On stage during a Q&A after the London premiere of his new film Trash Humpers, it's as if Harmony Korine has become a character in one of his movies: a bad-taste bar mitzvah comedian, perhaps. Someone in the audience asks how he cast the film's trio of suburban prostitutes. Korine replies that one of them was his high-school girlfriend: "I admit she doesn't look that great today." Ba-boom. Where did he get the idea for the film? Well, there was this house in his neighbourhood when he was a kid where people would dump their elderly relatives for $90 a month. The old folks were fed undercooked meat and forced to listen to Herman's Hermits. With a final flourish, answering who knows what question, Korine declares, "I'm the most American director making movies today." He's beaming wildly.
That last line has the audience in stitches, not least because the film they've just watched is Korine's least accessible (some would say least watchable) to date. If you have seen his 1997 directing debut, Gummo, then imagine its glue-sniffing teenagers 50 years down the line. They've become gonzo OAPs, suburban winos who prowl Nashville back alleys at night, dry-humping dustbins and bridges, cackling insanely and committing the occasional murder. There's no plot, little comprehensible dialogue and no suggestion of a world outside the humpers' network of miscreant buddies (whose number includes a cross-dressing poet in a French maid's outfit). What's more, the actors aren't even old people: Korine cast himself, his wife Rachel and a couple of buddies, all wearing masks and looking like retirement home Freddy Krugers. Filmed on crappy VHS in the style of a home movie, Trash Humpers is the cinematic equivalent of listening to black metal: most people hate it, some can stomach 10 minutes, only the devoted will go the full 78 minutes.
After the Q&A I bump into a friend of Korine's who worked on the film. How much of what he said on stage was true? "Some of it," he says laughing. "A lot of it was complete fantasy." In the past newspaper features about Korine were littered with his self-mythologising tall tales (there was the one about the time he found a piece of a guy's shoulder in a pillowcase). A mutual acquaintance who has known Korine since around the time Kids was released in 1995 (he wrote the script at 19) tells a good story of the director being in Los Angeles in the late 90s. This was around the time Werner Herzog was calling him "the future of American cinema". A big Hollywood actor, hearing Korine was in town, summoned the young director to the studio where he was filming. Korine showed up in blackface and took off his trousers before being chased off by security. There's a video of it somewhere, apparently. Or is it just one of the fibs that Korine likes to circulate?
But during our interview proper, the day before the premiere, American indie's enfant terrible keeps his answers more or less straight. Now 36, with grey streaks in his beard, he's a darn sight more sprightly than when he was a few years ago, when he lived in London and shuffled around looking twitchy. The only trace now of his once-distinctive jitters is the non-stop gum-chewing.
Others on Team Trash Humpers make up for Korine's seeming lack of nerves; you get the impression they are uncertain how to plug the film. A publicist calls it his detox film (Korine is a former heroin user), a purging of all those nasty toxins. That would explain the paranoid tone, but in truth he has been clean for a few years. Korine says the film is more of a reaction to Mister Lonely, last year's comeback. His first film in eight years, Mister Lonely was a rich and touchingly old-fashioned melodrama set in a commune of celebrity impersonators. But with an $8.2m budget, he says he found the backroom wrangling crippling: "The people involved, the logistics, the bureaucracy. So much energy is put into capitulating. It just chops your head off." Korine thrusts himself into the back of his seat for effect. Trash Humpers was more of a wham-bam production. Shooting – practically on his doorstop – started four months ago and he was done editing in time for the Toronto film festival in September.
So far the film has divided opinion – nothing new for him there. Experimental art film or sub-Jackass goof-off? Korine seems to be hedging his bets ever so slightly on its place in his body of work. Maybe it's not even a movie at all, he suggests: "I wanted to make something that replicated an artefact. Or a found object." At one point there was talk of presenting it as a VHS tape that had been found in a ditch or in a box in someone's attic.
In perhaps his only lapse into interview whimsy, Korine claims that when he was making the film he was convinced of its commercial appeal: "I was actually thinking it would be the kind of thing someone like Miley Cyrus might like." What would Miley Cyrus like about it? The man fellating a twig? "I just thought it was so base and, in some ways, so on the surface, that it's something that someone like her could identify with." He's beaming again. As usual, he doesn't give a twig himself for criticism, or for the charge that Trash Humpers is nothing more than boring provocation: "I don't give a fuck if people think that or not. I honestly don't care."
Korine refuses to be drawn on his private life. He spent a handful of self-destructive years between New York, London and Paris. Anyone familiar with his work probably has a fair idea of the rest of it: break-up with on-off muse and girlfriend Chloe Sevigny, teeth falling out, houses burning down, drugs, near homelessness. Then there was Fight Harm, the abandoned film in which he picked fights with strangers, filmed by David Blaine. "I was quite unhealthy," he says with a rueful grin. He pauses. "You can imagine, it was hell." He shrugs and gives the table in front of him a little bang for emphasis.
Today, Korine's back in Nashville, Tennessee, where he grew up. He's married with a baby, and when he talks about family life it's with zeal of a reformed man. "Living there, you have space," he says of his hometown. "That was one of the things that was missing from my life for a long time." And Southern hospitality was a boon during the filming of Trash Humpers: "It would be really late at night and one of the characters would be fucking a trash bin, like really fucking it hard. And then a guy would come out of the house and see it and ask if we wanted the porch lights on."
As for right now, Korine's just finished work on a comedy script, and he's got back the drive that saw him through the youthful burst of Kids, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. "At that time I was literally exploding. Internally I couldn't contain my thoughts, my energy. At the same time, when I would close the door, I didn't have much left. I was spent. Now I try to pace myself a little more." Which reminds me of something said by Harmony Korine the quixotic wunderbrat, at the time of Gummo's release: that great artists have 10 years in them at best. Was Korine's decade back in the 90s? Or is it yet to come?
