might not notice at first. There's the filmmakers] and [Isamu] Noguchi [sculptor] scene where the kid in the bathtub drops his talking about a unified aesthetic. You can make chocolate bar into the dirty water and just behind movies, write books, do a ballet, and sing opera, him there's a piece of fried bacon stuck to the wall but it's all part of the same vision. with Scotch tape. This is the entertainment of the future. Herzog: I see Gummo as a true science fiction film in the way it shows a scary vision of the Korine: It's the greatest entertainment. Seriously, future: a loss of soul, a loss of spirituality. And yet all I want to see is pieces of fried bacon taped on you clearly see all that with very tender eyes. I am walls, because most films just don't do that. very interested, too, in how you show the effects of a tornado on people. Herzog: Tell me about creating a sense of dirt in the film. Those people's homes are like garbage Korine: When I look at the history of film - the dumps. early commercial narrative movies directed by D.W. Griffith, say - and then look at where films Korine: I grew up in Nashville, so I knew the are now, I see so little progression in the way they neighbourhoods. Certain houses were just the are made and presented,and I'm bored with that. worst people were living like pack rats. In one of Film can be so much more. With Gummo I wanted the houses, I found a piece of a guy's shoulder in to create a new viewing experience with images a pillowcase. As far as production design went, it coming from all directions. To free myself up to was about taking things away to make it cleaner. do that, I had to create some kind of scenario that At times the crew would refuse to film in those would allow me to just show scenes, which is all I conditions. We had to buy them those white suits care about. I can't stand plots, because I don't feel like people wear in a nuclear fallout. I got angry life has plots. There is no beginning, middle, or with them because I thought they were pussies. I end, and it upsets me when things are tied up so mean, all we're talking about is bugs and a perfectly. There had been a tornado in Xenia in disgusting rotting smell. I couldn't understand 1974, and I decided to set the film there. After the why they had no guts. I was like, "Think about tornado, people found dogs up in trees and what we have access to,"but I guess most of them playing cards that had been blown through brick didn't really give a shit. But Jean Yves [Escoffier], walls. I heard about this one guy on a paper route the cinematographer, was fearless. When the who was sucked up by the twister and dropped others were wearing their toxic outfits, he and I off, still on his bicycle, fifty miles away, and the wore Speedos and flip-flops just to piss them off. only injury he had was a scratch on his forehead. Herzog: When one of the kids in the film moves Herzog: You use the tornado in your film to a picture on a wall and all these cockroaches come shatter the narrative form. All your screenplays - crawling out, the cameraman doesn't zoom in not only Gummo - follow that same lack of from a distance; he moves in physically, because pattern. There is no story line, no development of he's interested. The first cinematographer I characters. Everybody in Hollywood would worked with said to me, "Werner, don't use a long immediately ask, "Where's the development? lens - just move in. Film knows no mercy." You Where's the good guy and the bad guy?" You are have to be bold, you have to be curious. obstinate about that. Korine: I don't know how other directors work, Korine: I guess I'm lucky, too, because I've been but I wanted to create a kind of ultra chaotic protected by my producer and my agents so far. environment where things were just happening, They understand that I don't want any kind of and then shoot them without thinking about it. The line producers told me the bond company hunting for dead cats. What about the one whose was threatening to take the movie away at one hair gets shampooed by his mom []? point because I was shooting too much film, but I said, "Leave me alone. The film we're shooting is Korine: Jacob Reynolds. I'd seen him in a small the movie." Jean Yves said to me late one night: part in The Road to Wellville [1994], and he was also "Fuck these guys! We will fire everyone. It will be in a Dunkin' Donuts commercial I liked, so we me, you, a fucking lightbulb, and the soundman." cast him. He's got an amazing face. Most of the That was so punk. I was so charged by that; I felt others I'd grown up with or gone to high school I couldn't lose. with or knew from hanging out.

Herzog: He has to be given credit, because in Herzog: Who do you want the audience for some scenes he was alone, wasn't he? Gummo to be?

Korine: Oh yeah. He got one of the most Korine: I never thought about that while I was amazing scenes on the last day of shooting. It's making it, but I feel it's definitely most important where those guys are arm wrestling in a kitchen. if young people see it, because it's anew kind of I'd written the scene, but some of the people in it film with a new kind of syntax. Younger people had just gotten out of prison that day, and I could have a different kind of sensibility, and I think feel that things were going to happen that night they'll understand it. But if someone said that I that were way beyond what I hoped for or was the voice of my generation, I couldn't agree imagined, but I knew they wouldn't happen if I with that. I'm just the voice of Harmony. was there watching them. So Jean Yves and I agreed he'd be the only person in the room with them. We rigged a boom onto his camera, and I shut all the doors and turned all the monitors down, so even I didn't know what was going on. I would just run in between takes and get them really excited. I'd tell them to throw the refrigerator out the window or kick the door. It got really violent in there. There were pregnant women in the room, too; it was scary.

Herzog: The moment I like most in that scene is the moment of silence when nobody knows what to do next. That's not something that could be directed.

Korine: When I saw that in the dailies, it amazed me, because Jean Yves really captured that awkwardness, that sad silence; it was beautiful. Most of the people in that scene were parents of kids in the film, so it worked out well.

Herzog: Can you talk about some of the kids?

Korine: When I go to the movies, there's usually nothing on the screen that compels me, and with this film I wanted to see people who were amazing looking. I was watching an episode of Sally Jesse Raphael called "My Child Died From Sniffing Paint,"and I saw this kid on it named Nick [Sutton] who's a paint - sniffing survivor. They asked him, "Where are you going to be in a few years?" and he said, "I'll probably be dead." I loved him and wanted him to star in the film, so we tracked him down. He told me he'd been on acid on the show.

Herzog: This is the older of the two boys who go