Harmony Korine

Harmony Korine is not a filmmaker that easily lends himself to straightforward analysis. Those who attempt to critique his films head-on often fall short – either by mistaking something for nothing or vice-versa.

His latest film, Spring Breakers, is particularly confounding. While it may seem that this is his most audience-friendly film to date, which it is, its ease of consumption betrays the complexity of its design. This is a film that is meant to be felt, not thought about. Now think about that. At once an expert aural-visual hand-job and the greatest cock-block ever shown on screen, it should incite recklessness, not somber reflection.

The tale of four co-eds who, by way of simulated violence, trade in the trappings of collegiate responsibility for the raw sex vibes of St. Petersburg, Florida, Spring Breakers seeks not to deliver a narrative about liberation, but to liberate its audience from narrative. 

There is a story here, but it’s secondary to the film’s rhythm – a hot swampy mix of .giffable iconography and jail bait aesthetics. It’s Scarface, chopped and screwed, for girls who can’t legally drink but already know they don’t need a man to rule the world. 

For everyone else, to see the film is to answer a very blunt question – do you want to get fucked up? For those that opt in and let the film wash over them like a sketchy batch of Mountain Dew-flavored ecstasy, the high is worth the hangover. For those who don’t, there’s plenty of suspect messaging and rank objectification to deconstruct at the coffee shop afterwards. 

Douglas Haddow — How would you describe Spring Break to someone who has never experienced it?

Harmony Korine — It’s a pretty common thing here, it’s been going on forever. In March for one week, kids from high school and college go to the beaches in Florida, and Mexico now, and kind of just tear the place, act out and just turn it up and go for it. 

— What did you initially find so interesting about spring break?

— Ummmm. What did I find interesting about it? I thought it was an interesting backdrop for the film. I like the idea of it, I even like the word “spring break”. I just thought it was kind of… it was an interesting place to base the film. A dream or something.

— Do you think there’s a spiritual or almost religious dimension to spring break?

— Maybe for some of the people that go. 

— The film doesn’t seem to be a critique of pop culture but it does explore the pathology that bubbles underneath the surface – like it embraces that pathological desire.

— I guess the movie to me is more like chasing a feeling, and more like, it was like all these things were in the air and I was just trying to make sense of it. It was more like an impressionistic reinterpretation of all these things. It’s mostly just a feeling or an energy. 

— Wikipedia describes the film as crime thriller, IMDB a crime comedy, but to me it felt more like a coming of age film that surfs the edges of a musical. What sort of film do you think this is?

— I don’t know, I guess all those things make sense in some way. Umm. But it’s mostly just a Harmony film. 

— For people with no knowledge of the film, what are they in for?

— Hopefully they’re in for something that they really enjoy, you know. I try to make a movie that’s more of an experience or something, that has some type of physical effect, more like a drug effect. But you know, I think at its core I’m trying to entertain. 

— A number of the scenes are repeated throughout the film from different perspectives, what were you trying to do?

— I was trying to do something more trance-like, which goes with this idea of micro scenes and images and sounds, blasting, falling from the sky. And, the film in some ways is closer to electronic music or at least the structure of the film, or some type of sample-based music, things with looping and a kind of strange repetition in some sequences, dialogue being repeated like choruses or hooks from pop songs, things that become like mantras. 

— You put together quite a deep bench in terms of the film’s music – Randall Poster, Cliff Martinez and Skrillex. Did you want music to be closely related to the structure of the film?

— Yeah yeah, you want it to work in the same way the images do, it needed to have a kind of power and it needed to be physical. I wanted a certain type of bass that hit you in the gut. A trunk rattling bass, I want that feeling throughout the whole film.

— Was there an intended audience for the film?

— Honestly I really didn’t have any kind of intended audience. I was hoping it would be seen by all different types of people and it seems to be happening. 

— Do you want teenage girls specifically to see the film?

— Uhhhh. I mean, I guess it’s difficult for them to see it because the movie’s R rated so… I think when they’re old enough, yeah of course. 

— It really captures the current zeitgeist with Skrillex and Gucci Mane to this weird pop-feminist approach to post-articulate culture. Were you trying to make a film that was really “current”?

— It was interesting because again it was like, I had this idea and I was imagining these characters and this world and what it would look like and how it would feel and it lends itself to that kind of pop-vernacular. And that feeling, and I don’t know what it was but I’d just been… maybe years of watching things and feeling a certain way about stuff and being excited about certain things and put off by other things and, I don’t know, in some ways I was trying to make sense of it all. Culture is kind of up for grabs at the moment, there is no such thing as high or low culture anymore, it’s all been exploded. I don’t know what it is, you just go towards the light. 

— The girls in the film describe their experiences in terms of being a movie or a videogame. Is this a film for people who aren’t able to articulate their thoughts?

— Maybe but, maybe they just do it in actions, done in a different way. Yeah I mean, it’s not maybe as spoken about or analyzed, maybe it’s more impulsive. Maybe people’s brains are different now. 

— One of the elements of the film is the gangster mysticism as represented by James Franco’s character, Alien. What attracted you to that lifestyle and the aura of the American gangster?

— I don’t know, sometimes its hard, I just make it because I don’t know how to say it. I can’t really say, it’s difficult to say. I just invented Alien because I thought he had to exist in that way. He was just like the kids I used to ride the bus with to school, white kids with gold teeth, rap bullshit and insults and shoot guns and if they survived to thirty what would they be like? And there were these other elements that I thought also needed to be present in the character. 

 — There’s this really great Scarface scene in the film, a film that has played a major role in gangster’s lives over the past thirty years and I was thinking, do you want Spring Breakers to be a movie like that in the future?

— Sure. I don’t know if that would be possible but that film, but yeah, that film has become something that means a lot to people. 

— There’s a bizarre love connection between the girls and Alien, why were they attracted to each other so deeply?

 — You know it’s that whole thing – game recognizes game. They’re kindred spirits, they’re next level, they see that rage and that poetry, they see it all in each other, they’re brothers and sisters in arms. 

— The four girls are quite different and seem to represent a whole.

— Yeah I always thought of them as a single entity, four parts of one.

— What do they come together to make?

— I don’t know you tell me.

— I felt that if this story was handled by a different writer or director, it would have led to one of the girls being sacrificed. 

— Yeah.

— But save for Cotty, who suffers a mild gunshot wound, they come out unscathed from their trip into the beach noir underworld. Why was that important?

— I don’t know, I wouldn’t want to tell you. You know what I mean? It wouldn’t work because if I said what my intent was, it just would kill the film. 

— One of the stranger things I overheard walking out the theatre is how one guy was commenting on how he wished one of the girls had gotten raped or there was more sex, and he didn’t get that.

— Wow, Jesus, that’s a really crazy reaction. And I think that’s the thing, the idea with the movie is that people’s reactions are personal, and wherever they are, it’s something that’s specific and unique. So there’s wild interpretations I’ve heard.

— Do you see this film in the context of your work, it seems you’ve tackled a different subject with Spring break.

— It’s all part of the same thing, it’s a different story and a different subject and it’s stylistically different, but at their core everything is all connected, it’s all unified, it all comes from the same source – a reflection of my thinking at the time, and emotional state, the films work like that.

— You’ve been thinking about Spring break for a while?

— Yeah, I was using all this imagery, mostly for artwork and stuff and I then started looking at it all together and started thinking about it as a film.

— And there’s a very clear aesthetic here, both visual and aural, what tone did you have in mind before you set out

— Basically it’s the tone that is the movie, I just wanted to feel like it is. I wanted it to be something more like magic.

— Like a vision of Spring break.

— Yeah, it’s not even a Spring break movie, it just has that in there. The time that they’re actually there is fleeting. And it becomes something else. 

— The colour scheme is very strong, with its pinks and purples, did you come up with a name for that?

— It was mostly just, it was a culture very much about surfaces and the way things looked and felt, there was a presence there. And all these details and pop-culture indicators. It was like a specific inner coded language. The colours really spoke to me, so, I don’t know, I wanted the film to look like it was lit with candy and Skittles. It was this texture that you could feel and all that message and meaning, or what you get from characters, it comes from the residue of that, it’s like a document of a performance or something.

— I think it’s the first film that has connected trap music to Britney Spears.

— It’s all getting closer and closer now. 

— Until you think about it, you don’t think there’s any connection, but maybe there’s a deep connection between those two worlds. The pop world and the underworld. Is there a stronger connection there that most people might not think about?

— Yeah, I don’t know, what do you think? You know what I mean? That’s why I make the movie because that’s cool. When I hear you say that stuff I like it. 

— The Britney Spears scene has a bizarre kinetic quality to it, it almost erupts and people in the audience start to sing along, how did you go about putting that together?

 — Yeah, definitely. It’s something I dreamed up. I just thought about it a couple years before I even had an idea for the movie. I just like that song and kept thinking about it being used in that way, with that kind of violent imagery underneath it, and it just finally seemed like the right place to do it. I just dreamed it up.

— Could the film have taken place in another state or was it important for it to be in Florida?

— I thought it was important to be in Florida. Maybe you could have done it somewhere else, but I don’t know, it seemed like Florida was also a character and a presence in the film -– the skies and the architecture, and the whole feel of it. It seemed to be very much in line with the story, the characters, the colours and everything. 

— What was it like working with these very diverse set of actors?

— My favourite bit was working with them. Yeah, it was great, they were all perfect and they really went for it. It was exciting to watch, especially the girls do things that were more extreme. They were like a real crew, a crew of dangerous bitches. 

— What do you like about trap music?

— It’s a feeling, it’s got a good energy. Growing up in the south there’s always a sense of the trap. And that kind of, it’s like music and menace tied together, it’s dramatic, I like the bass, I don’t like shit that’s too lyrical, I like the vibe or something. I think there’s something very cinematic about it. 

— That’s reflected in the film, the vibe.

— Yeah, when a specific type of music can define a violence and culture so well, it parallels that specific world.

— Without needing to say too much.

— Exactly.

— This is your most musical film to date

— Yeah, I wanted to make a film where the audio was this kind of melding… where the sound design and the score were almost the same thing, like, what’s musical, what’s not musical, it just has a presence you know, it just hits you. 

— Is this mix of visual and aural something you want to keep doing?

— Yeah, definitely, it feels good to me, it feels where I’ve always wanted to be technically. I don’t know, I feel like keeping shit aggressive, nothing too soft, I feel it’s good to go hard, like, you don’t want anything to get too subtle, you might fall asleep. Hard in the paint. 

— I felt like you want to provoke girls with this film.

— I didn’t really try to, I wasn’t really thinking of the sexes different reaction. If I want to provoke girls I would also want to provoke guys, and if I wanted to provoke guys I would want to provoke girls, because, you just want to get both sexes going.

— There’s never really been a gangster movie for girls. Now there’s a movie for girls who want to be bad-ass. 

 — I never even thought about that, you’re right. Man, that’s cool, it makes me really happy. I just felt it needed to be girls, for whatever reason they needed to be more gangster than the most gangster, they needed to transcend it all, and I can’t explain it any more than that really, it’s just that it always had to be girls that did this, girls are the only ones that could do this.

— Does the film have a taste?

— I don’t know, you tell me.

— I think it tastes really good. 

— Laughs.

Glossary

Pop-pathology: What lurks beneath the American dream. The darkness of ambition, the madness of a culture gone post-articulate. 

Spring Break: An annual ritual where thousands of teenagers and twentysomethings flock to the beach to sacrifice innocence to the gods of youth. 

Beach Noir: The darkness that haunts paradise’s backstreets. What happens beyond the hot tubs and free HBO. 

Skittle-Vision: The candy-colored lens with the syrupy glow that coats Spring Breakers’ mise en scène. 

Gangster Mysticism: The religion of ill-gained capital, where Tony Montana is bigger than Jesus and the entire universe is just one big pussy waiting to get fucked.

Britney Spears: The official spirit animal of celebrity disaster, madness, beauty and pain. 

Florida: The craziest, stickiest, sluttiest state in the union. 

Liquid Cinema: Film without traditional narrative restrictions. What a movie looks like after a bottle of tequila and a cap of ecstasy. 

Trap Music: Thump in the trunk. The rhythmic underpinnings of the modern American south and the nature sounds of that which binds one to a cruel fate.