HARMONY KORINE - Yeah, so I used it more sparingly. I wasn’t even sure when we were making it how I was going to incorporate it because it’s such a stylistic jump.ĪNNABEL MEHRAN - It’s really trippy and feels like you’re partying. The movie was shot with seven different cameras simultaneously. They were all placed on different settings: black and white, etc. HARMONY KORINE - I think there were five or six little cameras rolling simultaneously. For the first two weeks before I had really seen scenes cut together, when we were shooting, I was like in hell because I was so nervous as to whether it was actually going to work.ĪNNABEL MEHRAN - How did you make those slow-motion watercolors? I was because, at the same time, I didn’t want it to be like a music video, where there is the risk that you can destroy the image for the sake of being fast. It should hit you very hard and it should leave.ĪNNABEL MEHRAN - Were you worried at all about being able to make something that’s usually four minutes long into something that’s 90 minutes long? In the beginning, I was telling people working on the film that it should be more like a violent pop song. HARMONY KORINE - In some ways it was meant to be. I wasn’t really referencing cinema as much as I was thinking about other things like art or even YouTube clips.ĪNNABEL MEHRAN - The movie is so musical. And I set certain rules when I was writing it: I would never write scenes that were more than one page per scene or I would try to at least have four or five locations per page per scene. I’d done it in advertising and in shorter videos, but I wanted to make a film that worked like this kind of frenetic piece of pop poetry, this kind of relentless inundation where images and sounds were kind of just falling from the sky. The style was something I’d been wanting to try in long form for a while. I wanted to make a movie like this with micro-scenes, you know? A kind of looping trance cinema. It was more like I wanted to see a movie. Did you want to communicate with a different audience? It was more of an emotion rather than some type of specific commentary.ĪNNABEL MEHRAN - This film is so different from anything you’ve ever done before. So I wanted this movie to feel like you were being drilled with images and sounds. I try to move in the direction of something more inexplicable or more like a physical experience. You want the films to have some type of greater purpose, but I don’t ever start with that. I feel like the characters are a reflection of something, but I never set out to say anything specific. But the commentary and all that stuff, for me, it comes after the fact. I knew it was going to be current in the way that it looked and would feel, and that the movie would unfold almost like a pop poem or something. HARMONY KORINE - I never really think about pushing any message. I just started thinking about girls in bikinis robbing people.ĪNNABEL MEHRAN - With this film, did you consciously try to propose a commentary on youth culture today? I had been collecting spring break imagery for a while, like college kids being debauched and messed up - redneck Riviera imagery. My wife Rachel and my daughter Lefty were in New Mexico, and I just started playing around with this idea. HARMONY KORINE - Two years ago I was at home alone for Christmas. We asked Harmony how he came up with this magic cocktail of experimental art and how it might just reach that audience.ĪNNABEL MEHRAN - How did you come up with the idea for Spring Breakers. But with this film, by making what he calls a “pop movie” - and casting Disney favorites and teen stars Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson, along with the prolific James Franco, and shooting them all under the Florida sun - he clearly decided to address a wider audience. With his fourth feature film, Spring Breakers, Harmony hasn’t lowered his artistic standards. And yet he has never achieved mass-market success - even though, in 2009, Harmony won the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival’s prestigious DOX Award for his film Trash Humpers, which he wrote and directed. For the underground community of artists, his body of work composes a masterpiece. Since then, he has written, directed, and produced a wide-ranging body of books, screenplays, and films. It’s been two decades since a 19-year-old Harmony Korine wrote the critically acclaimed screenplay for Larry Clark’s film Kids. Interview and photography by ANNABEL MEHRAN
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