How Indie-Cinema Bad Boy Harmony Korine Found Redemption -- New York Magazine

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Harmony Korine directs Samantha Morton.

(Photo: O'South/Courtesy of IFC Films)

Korine tried to make another film, with Gus Van Sant, but couldn’t finish it. He was also spending a lot of time painting eggs. “I was messed up. I was living like a tramp. You start to run out of money, and friends. It gets a little bleak.”

Fortunately, one of the people whom he’d befriended was the fashion designer Agnès b. She’d met him at the Venice Film Festival in 1999 after the screening of Julien Donkey-Boy, and to this day she can quote from the scene in which Julien’s father, played by a sadistic Werner Herzog, offers Julien’s brother $10 to wear his mother’s dress (“Just put it on, Chris, and dance with me”). “That’s why Harmony loves humanity—he can do things like that with no judgments,” she says.

“My whole life, all I wanted was to be a director. When I was finally a director, all I wanted to do was quit.”

And, with equal open-mindedness, she helped him clean up. “I wanted to give him time,” she says. “I think that time is the best thing that you can give an artist.” They started a production company, called O’Salvation, which took as its logo the trident tattoo on Korine’s right hand. “I went through a lot of places like hospitals and psych wards, and also I spent a lot of time in the jungle,” he says.

Mister Lonely, which Agnès b. produced, is, in the end, a recovery film. Its origins came from an image Korine had of nuns falling out of airplanes without parachutes, praying, and landing safely. A gorgeous piece of extreme-sports nonsense he shot in Panama, the nun footage is intercut with a story about a Paris-based Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton, in the role Sevigny might have played) who persuades him to move to her impersonators’ commune in Scotland.

About halfway through the movie, the Michael Jackson character has a monologue, while painting eggs, in which he addresses “Dear World, and everyone in it.” It’s both sad and gentle and, one suspects, genuine. “I have noticed that over the years you have tried to pass me by,” he says. “I don’t think I ever felt the same that you felt, and I’m not exactly angry about it. Never quite getting things the ways that everyone else gets them. It’s hard to laugh when you don’t know what people find so funny … ”

Moviegoers have felt similarly dislocated in his filmic world, of course. But unlike his earlier works, Mister Lonely is not grim. There’s lots of yellow.

In the run-up to the movie’s opening in May, the IFC Center has been screening Korine’s old films at midnight. “I’m glad that new people will get to see them projected in theaters,” he says. “But I don’t think about those movies that much. I don’t own any copies.”