Harmony Korine is hard to pin down: Stylistically, ideologically, and even rhetorically. While leading a Q&A with him before a mostly teenage and 20-something crowd at the Ringling College of Art and Design at the Sarasota Film Festival on April 12, that quickly became apparent.
Like he was once again appearing on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” as he did frequently in the 1990s, Korine gave some amusing answers — maybe non-answers.
What inspired his latest film, “Baby Invasion“? “I’d seen this Phil Collins video, and I just remember watching it, and I had been drinking Mountain Dew and eating Skittles, and I was playing a lot of Tetris, and the movie just came to me.”
What made him fall in love with Florida, where he’s made his recent movies and has headquartered his company Edglrd? “Strip malls. I was investing in this company that just builds strip malls, and this state has the best ones, plus the best massage parlors and palm trees.”
But get him talking about the state of cinema, and he turns thoughtful, if still playful. When he called Ron Howard’s “Cocoon” — filmed in Florida — “one of the greatest movies ever,” this writer pressed him on whether he sees much difference between that movie, fairly conventional by any standard, and his own work, often thought to be taste-shattering, boundary-pushing provocations.
“I’ve never seen a Stan Brakhage movie ever,” Korine said. “I never want to watch a movie where someone tapes a moth to a piece of film. I don’t really know anything about it. I just like what I like. I was really trying to make blockbusters. Mostly just the biggest films imaginable, but it doesn’t work out.”
Stop and look at some of his recent movies, and you can see a bit of a blockbuster ethos. “Spring Breakers” was certainly the definition of an indie blockbuster, all but putting A24 on the map when it hit theaters in 2013. His follow-up, “The Beach Bum,” shares some DNA with two other movies Korine name-drops in our interview as personal favorites: “Porky’s” and “Caddyshack.” Even his latest, “Baby Invasion,” draws heavily from videogame aesthetics — and the biggest videogame hits dwarf the grosses for Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters by a mile.
Maybe Korine is secretly a popular — or populist — filmmaker in disguise. He certainly has thoughts about the existential crisis hitting Hollywood: why it simply is that so few movies seem to break through and dominate the zeitgeist the way they once did.
“I think it’s just because they suck,” Korine said. “Yeah, most of them just are not good. And movies were the dominant art form for so long, and for better and for worse, I don’t think they’re the dominant art form anymore.”
Why?
“I think life happened,” Korine said. “Radio was the dominant form, then television and movies. I think you have a period of time where things are the dominant, perfect art, and then something comes along. And it’s not just technology, but it’s people, syntax, the way that they view things, the way that they feel about the world, their internal rhythms and the cadences and the vernacular, the imagery of sight and sound, and it changes. It evolves or devolves. I don’t think movies are going away. I just don’t think that they’re the dominant form anymore.”
Just as language itself evolves, so does cinematic grammar. Is the vernacular that Hollywood uses out of step with a cinematic grammar kids relate to? Watching the effect that Korine has on this crowd of college-age youths — the demo that everyone from politics to Hollywood is trying to reach — is truly something. It’s a niche crowd, but one he owns. Two kids present him with a skeletal effigy they’ve designed and hope he “casts” in a movie. (“It even has a huge weiner,” Korine says of the mannequin.) Another attendee has dressed like Matthew McConaughey in “The Beach Bum.” One barely drinking age guy says, “I don’t usually fuck with movies, but you’re my fucking hero.”
The past 15 years or more of Hollywood have been defined by 40- or 50-something white guys trying to impose their favorite things from when they were kids (Marvel, DC, “Star Wars,” Transformers) onto the kids of today, excavating 40-year-old IPs in the process. Korine is meeting today’s kids where they are: “Baby Invasion” draws from videogame aesthetics just the way “A Minecraft Movie” has, a smash hit that’s almost shaken Hollywood to its foundations with an “oh, this is what kids are really into” kind of revelation.
Movies are going to keep evolving, and Korine plans to keep up with them. What comes next?
“What comes after conventional movies is, for me, something that is closer to an experience or a trance or something that’s beyond a simple articulation,” Korine said. “But it’s also me just having fun, enjoying the medium, playing with things. There’s people who get really upset. You get people that get really angry, and they’re always trying to tell you, ‘You shouldn’t be making this. You should be making what you made 10 years ago,’ and then they hated what I made 10 years ago. So people are always trying to tell you what to make, what they think that you should make, and so this is what I want to make.”
