Collected Harmony

Director Harmony Korine muses on early inspirations, subconscious impulses and his evolving ideas of filmmaking in Dustin Lynn’s intimate portrait shot during The Venice Film Festival in early September. Catapulted onto the indie film scene in the mid 1990s aged just 18 after writing the screenplay for Larry Clark’s controversial Kids, Korine cemented his reputation for pushing aesthetic and narrative boundaries by directing a string of cult classics including Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy and the provocative VHS camcorder-shot horror Trash Humpers. Lynn spent the afternoon exploring Lido with the Nashville-based director ahead of the star-studded Spring Breakers world premiere in the festival's prestigious Palazzo del Cinema venue. The Florida-set, porn-pulp crime tale stars James Franco as a gun-toting gangster presiding over a bevvy of delinquent beauties including Disney Channel darlings Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens. “I'm not sure a lot of the older people in the audience understood the feeling the film was giving them,” observes Lynn. “But such is the way from one generation to the next, like Elvis's hips were the devil not too long ago.” Cinematographer Benoît Debie’s sun-blasted neon exteriors and a pulsating electronic score by Cliff Martinez accompany Korine’s derisive commentary on the American Dream, materialism and the youthful search for self. “It is a disturbingly beautiful work of art and I found myself recalling images and scenes weeks after,” notes Lynn. “It just stays with you.”