Compassion Comes Through in His Words and Images

In the years since Harmony Korine, then 18, wrote the script for Larry Clark’s controversial 1995 “Kids,” he has directed two films himself, “Gummo” (1997) and “julien donkey-boy,” which opened Friday at the Sunset 5. In that time he’s been the subject of considerable ink, both as a chronicler of life on the brutal edges of American society and as a put-on artist with the press.

A slight, dark-haired, bearded young man of 25, Korine, in town for “julien’s” opening, proved easy to talk with and happy to discuss his films seriously. He certainly has a sense of humor, and you can well imagine he would have fun selling a bill of goods to anyone he felt deserved it.

For “Kids,” Korine, a skateboard whiz Clark met in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square, came up with a group portrait of aimless urban youth in which a boy, barely into his teens, is bent on seducing as many girls as he can--never mind that he’s HIV-positive and not about to disclose his status to any of his unprotected partners. As Korine is quick to point out, it is very much Clark’s film, made by a man in his 50s who is famous--or infamous--for his striking photographs of teenagers, sometimes engaged in sexual activity and drug use.

With “Gummo,” Korine created a roughly semirural equivalent of “Kids,” which he filmed in a community outside Nashville where he grew up. In “Gummo” verdant scenery conflicts with ramshackle houses in which adults as well as young people live with little hope. This group portrait is strung together with a slender tale of two boys who kill cats to pay for glue to sniff and for sex with a girl with Down syndrome.

What is striking about “Gummo” and now “julien,” about a young schizophrenic and his exceedingly dysfunctional family, is the intensity of Korine’s compassion for individuals who have so little going for them and so much going against them, yet at times are capable of experiencing an exhilarating freedom of spirit.

“Gummo” so impressed Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg that they invited “julien” to become the first Dogma ’95 American film. (Guidelines of this creative “manifesto” call for a stripped-down, minimalist approach to filmmaking.) Korine agreed to the Dogma rules and landed the cinematographer of Vinterberg’s “The Celebration,” Anthony Dod Mantle, and also that film’s editor, Valdis Oskarsdottir. All three features Korine has worked on have been produced by Independent Pictures’ Cary Woods and all have featured lovely and vivacious Chloe Sevigny. (Korine refers to her as “my partner,” and she has accompanied him to California. She co-stars in the upcoming “Boys Don’t Cry,” and yes, she is a descendant of 17th century French writer the Marquise de Sevigne.)

“I shot 100 hours for ‘julien’ and I never saw any of it until I was done and neither did the editor,” said Korine, sitting in the living room of a West Hollywood hotel suite. So intent was Korine in maintaining spontaneity that Oskarsdottir was not permitted to see any footage in advance either.

“I wanted to make a film about my Uncle Eddie, a schizophrenic who’s now about 47 and has been at a mental institution since he was 35. I had left Nashville and had gone to live with my grandmother in Queens--I even took Eddie’s room. I wanted to bring Eddie home and make a movie about him and my grandmother, but it was too much for her. That’s why she had to put him in Creedmoor in the first place: She couldn’t handle him anymore.

“Eddie was the first person I had ever met who was severely mentally ill,” Korine said. “Apparently, he was a regular kid until he was 20-21, and then he started hearing voices in his head. Multiple voices, all of them threatening, making him paranoid. It’s like having a radio stuck in your ear that’s on all the time. I hate most movies about mental illness--they’re romantic and sappy.”

Characters Inspired by Korine’s Family, Friends

When Korine found it impossible to film his uncle, he came up with the idea of creating a character inspired by him--Julien, who’s about 20 and is able to hold down a job working with the blind. “I was thinking about how to tell his story and came up with this family unit and wanted to discover how each person reacted to him.”

The film’s key setting is the actual home of Korine’s grandmother, Joyce, who appears in the film as Julien’s grandmother, a woman who is always there yet says virtually nothing and lives in her own world. Julien’s father (Werner Herzog), a mean-spirited, tyrannical widower, treats his son (“Trainspotting’s” Ewen Bremner) with disdain and outright cruelty. He’s a source of embarrassment for his younger brother, Chris (Evan Neumann), a high school athlete, who, as his father’s only hope, is the main target of his abusive discipline.

Luckily, Julien’s sister, Pearl (Sevigny), is loving, perhaps overly so. Korine says what especially intrigued him was discovering in Julien that fine line between normality and madness--how individuals can seem normal one day and crazy the next, and what it takes to push them over the line. The film is not autobiographical; its characters are amalgamations of people Korine has known.

“I want to show what people are like rather than to judge them. Sometimes when people do terrible things they are not always coming out of a bad place,” he said. Once Korine thought through his story and cast his picture, and once his actors got into character, he was ready to turn them loose to improvise their dialogue. Korine sees his method as a form of what he likes to call “Mistakenist Art.”

“It’s like pouring chemicals in a bottle and shaking them up until they explode. What I’m doing is setting up and then documenting the explosion. I like movies you can live in, like John Cassavetes’ ‘Husbands.’ I want to make everything look and feel as organic as possible. I don’t believe in ultimate truth in movies. There’s always a manipulation of some sort, a point of view involved. It’s more important to try for a poetic truth. What you don’t say may be even more important than what you do say. . . .

We shot the whole movie in 30 days, working 17 hours a day. . . . Making a movie is always a process of discovery. I’m still trying to figure out where it comes from. If I could say in words what I wanted to say then I wouldn’t need to say it in images.”

Born in Bolinas, Calif., where he lived until age 3, Korine tends to be reticent about his parents, who live near Nashville, saying “They were Marxists.” He says his father didn’t talk much, but that they shared a passion for movies. Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill Jr.” struck Korine as so poetic it made him want to be a filmmaker. He saw as many classic films as he could, and Germany’s Herzog became a special hero. Like Herzog, who in turn became an ardent supporter of “Gummo,” Korine is drawn to explore the extremes of human experience.

‘Fight’ Just Didn’t Work

One idea that didn’t pan out for Korine is a project he called “Fight,” intended to be “a cross between Buster Keaton and a snuff film.” He thought it would make a good comedy for him, as a small guy, to get into actual brawls with bigger men and have someone follow him around to film them until he got enough footage for a 90-minute feature. He soon discovered that not only did six such encounters yield only 15 minutes of film, they also sent him to the hospital with broken bones. “There’s no way I could have continued making that film to get 40-50 more minutes. My mother said, ‘What’s happening? You can’t separate your life from what you are creating!’ She wanted to send me to a psychiatrist.”

Korine, who lives in an apartment in New York City, now wants to recharge his batteries at his newly purchased second home in Connecticut, where he plans to write. Already in the works for Korine is “Jokes,” an omnibus film he’s written. He will direct one segment, and next month Gus Van Sant will start filming another. Perhaps Von Trier or French director Claire Denis will direct another.

“All three stories are based on Milton Berle jokes, and we want him to introduce each segment,” Korine says.

While he was grateful for the discipline of Dogma ’95 while making “julien donkey-boy,” Korine says he’s not about to stay within its restraints. “I’d like to do something extravagant, something opulent, then maybe after a couple of years I’d repent and go back.”