Harmony Korine: Hey, Steve. Hey, I remember you, yeah.

HK: I remember it well.

HK: Yeah, it was pretty cool. It was funny, funny shit.

HK: There was something weird. Someone asked Selena something about being a "woman of color" or something. I don’t know.

HK: [laughs] That was so random. It was strange.

HK: It became that in some ways, and there’s that exciting element to it. It started off honestly just being really interested in these characters and then the Alien character [played by Fraco] and that whole world. Obviously spring break was interesting for me as a backdrop and as a metaphor for the story later, but I was more into wanting to make something that was about the menace and the pathology of the backroads, past the strip under the palm trees and the dilapidated houses and the beach trap, almost like beach noir or something.

HK: Yeah exactly. Then when I started trying to figure out how it would look and feel, and I just was like, “Maybe there are these more inventive, more even slightly experimental techniques that I can filter through this pop gloss.” So it just started to develop in that way, and ultimately that was exciting, the idea that all of these new people get to see the films I make.

HK: Yeah, it was. That became like a character in the movie with the color. I wanted the film to be almost more like a physical experience or more like a drug experience--something that was closer to a hallucination or a pop fever dream. So I started thinking about the surface of the film and the colors almost like painting or something, and so we started developing all of these neons. I told [cinematographer] Benoit Debie, we talked about lighting rooms as if you were using Skittles for lights or making everything seem like Starburst Fruit Chews.

HK: The tone starts to shift as we go from this vibrant, bright-colored neons to something tonally that’s a bit darker.

HK: Yeah. I wanted to be a complete and utter bombardment of the senses. I wanted it unrelenting. I never wanted the viewer to be too close to being comfortable. I wanted the film to be constantly shifting gears and having images and sounds falling from all directions. In some ways, it was like making a film that was closer to electronic music or loop-based movement with things that repeat and are almost working in these micro scenes, or even like pop music, pop songs with hooks, and choruses. There are things in the film that almost become like mantras and stuff, things that get stuck in your brain, and you can’t get rid of.

HK: Florida is such a weird place. When I would go as a kid to visit my grandparents, they lived in these backgrounds . I don’t know what it was, it seemed like everyone was trying to escape from something or everyone was seduced and lured there by the promise of sun and fun, but you could see that it became something else. It’s so beautiful and the weather is so perfect. Then there’s also when the lights go down at night. I always felt there was something more ominous and stranger. It’s hard to articulate, but there’s a weirdness there in Florida.

HK: You know, I was writing and I was thinking about it who could play them and then I was like, “It would be amazing to get girls who are, in some ways in real life, representative of a kind of pop mythology or connected culturally to the characters in some way and are orbiting around that world. It is fun, this idea of playing against type, and people are just so used to seeing them in this one way. I like the idea of playing against expectations, and at the same time, they need to work as characters within the film.

HK: It really is.

HK: It was legit, yeah.

HK: I had found that location. It was a pool hall in this super hood neighborhood in St. Petes, and the location was amazing, all the people there, the colors, the whole vibe of the place. I had seen this back room there with all of these guys hanging out with pit bulls and smoking menthols. I don’t know what it was about it, but I started to dream up that scene and I started to think in the script is was written that she pretty much just leaves right after Alien bails them out--she’s just creeped out by him.



But the way he was playing it was so much more intense. I thought “It would be nice to add this kind of moment.” So a couple of months before I dreamt up that sequence, but I didn’t tell either one of them, and I called Franco up the night before and I told him what I wanted to do. I wanted to surprise her, because I didn’t want her to be thinking about it. I wanted her to react in real time, and so that’s what happened. I just pulled her by the arm when she thought she was going home, and I said, “Hey, we have one more thing waiting for you.” And she was like “What?” So I think that’s all I said, “React like you really would. Just let it go.”

HK: Yeah, she was freaked out. We did it a couple of times, and it got more and more demented as we went.

HK: Yeah, his big thumb over her mouth.

HK: Yeah, it really does. It’s pretty crazy.

HK: I had been friends with him, and we had talked about making a film together for a couple of years, but I never had the right part, and I always felt with him he was capable, because there is something unhinged and insane about him in real life. So I had always thought he was capable of really going to a place that no one had seen before, like he just hadn’t had the right part. So I had called him up to explain “Hey, I have this idea.”



A lot of the character of Alien was based on kids I used to ride the bus with to school, growing up in the '80s and that classic archetypal white Southern gangster, regional gangster with black mannerisms. So for the year before we shot, I probably sent him hundreds of images, reference photos, pictures, clips, rappers, audio clips, anything from videos where people would get into fist fights in gas stations to just pictures of girls with Skittles logos stenciled into their hair cut. So I would just say to Franco, “I want your character to feel like that.” So he was a cultural mash-up, his character, like a gangster-mystic, and he just played it in this extreme way. He is someone who’s very violent and very humorous.

HK: Yeah, because he wasn’t big into rehearsing. There was a lot of discussion, but then once he got into costume with the character in corn rows and gold teeth and his accents, that’s when I was like, “Okay, I see he’s going to take it there.” Then we had him spend time with a lot of local guys that were living the life that he started to emulate in some ways.

HK: Yeah, the menace follows him, and it becomes palpable. It becomes an energy, and the tone of it is so horrible. The tone is so intense.

HK: Here’s the thing, I tend to be interested in things where I feel both of those things, both an attraction and a repulsion simultaneously, and most films and most artwork seem to veer away from things that are more morally ambiguous or visually ambiguous or have some type of emotional abstraction where you’re not told what to think or you’re not told “This is bad.” So for whatever reason, those are the types of characters and the types of storylines that interest me most, the things that are both disgusting and beautiful. It’s like life. It’s like everything and nothing, and I don’t like to just strip things back to the point where it’s just one way; I to be able to dream on them.

HK: You don't want to tell them what to think. It’s too easy to condemn. It’s too easy to judge. People love judging, and I’ll never give the people that. Do you know what I mean? People just want you to make characters pay and make people pay and judge them and say, “This guy is bad.” Well you could say, “Yeah, this guy does bad things, but there is also something kind of amazing about him. Culturally, you could say this is the most vile world, but at the same time there is maybe some kind of strange poetry in it.

HK: Sure, yeah. Yeah, it’s nice. It’s great for me, because it’s a different type of film experience. You can be aroused and be horrified. [laughs]

HK: Yeah, I mean the party scenes were chaos. There were thousands of kids in abandoned hotels just destroying things. It was difficult when Franco came--and that’s the thing about chaos, it’s chaos. It’s almost impossible to control. So that was pretty intense.

HK: Well as they say in the beginning, “It's pretend; it’s a video game.” I have them say that a couple of times over and over, because I want you to realize that is what’s happening. It becomes something more like a strange wormhole, like this little step from viewing and playing to actually doing.

HK: [Laughs] Yeah, I guess it is. What I’m trying to say is it’s more… the way that everything now is filtered, life is filtered, your social life is filtered through technology to such an extent that sometimes it just all becomes a blur.

HK: Yeah, we shot all that to set it up.

HK: You’d have people on the radio say, “Hey, we need you to come now.” You’d take out ads and come to colleges, fraternities. They had culled them for a couple of months.

HK: Apocalyptic.

HK: Yeah, definitely.

HK: You want the film to build in some way at that point. Again, it was more like a trance with some type of peak moment, and then it disappears into darkness. I wanted it to almost be some kind of strange, violent pop song.

HK: I don’t know man, it’s crazy.

HK: Yeah, it’s always fun to watch that scene with a crowd. I had been thinking about doing a sequence like that for a couple of years and I thought that song in particular was kind of amazingly delicate, morose, airless pop song, but underneath it there was this kind of violence or menace to it. I thought in some ways, it was a lot like the film. So I don’t know, I just always envisioned this violent robbery sequence under the song and him playing the piano. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s weird, you just get images and sounds and things, and you just put it together.

HK: Before I wrote it into the script, I probably listened to it a couple of hundred times on a loop.

HK: It was always conceived in that way, because there’s four girls, and to me they always represented a whole--a single kind of spirit and a single soul. So one by one they leave, right? So the first one to leave is Selena’s character, who is the moral compass, the faith [her character's name is Faith], and what happens once the morality is stripped away, and you’re left with the three girls. Then Cotty leaves, and Cotty [played by Rachel Korine] is the kind of in-between, and then you’re left with these two girls with almost like complete sociopathic tendencies.

HK: Yeah, exactly. They're almost beyond human and they elevate themselves in this way like pure violent poetry.

HK: Yeah.

HK: Look, the thing is you never want to be in a situation where you are shooting something and you realize that the actor you’re working with isn’t in the same place. So a lot of knowing she was capable and where she was going to go was done in the rehearsals and auditioning process, because I was like, “Look, you need to know this is going to be way more extreme and way more graphic and intense than anything you have ever done” But she was down.

HK: Yeah. With Rachel, I’ve worked with her before, and she’s really bold and she’s amazing.

HK: Yeah, exactly. And she can get this demonic glint in her eye, and I definitely thought…again the four of them have a relationship that’s almost chemical, so I thought that Rachel needed to be the one that throws it down to set it off.

HK: She really is.

HK: I don’t know. I have a couple of really vague ideas of things, but I've just been making paintings and hanging out alone.

HK: Oh, The Black Keys video?

HK: Yeah.

HK: I do everything. I just like making things and don’t think about them too much. Whatever it is, if it’s interesting to me and I can do it, if I can react to it quickly, I just do it. I try not to differentiate between high and low art; it’s all part of the same thing.

HK: It’s very strange. It’s so strange that I kind of love it. You know what I’m talking about? [laughs]

HK: Yeah man, my pleasure. It was awesome. I hadn’t seen you in a couple of years.