CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 5/02/08

A Genre of One:
Mister Lonely's Harmony Korine

By peter clines

The avant-garde writer of cult films such as Kids and Gummo steps into the spotlight again with a film featuring two downward-spiraling plotlines about people aspiring to greatness.

Screenwriter and director Harmony Korine was only 19 years old when he sold his first script. In the years since then, he's developed his own near-cult following as an offbeat writer-director who defies almost every standard of storytelling and filmmaking with his movies. His latest work, Mister Lonely, arrives in limited release theaters this weekend.

Mister Lonely tells two narratives of belief, twisted together as the off-kilter stories play out side by side. One is the story of a struggling, Mexican Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who meets a beautiful Marilyn Monroe wanna-be (Samantha Morton) in Paris. Sensing a kindred spirit, Marilyn invites Michael to join the unusual group she lives with in Scotland. The two impersonators travel to her commune, a sprawling, secluded farm populated by a baker's dozen of almost-icons, including a drunken Pope (James Fox), a foul-mouthed Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange), and a sexually confused Buckwheat from The Little Rascals (Michael-Joel Stuart), all ruled over by Marilyn's domineering and sometimes abusive husband, Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant). The second thread of the film tells the story of a small mission in Africa, where a terrifying accident during an airborne food drop results in a miracle, and convinces the local nuns that God wants them all to go skydiving without parachutes.

In the last hours of the Mister Lonely press day, Korine sat down with CS Weekly by the pool of the Avalon Hotel to talk about movies as cheeseburgers, pop stars vs. folk-tale legends, and watching your friends climb into a large wood-burning stove.

Let's start big. You don't like traditional Hollywood stories or structure. Why not?
Sometimes those movies work. It's not that I'm against anything; I just figure there's so much of that that exists already. It's not my thing. There's enough people that pump that shit out, and it's not what I do. I don't have anything against it; I just think it's like fast food. Sometimes it's really delicious and hits the spot, but you also need some other nourishment.

What's the writing process generally like for you? Notecards, outlines? Does it take ages or do you just dump it all on the page in three days?
It's different for most movies. It depends on the film. I always write now with notecards. I come up with a story. I come up with characters. Gummo was more like writing scenes on notecards individually. "Kid in bathtub eats spaghetti." That was the full extent of that. "Boys ride down street on BMX bikes." There was no real order to it. When I felt that I had amassed enough scenes and ideas, then I more or less reassembled and reorganized them according to a different kind of logic. I always write with some kind of cue cards. I usually have them, probably the way most people do it, on a chalkboard or something. Kids took a week. Mister Lonely was about three months.

Do you like writing for other people or for yourself more?
It's worked out better when I write for myself than it has when I've written for other people. Having said that, I also find I like the idea of writing for other people. I have no problem with it. If it's someone I like, a director I'm friends with or find really interesting, I would have no problem giving my script to someone else. Sometimes it takes so long to make a movie, it's nice—the idea of just handing it off and going and doing something else. But for the most part, I like writing and directing my own things.

Do you write tighter or looser scripts when you know you're going to be the guy there on set interpreting it?
I guess I write what you would call a loose script. I don't ever do more than two drafts of a script. I never have. In fact, most of the time I'll write one draft, get to the end, go back and check spelling and punctuation, tweak some dialogue, and that's it. I don't care about writing scripts that are perfect. The script contains the thoughts and ideas, but I want to finish the film and go shoot it. I get it to where it's good enough and then I'm happy.

Your films tend to feel very free form. Do you like a lot of improv and ad-lib from your actors?
I don't like actors to just make things up, to just do things without prompting or without direction. But I do find it's good, especially with non-actors and non-professionals, to try to get them to do something that's more interesting or less rehearsed. I always try to set up an environment where anything can happen, where you hope the performer can take something in a different direction and add to what's written.

What first sparked the idea for Mister Lonely?
The first images from the movie were nuns jumping out of airplanes. Nuns flying. Nuns riding bicycles in the sky and doing tricks in the clouds—and surviving. I also wanted to make a movie about a commune full of impersonators and icons, like a hippie commune except for impersonators. And then I thought, well, maybe they're the same movie. Even though they don't necessarily intersect, maybe the narrative is more like an allegory. I knew it would be controversial. I knew people wouldn't get past the fact that the two stories don't necessarily intersect in a concrete way, but I felt like that was alright. The narratives danced with each other, they spoke to the same ideas and emotions. It made emotional sense, and I thought that was enough.

What made you think of connecting them?
I've always been attracted to marginalized characters, people who live outside the system and create their own environment. Obsessive characters, eccentrics, bastards, tramps, dreamers, all that. I thought that's what they both were. They both believed in something, some kind of magic or faith, and this strong desire to transcend. I just felt like that was it.

In Mister Lonely, it's kind of interesting that out of over a dozen impersonators, almost none of them bears any actual resemblance to their chosen subject. How much of that was a story choice?
Well, in doing the little research I did on impersonators, I noticed that a lot of them looked nothing like the person they were impersonating. I thought it was more interesting that they were regular people who had just willed themselves, that that was part of it. They wanted to do that. They wanted to be that person. Some person watches Madonna on the TV and says, "Oh, I like her, I'll buy her record." Then there's that other obsessive person who looks at her and says, "I want to be her. I don't look like her. I'm not her, I'm a veterinarian, but I think I'm going to become her." That's what the movie was about.

Let me ask you about two specific characters now…it's brought up within the film that Charlie looks a lot more like Hitler than Chaplin, and his personality leans that way as well. Why such extremes?
I had actually heard stories that Chaplin in real life had kind of sadistic tendencies and was actually, in a lot of ways, kind of a terror. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but I liked the idea of this guy who plays this beautiful, innocent tramp on screen being a terror. As sadistic as he was, I also feel like he's filled up with some strange love for Marilyn.

The other character—in the midst of all these celebrity impersonators, you've got Little Red Riding Hood?
Again, it was about putting these different people together. It was about ages and sexes, and I felt there needed to be a pretty teenage girl. It originally was written as a Britney Spears impersonator, but we put her in costume and she just seemed like she was some slutty teenager. There was nothing interesting about it. I didn't have anything interesting to say about that character. So I was doing some research into impersonators, and for some weird reason there's this phenomenon where there are tons of Red Riding Hood impersonators. Maybe for children's shows, I don't know. Maybe because she's the most iconic of all the fantasy characters. So, I thought it was nice, and also I liked the red cape (chuckles).

You've worked with David Blaine a lot, and he's a storyteller, of sorts, as well. What have you learned from him about storytelling, or what has he learned from you?
Well, he's given me a lot of good stories to tell (laughs). That's the main thing, just the experience of hanging out with someone who's so extreme. Someone who'll put himself in a pizza oven and turn it on and stay there for a good 20, 30 minutes. Someone who starves themselves for seven weeks. A person who freezes himself, buries himself alive. These are all great things and good stories. It's more about the experience of human nature.

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.

Harmony Korine, Mister Lonely courtesy IFC Films

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