Harmony Korine: Hello?
Kill Pretty: Hey, is this Harmony?
HK: This is Harmony. How’s it goin’, I just chased this one dude who was trying to steal this statue out of my front yard. I was chasing him down this alleyway.
KP: How big was the statue?
HK: It was less than a hundred pounds but he was a massive Puerto Rican. I’d seen him scooping out my house for a couple of days. It was a statue I had gotten at a flea market of a clown with a fishing pole. I had thought he had been standing at my yard because he liked the way the flowers looked but it didn’t work out that way.
KP: Some of your films, like Trash Humpers, are extremely dark and graphic. Have you ever been embarrassed to show the film because it is so graphic?
HK: No, not at all. In fact when I show it to people I almost feel holy, like I’m doing gods work.
KP: I’ve heard filmmakers talk about how film should cause a physical and mental reaction. I think Trash Humpers and Spring Breakers are definitely films that do both. Is this sometime you agree with?
HK: Yeah, I think you try and make work that is more experiential. Something that changes you. It can move you to heaven and it can move you to great disgust but it will touch you in some way. A lifetime movie. One of those Lifetime Channel movies.
KP: You should try and get it on Lifetime. In your films I don’t see you differentiating between beautiful and ugly, it feels like everything is beautiful to you.
HK: It’s not that everything is beautiful it’s just that I don’t have these bourgeois conceits of high art and high living and low living and in the gutter. You’re just attracted to what you are and what you enjoy. There’s a pull and a push in a certain direction. I think people spend a lot of time building up a mental class system and a social structure. Which is something I never really understood or cared about. There’s beauty in horror and then, obviously there is horror in beauty. It just is what it is, it’s life abstraction.
KP: What was it like getting KIDS turned into a movie so young?
HK: It was like a dream, it was like a strange dream. I had just graduated high school and I didn’t really understand all the things that were going on but I just kinda went with it and it was terrific.
KP: What’s your interest in vaudeville humor?
HK: It’s just always made me laugh, I’ve always loved pure entertainers. Pure performers that could live off their wits. People that could do one thing, one odd very specific thing but do it better than anyone else. I always thought it was the most admirable thing a person could be. A pure entertainer, someone who could jump on a table and sing for you, dance on one leg and walk away.
KP: Are you ever gonna release Fight Harm?
HK: It’s possible. It’s one of those things I get asked a lot and I don’t know what to say. I go back and forth because I have all the footage and I go back and forth on whether to put it out. Or maybe the idea in itself is stronger than the actual footage. It’s something that I’m always thinking about.
KP: Is the problem that it’s just not finished?
HK: It was never done like it was originally conceived. I mean I wanted to make a feature film that would play in shopping malls across America that would double bill with a Tom Hanks film. I thought I was making the greatest comedy of all time. It didn’t work that way, I had my bones broken, I was thrown in jail. I still have seven or eight fights that aren’t edited, just in raw form that I could release at some point but there’s never a rush for me with that.
KP: What do you think of reality TV?
