Harmony Korine

When we interviewed director Harmony Korine for the June/July issue of Boards, we were left with more bizarre stories than we knew what to do with. During an interview, a commercial director will often cite influential literary or cinematic figures as inspiration. Korine, on the other hand, name checked a family of hunchbacks, a Diet Pepsi-addicted gospel singer and a brother-sister amputee comedy team.

The Gummo and julien-donkey boy director's love of the eccentric, surreal and unpredictable sides of life has earned him a cult following among cinemagoers and now that he's signed with MJZ and directed campaigns for Budweiser and Liberty Mutual, the 35-year-old is hoping to hone his storytelling abilities in the commercial world.

To find out more about Harmony Korine's advertising aspirations, Boards rang him up in a wind-swept Home Depot parking lot in Nashville to chat.

Where are you?
I'm in this crazy wind storm - it's actually just in a parking lot, an abandoned Home Depot. It's a lot of wind now. I'm hoping to catch a glimpse of a tornado.

Is now a good time to do the interview?
Yeah man, let's do it in the storm.

Why did you decide to start directing ads?
When I was young, when I first started making movies, I would sometimes get asked to do spots but I was more focused on making movies, really. Time passed, films take so long to make and also because I write my movies, the actual process just takes a long time. I enjoy making things and so I like the idea of beginning and finishing a project and having that immediacy. It was about a year and a half ago, two years ago I bumped into a friend and started talking about it and they were involved in ads. And that was kind of how it happened. It was another director and I just said, 'oh maybe I'll give it a try.'

How old were you when you started making movies?
I was making films in high school - probably about 15 or 16, during my sophomore year. I had written a short story for my English class and the teacher asked me what I wanted to do. It was the first time anybody had told me I'd done something good. It was about a guy whose father takes him to see a prostitute on his 13th birthday. It was kind of like a Bar Mitzvah thing except that he was a Mennonite. It was based on a good friend of mine whose father was a Polish Navy Seal and his name was Jason - the kid. His dad would sometimes beat the shit out of him but I noticed they did have kind of a loving relationship so I thought it would make for a good movie.

Did you ever do anything with it?
[My teacher] said, ‘what do you want to do?' and I said ‘I want to turn it into a film but I really don't know how to make movies.' I read up on it and talked to people and she got me a $2,000 grant from the school board. This is in Nashville. I moved to New York right after I graduated. That was how I got into college because I had pretty mediocre grades and I had blown up some toilets in high school and caused a big ruckus.

Why did you want to make movies?
I just loved movies. I loved films and that's all I ever really wanted to do. When I was really young I had also wanted to be a tap dancer but my moves weren't nearly as good as say, The Nicholas Brothers. I realized I would never be able to dance like that so I decided to devote myself full time to making films instead.

We would do things, we would steal - with this friend of mine who is now in prison - we would call it curb dancing and we would go into parking lots and we would steal these side walk curbs and put them in my backyard. It was really my next door neighbor that got me involved in all this. His father wrote all those Choose Your Own Adventure novels. We tried to invent our own style of dancing called curb dancing where we would remove the shoelaces from out tap shoes. It was pretty fun for six months or something but I couldn't really see a future. My parents were disappointed and the backyard was pretty cluttered. I started thinking I should make films. Ads were like a cross between making films and stealing curbs to dance on them. It was somewhere in the middle, you know?

How so?
It just seems like if you were to take a curb dancing enthusiast and someone like, say, David Lean and cross him with a curb dancing enthusiast you would probably get a really good commercials director. I can't really explain it better than that.

Can you tell me about your Thornton's commercial? It was based on your "No More Workhorse Blues" music video for Bonnie Prince Billy.
Yeah. I was in love with this girl, who became my wife, but she was younger than me and she was disgusted by me. And she'd been used to dating, I guess at that time, guys more like her age - right out of high school. So, I was trying to woo her and basically the only way I could think of doing it would be to put her in a music video - and put her in a wedding dress and have her do minstrel reenactments. So I was talking to my friend Bonnie Prince Billy and we put this little video together. It was pretty much no money. It was just a lark. There was an effect that we did, it was a looping effect that the [Thornton's] creative team had seen and thought we could expand upon.

How did you find the experience of filmmaking with an ad agency and client looking over your shoulder?
That part is interesting. I'm not used to that so much. In some ways, I felt like I've been pretty lucky. People that generally want me to do things, for the most part, would come to me because they want something specific, I would hope. I've been lucky that I've worked with people that are pretty loose. Obviously there are times when you're like, what the fuck's going on here?