<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Harmony Korine doesn&amp;#039;t want to answer your stupid questions. And he doesn&amp;#039;t want to answer your thoughtful ones, either. That was made clear when he came to the Harvard Film Archive for two nights worth of question-and-answer sessions recently. Some artists use interviews to illuminate their works, other use them as a form of promotion. Not Korine, American indie cinema&amp;#039;s perpetually addled, misbehaving, middle-aged enfant terrible (Kids, Gummo, Julian Donkey-Boy, Mister Lonely, Trash Humpers, Spring Breakers). When people would ask about his history, he&amp;#039;d cite memory loss, arguing, &amp;quot;I did a lot of drugs.&amp;quot; Whenever someone prodded him about the meaning of the more abstract elements in his films, he&amp;#039;d say, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll never tell you.&amp;quot; He cited Michael Mann&amp;#039;s Miami Vice as an inspiration for Spring Breakers, a year after telling me personally that it wasn&amp;#039;t. One night he said he still does acid, the next that he hasn&amp;#039;t done drugs in years. So what does a man do, when he doesn&amp;#039;t want to respond honestly to anything? In Korine&amp;#039;s case, he does what his films do: He subverts, contradicts, mythologizes, and turns everything into a form of absurd performance art. And how does he do that? By saying things like the following: On growing up: &amp;quot;I was a skateboarder, and my parents didn&amp;#039;t care so much what I did, and I just lived out on the streets with my friends. It was before Internet and cell phones, you could just get lost for days, people didn&amp;#039;t really care. I remember one summer, I forgot to call my parents. Like, for the whole summer. I called them up three months later, and they were like, &amp;#039;Oh, we were going to call the FBI.&amp;#039; I was just living life. You&amp;#039;re seeking oblivion, you know? Now it&amp;#039;s a culture of display, a culture of performance. Then, it was about getting lost.&amp;quot; On tap dancing, which has shown up in his work often: &amp;quot;I just always liked tap dancing. I wanted to be a tap dancer. As a kid, I was obsessed with the Nicholas Brothers. I have a video, you can watch it, of me tap dancing, it&amp;#039;s called Curb Dance. I used to be very close friends with these two kids \u2014 both now in jail, on death row. Their dad invented the Choose Your Own Adventure novel [eds. note: random Choose Your Own Adventure references are something of a motif for Korine]. Made a fortune. We would steal all these parking lot curbs, and buy tap shoes, and take the laces out... do curb dancing. I guess we were delusional but I thought we were going to reinvent the tap game.&amp;quot;      On whether he was actively courting the mainstream with Spring Breakers: &amp;quot;I was sick of making movies that not many people see. I wanted to infiltrate and subvert that shit in a deep way. I wanted to make a film that, um... where the surface of it was like candy, or something. [I wanted the movie to look like it was] lit with Skittles. And then all the meaning is the residue of that. It&amp;#039;s what drips off the surface.&amp;quot; Why he&amp;#039;s a great filmmaker:&amp;quot;The great films and the great directors, they&amp;#039;re a reflection of the person. They&amp;#039;re a reflection of who you are as a human being... It&amp;#039;s not so much a technique or it&amp;#039;s not so much a way of doing things, it&amp;#039;s what you are. What you&amp;#039;re prepared to give. How you&amp;#039;re prepared to dominate the situation. What you&amp;#039;re receptive to. Someone like [John] Cassavettes is great. Not because of a technique, but because he&amp;#039;s just great, as a person. That&amp;#039;s why I&amp;#039;m just great.&amp;quot; When asked about his screenwriting process: &amp;quot;With movies, as a kid, I always wanted to get to the good parts. &amp;#039;Fuck, why&amp;#039;d they waste twenty minutes to get to that part? And then I have to waste another twenty minutes to get to that [next good] part? I just want to watch that part and that part. Maybe I can take them out and put them together.&amp;#039; I wanted to make movies that were like that. Where you can just blindfold yourself, and put your hand in the movie, and pull out a scene, and get something from that scene, without having to see what came before or after it.&amp;quot; When asked if his work is &amp;quot;quintessentially American&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;I probably am the most uniquely American director in the world. Me and Clint Eastwood. And that&amp;#039;s the truth.&amp;quot; On the difficulties of shooting Trash Humpers, his found-footage shot-on-VHS-tapes horror-comedy, with such a small crew: &amp;quot;There was a sequence where I get my dick sucked by this prostitute. I didn&amp;#039;t put it in the movie. But I had to have my wife film it, because she was the only one there.&amp;quot; On editing Trash Humpers: &amp;quot;I have a blind editor. He could only see like five percent in one eye. It was the only movie he&amp;#039;d ever done. I thought, because of that, he had this kind of golden touch... We were editing on VHS tapes, on VCRs, and he would take pencils, and tape them to the ends of his fingers. And just go like that [Harmony mimes jabbing his pencil-fingers randomly into the buttons on the front of a VCR]. We started jamming out, we called it glitching... We did that for a couple months. It was good. It was a weird experience.&amp;quot; [Eds. note: The editor credited on Trash Humpers is Leo Scott. He is not blind.] On having said that he edited one of his films while Terrence Malick worked simultaneously in the next room:&amp;quot;Oh, I was just lying about that.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a27864/harmony-korine-quotes/>