Cover Story
Photo: ericengland.net
The snapshot, smudged with soot, shows a man with a puzzled expression propped up in a hospital bed. He is clearly a patient of some kind. The object cradled in his arms explains the puzzlement: a clown-red baseball bat. Another soot-rimmed snapshot later, his position and expression have changed. He’s lunging forward, plainly pissed. The bat looks headed straight for the photographer. Turns out the man had just awakened from a coma.
“I used to break into hospitals sometimes, and we would dress up the patients,” Harmony Korine says. “We would crawl through the windows of these hospitals, and I would give them baseball bats and plastic gloves.”
He says it fondly, amusedly, in the offhand way someone might recall a Cub Scout jamboree. The concrete floor of his basement is barren, except for some big green storage tubs stashed under a bare light. The lid of one forms a makeshift tabletop heaped with snapshots, most streaked with smoke and soot. The host picks up one Ziploc bag filled with photographs, then another, then another.
There’s a wild-eyed man with a shock of silver hair, contorted into lurid scenarios of domestic mayhem with a fleshy woman whose forehead bears a crucifix tattoo. “They’re these next-door neighbors I used to have in New York that I would get to strangle each other,” Korine says. “They were this weird fucking couple I found out was into sadomasochism.” There’s a teenage Korine in minstrel getup with a broomstick jutting out of his fly. There’s Macaulay Culkin, bathed in babes and sickly light for a Sonic Youth video Korine directed. There’s a gaunt stranger whose expression is so dramatic that a guest assumes he must be an actor. Korine shakes his head: “That was back when I’d break into mental wards.”
From another photo, a slim, blurry wraith peers out from a backdrop of greenery, while the host’s 22-year-old self looks on. “There’s Chloe,” he says—actress Chloe Sevigny, his former girlfriend, who starred in his Nashville-shot 1997 feature Gummo and scoured local thrift stores for its grungy costumes. There are zines, notebooks full of random thoughts, even a heap of script notecards from a project called What Makes Pistachio Nuts?, involving a pig named Trotsky. All reek of ash and cinders—the result of a house fire (the first of two) six years ago, during a period he casually describes as “back when I lost my mind.”
“There’s something kind of strange about having all your memories drenched in soot,” Korine says.
Even stranger, perhaps, is the context that now surrounds them. Leave the dark basement, and its jumble of scorched, chronologically scattered memories, and you’re suddenly in the picture of domestic bliss: an airy, immaculate old house in one of Nashville’s most picturesque neighborhoods. A bowl of fruit salad and a plate of cookies await guests; a copy of Vanity Fair rests on a coffee table. In another room, his wife Rachel, a willowy, brunette Southern belle who serves as sounding board for his flights of fancy, tends to their new puppy Lupe, a “pocket poo” genetically disposed toward cuteness.
Their home is just down the street from his younger brother Avi’s
house, where the two siblings wrote Korine’s first film in eight years:
a comedy-drama called Mister Lonely that opens next week in
Nashville. A selection last year at both Cannes and Toronto, it’s a
winsome, disarmingly gentle fable about a lonesome Michael Jackson
impersonator (Diego Luna) who joins a commune of similar misfits, told
alongside the parallel story of a South American priest (legendary
German director Werner Herzog) and an order of flying nuns. It opens in
Nashville May 16 at the Belcourt, accompanied by a retrospective of
Korine’s movies and a four-film festival featuring some of his favorite
films and filmmakers. (See next week’s Scene for a schedule, or visit
belcourt.org.)
The Belcourt event marks an official homecoming
of sorts for Korine, who grew up in a house just a few blocks from
where he lives today. His production company O’Salvation, founded with
the French fashion designer Agnes B., just relocated its office from
Paris to Nashville, and he says he plans to make “three or four” films
here, including one he’s already written. He’s also producing a short
film by Nashville filmmaker Brent Stewart called “The Dirty Ones,”
starring Rachel and Nashville School of the Arts student Raven Dunn as
Mennonite sisters confronting the modern world. In March, he shot a
high-budget ad campaign here for Budweiser’s U.K. division, somehow
getting paid to deluge the European airwaves with Springwater denizens
such as Dave Cloud, William Tyler and Jon “Mr. Natural” Sharp. If
you’re wondering what you get when you hire the director of Gummo to make a beer commercial, one shot has musician Sharp playing an amplified plant.
“It’s
strange,” says Korine, now 35, bearded and boyish, with no sign of the
drug-addled mania that almost silenced him for good in the bleak days
after 9/11. “On the one hand, it’s weird being back, I guess, just
because I’m back—just because of all the things I’d done or
places I lived between when I left and here. But on the other hand, it
seems like the most natural thing in the world for me, to be here.”
There
are no personal posters, awards or grip-and-grin photos to be seen. “I
have director friends, and you walk into their house and it’s like a
shrine to them, their posters, their awards—man, what the fuck!” Korine
says, helping his guests to fruit salad. “Geez, get rid of that stuff!”
Only the exquisitely framed and hung artwork—a Japanese fetish study in
the living room, a Boris Mikhailov image of a smudged, spectral woman
staring vacantly from a swingset, a set of stark early works by punk
artist Raymond Pettibon—would indicate that the person who lives here
is one of the most divisive, inspiring, infuriating, hated and revered
figures in recent American movies.
Smoke has followed Harmony
Korine since the early 1990s, when he moved to New York from Nashville.
At age 19, just two years out of Hillsboro High School and encouraged
by outlaw photographer Larry Clark, he wrote the script for Clark’s
1995 directorial debut Kids. His scandalous portrait of
predatory teen sexuality caused an international uproar, provoked a war
between distributor Miramax and its outraged corporate parent
Disney—and made a talk-show guest and tabloid fixture of its author.
Still in his early 20s, Korine then wrote and directed two polarizing features—Gummo and its 1999 follow-up Julien Donkey-Boy—that
were arguably the most boldly experimental American films of the
decade. They were abrasive, plotless collages that dwelled in a zone of
viewer discomfort and dislocation, possessed of a tone somewhere
between the loony-bin talent night of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Titicut Follies
and the joke books Korine loved as a kid growing up near Belmont—the
son of a documentarian, Sol Korine, who followed moonshiners and
carnies throughout the South.
Korine’s first film followed the
residents of a tornado-stricken town (including some East Nashville
locations that would soon be ravaged by tornadoes) on ritualistic
rounds of cat drowning, eruptive fights and diversions of the flesh.
His second, made along the guidelines of the Dogme 95 cinematic “vow of
chastity,” used jarring edits and distorted digital camerawork to evoke
the mental turmoil of a schizophrenic dreamer. Together, they mimicked
the form of a dead medium—vaudeville, with its bring-on-the-next-act
sketch structure—while heralding the coming of YouTube and its emphasis
on bursts of random weirdness over long-form storytelling.
Reaction to the films, especially Gummo, was immediate and furious. Janet Maslin, the New York Times critic who called Kids “a wake-up call to the world,” declared Gummo the year’s worst movie. Agreeing for once with Maslin, the Chicago Reader’s influential critic Jonathan Rosenbaum called it “the worst movie I saw anywhere in 1997”—only to be countered by the Reader’s
other critic, Lisa Alspector, who hailed it as a four-star masterpiece.
“If only the director didn’t see the rest of humanity as found art, and
himself as its appraisor,” harrumphed one Jim Ridley in the Nashville Scene.
But filmmakers such as Werner Herzog (who also appears in Julien Donkey-Boy), Gus Van Sant (who cast Korine in a small role in Good Will Hunting)
and Bernardo Bertolucci championed the film, while the hostile reviews
only shored up Korine’s punk cred. Hip-hop video auteur Hype Williams
tossed a Gummo tribute into his feature Belly; a decade
later, renegade porn director Eon McKai claimed Korine as an influence.
“Korine, who at 25 is one of the most untamed new directors, belongs on
the list with Godard, Cassavetes, Herzog, Warhol, Tarkovsky, Brakhage
and others who smash conventional movies and reassemble the pieces,”
Roger Ebert wrote of Julien Donkey-Boy.
Had Korine been
European, or at least obscure, the acclaim might have been even more
widespread. (On the other hand, had he been less notorious, the movies
might have been smothered in their infancy.) But his work was
overshadowed by his gift for off-screen troublemaking: interviews full
of outrageous yarn-spinning and provocations, including a classic
appearance with a flummoxed David Letterman; nightly hell-raising with
a crew dubbed the “Pussy Posse,” peopled by luminaries such as Leonardo
DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and his friend and collaborator, magician
David Blaine. Tell Korine that profiles of him from this period read
like Andy Kaufman-style performance pranks, and he doesn’t disagree.
“I
wanted to blow things up,” Korine says. “I literally wanted to burn it
down, at that time of my life. Maybe I was beginning to get delusional
with my head, but I really thought it was time to destroy the whole
fucking thing. At least for myself, and then start again.”
He launched a project called Fight Harm
in which he would provoke fights with strangers, then let his friend
Blaine film as they beat the crap out of him. A bouncer broke his
ankle; an Arab man busted a mandolin over his head. In the basement,
snapshots show Korine soaking in an ice bucket, nursing
grapefruit-sized bruises with a fistful of Quaaludes. That was not the
end of his self-destructive ways. At his lowest ebb, Korine recalls, he
was wrapping himself in tinfoil, with rubber bands around his joints to
permit movement and a shower cap atop his head to hold in his thoughts.
After a grim stay in Paris, Korine says he returned to
Nashville “four or five years ago” to clear his head. He met Rachel,
introduced by a mutual friend, and began the process of writing and
filming Mister Lonely, which at one point could have starred
Gene Wilder as a Jewish Pope. Instead, it filmed in the Scottish
Highlands with a cast that includes Samantha Morton (as Marilyn
Monroe), Denis Lavant (as a Hitleresque Charlie Chaplin), Korine’s wife
Rachel as Little Red Riding Hood, and the reunion of James Fox and
Anita Pallenberg from Nicolas Roeg’s Performance.
Korine is again making headlines, but this time—along with the tag enfant terrible,
which follows him with comic predictability (Google: 763 hits and
counting)—they feature words like “redemption.” At home, though, he
seems less redeemed than refreshed. He may prove yet to be that rare
figure: a peaceable homeowner who also admires, collects, promotes—and
above all makes—dangerous art.
“It’s the mistakes and
awkwardness of real life that I’ve always been attracted to,” Korine
says. “But I’m not waiting for it to happen. I like to instigate it.
It’s like a real world that’s slightly tweaked—a subtle science
fiction. It’s like when you put chemicals in a jar and shake it up, and
then you document the explosion.”
Leaving the downstairs, he
claps his blackened hands together and brushes them on his pants. On
the way to the front door, he pauses at the tidy kitchen sink and
washes his hands. If Harmony Korine can’t entirely escape his past, at
least he’s managing to keep it confined.
In Harm's Way Korine shows off injuries incurred during the Fight Harm project.
So why did you come back to Nashville?
Because,
I swear, Nashville has this weird kind of hold on me. My heartbeat goes
down when I get off the airplane. It’s strange: I feel comfortable
here, and in some ways the city is a real part of me and who I am. And
a lot of the characters and the things I’m attracted to all came from
growing up in Nashville—a Nashville that, when I was a kid, was a lot
stranger than it is now.
Does that make it harder to create?
No.
What it is, I just get in my car and drive around, down Gallatin or
somewhere, and I’ll see something. Like the other day, I was driving
down the street, and I saw some woman with curlers in her hair, and she
had boxing gloves on both hands, and she was just punching herself in
the side of the face. And I thought to myself, that’s why I love this
city.
Maybe that happens in other cities. But I understand the
color, I understand the lights, I understand the feel of this town.
It’s just…nice. I mean, there are obviously things about it that
have changed a lot since I grew up: it’s become safer, and maybe
there’s more wealth, and things look prettier. But it’s home.
There’s an underside the city can’t pave over.
Of
course. I drive down West End, and I see that McDonald’s, I remember
what that McDonald’s was like 15 years ago when I used to go in there
with James [Clauer, a local filmmaker and Korine’s friend since
childhood]. There’d be a guy we used to call The Thinker, and all he
would have is six or seven packs of cigarettes stacked on the table,
six or seven damn packs, and he’d just think. James and I used to go in and watch him think. You’d go up to him and say, “What’s goin’ on,” and he’d go, “I’m thinking.”
He would wear these tweed coats and these turtlenecks. I remember going
there once alone and seeing him, and he just had bloodstains all over
his T-shirt, and he was smoking two unfiltered Chesterfields
simultaneously. And I was like, “Man, you look beat up, what’s goin’
on?” And he was like, “It was a tough day of thinking.”
When did you leave Nashville?
I
left as soon as I graduated. Pretty much within a week. I went to New
York. I’d gotten a kind of partial scholarship to NYU, and what
happened was I’d just started making short films in high school. I had
a teacher at Hillsboro and I was taking a creative writing class, and
she liked the way I wrote. She asked if I would ever want to turn it
into a short film, ‘cause she knew I liked movies. I said of course,
and she said she thought she could get me a grant for $1,000 or
something. And she did. My dad, who had made documentaries, showed me
how to work a Bolex and how to edit, and how to cut a film. So I went
and shot the movie. I might even have it here. James is in it; I shot
it in New York. I sound kind of like W.C. Fields in it, talking over
this jazzy soundtrack.
Did you start writing Mister Lonely here?
Yeah,
I started writing it up the street. I wrote it with my little brother.
He lives right down the street. I’d never written with anyone before,
and at that point it had been a long time since I’d written anything.
During those years where I was kind of…away from it, I pretty much
didn’t have anything to do with movies or anything creative. I would
basically just sit in a basement and stare at the walls or just smack
myself in the head; there was nothing really past that for me.
Sometimes I would imagine, like, fake conversations with people, or I’d
wanna mow someone’s yard or something like that.
When I started
to feel OK again, and that it was something I could do, just the
physical act of writing [was something] I was unsure of. And I knew he
was a writer, and I had liked his writing, especially the less
pornographic material. (chuckles) I figured because he was my brother,
and we liked similar types of movies, and had similar interests even
though we’re very different, I thought it could be interesting. And
because this movie has a more…traditional narrative, which is something
I always fight. It’s very difficult for me.
Why Does Herr K. Run Amok? A sample of Harmony Korine’s low-key directing style, from the set of Gummo. On the receiving end: the film’s cinematographer, the late Jean-Yves Escoffier.
Photo: Bruce Birmelin
This film definitely seems more accessible.
I don’t even
know if it is, actually. I guess narratively, it is. But it was more
that there were these characters I was interested in, these things,
these images that I was kind of curious about. I’d always been
attracted to marginalized characters that live outside of social
norms—people that create their own…language. Dreamers. Tramps.
So I just started dreaming about some of these characters, and these
images, and I just felt that the story was interesting enough and
unique enough and the characters were beautiful enough that it didn’t
need to be told in a way that was deconstructed. I just wanted to make
the story simple.
I think the films reflect the mental state at
the time you’re making them. Making the other films, I had a very
strong idea of cinema, a specific kind of cinema, and the way I wanted
to watch movies, that was very much about collage—a chaos narrative, a
kind of noise narrative. I didn’t care about making sense. I wanted to
make perfect nonsense. I wanted images coming from all directions,
falling out of the sky, sound. Gummo was like that, and to an extent Julien.
But with this film, it wasn’t that I’m not interested in making movies
the way I had before; it was that these particular characters in some
ways were quieter. I didn’t feel like I needed to break anything down;
I just wanted to paint pictures, kind of.
Was that opening shot of the Michael Jackson impersonator on the clown bike the first image that came to you?
The
very first image a decade ago, I just started imagining nuns jumping
out of airplanes. And I just wanted to see nuns in the sky. It was
something I used to draw pictures of, and I couldn’t exactly explain
it. I don’t try to question things too much, where they come from or
what they mean. I just let them go, and if they stay with you there’s
something to it.
Were the nun story and the Michael Jackson story ever separate movies?
In
the beginning, when I was first working with Avi, we were thinking of
it as two different movies, or as something with the same story but the
characters somehow inhabiting both worlds. But at a certain point I
knew we were going to do away with one. I knew it was going to be
controversial in that the stories never necessarily come together in a
cemented way. But I felt that both narratives were speaking to the same
idesa: that there was an emotional connection, that there was a
thematic connection—that in some ways the two stories danced with each other.
But
I felt pretty sure that a certain kind of person would just think that
it was gibberish—and I don’t dispute that either. I don’t even really
care, you know what I’m saying? It felt right. It felt right that they
were both part of the same story: they’re both stories about people who
live outside of the system, who create their own world—you could even
call it transcendence, wanting to be other than who you are. And mostly
this idea that if you believe strongly enough, magic is possible. You
can push the limits of who you are.
And yet all the characters seem doomed by that quality—by the talent that sets them apart.
I
feel like it’s always interesting to see people who construct their own
reality and kind of build a fortress around it, and then watch as
someone breaks it down and kicks their ass (laughs). It’s almost like
kids who are home-schooled—life is great when you’re in your living
room with your parents, but there’s some guy waiting down the street
with a baseball bat to get to you.
Tell us about Richard Strange, the guy who plays the foul-mouthed Abraham Lincoln.
Even
before I cast him, I had heard stories about this guy named Richard who
had been to Vietnam and he was obsessed with Jane Fonda. So I went to
his house, and he had literally bought something like 10,000 Jane Fonda
dolls and melted the faces off them. And he had spelled out “Death to
Hanoi Jane” in the residue of these melted dolls. I have takes of him
where he goes off and does monologues about her. He’s in a band called
Doctors of Madness, which I hadn’t heard of until I met him.
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Photo: Rachel Korine
How do you get actors to work that far outside their comfort zones?
When
I’m directing films, I mostly try to create an environment on set that
mimics what’s in my mind, as to the tone and feel of things. I try to
create a place where you feel that anything’s possible. Everyone’s in
character all the time to a degree, everyone’s in costume all the time.
You want to create an environment where these characters really exist,
and then it’s about me finding it. A lot of times, I’ll give six or
seven different scripts out with alternate endings, with different
character lines, with different pieces of dialogue. A lot of times, the
actors think they’re working on different films.
How much
of the movie is improvised? There’s that great scene with Werner Herzog
as the priest, where he gets this man to confess that he cheated on his
wife. Was any part of that real?
That scene was really
special. I was setting up for another scene in Panama, where my parents
live, and there’s an airport in the jungle. And out of the corner of my
eye I saw Herzog talking to this guy who was holding these plastic
roses, and he was crying. And I walked up to Werner and said, “What’s
going on?” And he said, “Please, put the camera on me quick, something
special is about to happen.” And what you saw, in reality, is very
close to the truth.
Here’s this guy who’s like the village
idiot. The first time I went and visited my parents a couple of years
earlier, I had seen him, and he tried to attack Rachel. He was
pretending to be a passport agent, right, but he had no shoes on, and
he was saying, “Where’s your passport, bitch!” and all this stuff. I
just thought he was a kook and never really paid that much attention.
What we learned was that about four years prior, his wife had left him
and left with another man. And so what he does every day, at the same
time each day, he waits at the airport holding these roses for his wife
to step off the airplane.
And Werner had kind of figured out
his story. Werner somehow knew that [the reason his wife left] was
“fornication.” He denied it when it was one, he denied it when it was
two—but when Werner said “five women,” the guy broke. He said, “You
read me! How did you read me?” And Werner said, “I read your heart.”
They actually became kind of like friends. And what was interesting
was, two or three months ago, I went to visit my parents, and he was
still there waiting. I stepped off the airplane and went up—I didn’t
think he would remember me, he was drunk—and I said, “Hey, how’s it
goin’?” And he looked at me and he goes, “WHERE’S THE PRIEST?” (rocks
with laughter) I’m sure he’s standing there right now.
How about the scene where Michael Jackson is performing at the old folks’ home?
What
happened was, I had read this article about the oldest woman in France.
And they asked her what her key to life was, and she said that every
day for 60 years she had done a bump of cocaine and drank a shot glass
of sherry. (laughs) And I was like, My God, this woman is incredible.
So I asked the producers to try to track her down, and maybe I could do
a scene with her and Michael Jackson doing a bump.
And we went
there, found her, found the place, but she refused to be in the film.
But I liked the location. Originally it was going to take place at a
car show, with everybody dancing next to Lamborghinis and women with
silicone titties. But I was like, this is better. To get them in the
mood, I’d put Three 6 Mafia on the amps. There was something really
great about being in Paris in an old folks’ home listening to Three 6
Mafia with Michael Jackson dancing.
The Revenge of Abe Lincoln The 16th president (played by Richard Strange) and Harmony Korine talk secession on the set of Mister Lonely.
Photo: Rachel Korine
What’s the deal with you and bathtub scenes? All your movies have bathtub scenes.
It’s
funny, someone else asked me that the other day! Actually, it was a
Q&A with Werner, and the moderator said the same thing: he’d gone
through all my films, and there’s always bathtub scenes. That’s just
one of those things that happens. I guess I just like the way people
look in bathtubs. I don’t take baths myself. I mean, I do take showers (laughs).
Are
you a fan of vaudeville and burlesque? The whole talent show by the
impersonators reminded us of the strip show in John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
It’s
funny that you mentioned that. Yeah, the photography’s similar, with
the lights blowing up. Vaudeville I always liked. It’s like my
attention span. To tell the truth, it’s no secret I have an aversion to
telling plots. I just hate things that are plotted. I feel like as soon
as I start to even write something that’s close to what’s considered a
traditional plot with a beginning middle and end, I feel like a
phony—like it’s just a device. I’ve never felt like life has plots. I
always felt like things just existed, and life is more of an
abstraction.
What I remember from movies—and real
life—is characters. Moments. Feelings. And scenes. In some ways, when I
first started making movies, I only wanted to have the good stuff. I
only wanted to go with the best moments. I wanted to make a film that
consisted entirely of moments. I thought you could compare it to
looking at a book of your parents’ photos, where you have a picture of
you riding a camel right next to the first time your mother bathed you
in a sink, next to your dad with a new car, next to your puppy dog.
Each photo on its own is what it is, but the book itself is the
narrative of a family. Without all the boring middle parts.
Are your movies deliberately mind-altering?
The
things that attract me are the things I can’t talk away—that I can’t
necessarily explain. I don’t know why they exist; they just feel
right. Maybe it’s emotionally confusing, maybe it’s funny, sad.
Bizarre–but it affects you on more of an intuitive level. I never
wanted to make movies you could just talk away. And a lot of times
people don’t want to know from that. A certain kind of viewer wants
nothing to do with that kind of thing: sometimes it requires a little
work, or a little faith, you know what I’m saying? That’s not what they
want from movies. And I understand that.
But I was never
interested in making films that didn’t have…a margin of the undefined.
I always wanted to write a novel with pages missing in all the right
places. I hate when directors complete the circle. They write it, they
direct it, they tell you what their intent was, it’s like the Bible and
this is what they meant—I don’t give a fuck! You watch my film and you
get nothing from it, that’s fine: I’m not even saying there’s anything there. I do it because these are images I want to see, and no one else is giving them.
Does the critical hostility to your films bother you?
You
want people to like your film, always. It would be a lie to say you
don’t want people to like your film. I understand why people don’t like
them. In the beginning, I cared a lot more—not about just critics, but
overall. I was still really young, and I was maybe more concerned with
the way you fit in and the reaction to things. I was trying to rile
people. It was fun for me to do that. But at a certain point, I
realized that the most healthiest thing for me to do is put the work
out there, and move on. As you see, I don’t have anything that reminds
me of myself. I don’t own posters; I don’t own DVDs; I don’t own copies
of my books…
Lonely No More Harmony and Rachel Korine with Lupe
Photo: ericengland.net
In Toronto last year, after the Mister Lonely
press screening, there were four different conversations that started,
“You know, I hate Harmony Korine, but this was pretty good.” Are people
still pissed at you because of things that happened in the ’90s?
(laughs) It depends on who you’re talking to.
It’s pretty funny how often you’re referred to as an enfant terrible. It’s like Obama and “articulate.”
Yeah,
that seems to really follow me around. There’s nothing wrong with that.
I was just doing what I was doing, making it up as I go along, and I
was enjoying it. I still feel like I need to…have fun with this.
Do you ever include something in your films just to bait critics?
See,
I don’t ever make movies thinking about critics. That would be a really
weird thing to do. There were definitely things that were, like, it’s
nice to get a reaction. But I never did anything just for that. I mean,
I have in my life, but not with the movies. It just goes back
to shit I wanted to see. It goes back to vaudeville. The people I
always loved were showmen, show people. When I was little, my dad was
making documentaries, and one of the people he made a film about was a
guy named Hamper McBee. When they were making that, we would go around
to all these carnivals and circuses in Florida, and I spent summers
with them when they were following him. And there was an energy to
those people, and a strangeness I loved so much. And there was a
bizarre chaos to Hamper and some of those carnies there. In some ways,
I just always wanted to get back to that.
How did they treat you?
It
was great! I used to sell goldfish with them—you know, ping-pong balls
in the goldfish tanks? I would say, I’m with the show, and they’d let
me get on the rides for free. And once in a while Hamper would slip me
a little moonshine…it was good.
But it was the same thing with
fighting or tap-dancing for the videos, I always wanted to perform. I
always thought that was noble, to bleed for the audience.
Will Fight Harm ever see the light of day?
Yeah, we’ll see (laughs). [Rachel] has a thing with them.
Can we see them?
No.
(laughs) I should try to find some photos. I have photos downstairs of
me with all the injuries—after I got beaten up by a bouncer, and this
Arab guy smashed me over the head with a mandolin. After that, my
friend Sidney took these photos, and I’m just lying there with a bucket
of ice, and my rib cage is all purple, and my ankle is swollen up, and
I think I have a handful of Quaaludes. It was ridiculous—that was the
only thing that could take away the pain.
I also want to do
things that are not just movies. I just like making things, and part of
the frustration with filmmaking, or maybe I should say feature
filmmaking, and is that it’s long and takes a lot of money, and it
lacks a kind of spontaneity. Sometimes I just see a woman punching
herself in the face with some boxing gloves, and it’s like that’s just
enough [for a film]. So I just want to be able to be here and film
stuff and make stuff, books of photos—like I want to just walk around
and make a book of just some of the alleyways around here. It doesn’t
have to be so precious, like every feature’s got to be bigger than the
last one and make more money.
Have online venues opened any possibilities for you?
It
doesn’t scare me at all, this idea that cinema’s changing, or the way
people watch film is going to be different, and they’re going to watch
it on their telephone. In some ways, Gummo was very YouTube,
because it was about these kinds of moments. Part of my intent in
making that film was that you could blindfold yourself and stick your
hand into the film and pull out a scene, and any given scene would give
you something on its own, without your having to watch what came before
it or after it. I guess it’s very much part of that same [YouTube]
idea—just like vaudeville. You don’t have to like the whole show, but
there’s something in there….
Do you ever re-watch your movies?
I
don’t have an aversion to it. But I figure there are so many movies I
haven’t watched, why the fuck am I going to watch my own? There’s a
book by Paul Bowles called Look and Move On. For me, that’s what it’s about.