Harmony Korine Makes Sense of ‘Trash Humpers’

Harmony Korine began his film career early on, gaining recognition for the script he wrote for Larry Clark's Kids while still a teenager. Despite a shared interest in the seedier things in life, Korine’s own films were a complete departure, borrowing more from video collage and the Dogme movement, but with his own distinctly American touches and a carnival approach to filmmaking which suggests things are never quite as they seem. Trash Humpers, Korine’s most recent effort (which recently screened at the New York Film Festival) is also his most experimental, and if you're familiar with past works like Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy in particular, you’ll know that means it's pretty weird.

Adopting the form of a found home movie VHS tape (according to Korine the kind you’d find lying in a ditch), the movie follows a group of masked deviants dressed like retirees who spend their days and nights breaking things, humping garbage cans, and tap dancing, all against a bleak backdrop of small town America--complete with empty parking lots, highway underpasses and empty suburban roads. Along the way we meet various eccentrics locals, a pair of overgrown twin babies who play-act the story of famed Siamese circus stars Eng and Chang, a cross-dressing poet, and a child preacher to name a few. Filmed with hand-held VHS cameras on location in Korine’s hometown of Nashville, Trash Humpers is equal parts video art, documentary, horror show and home movie. True to his reputation, Korine delivers something imaginative, funny, unnerving, disturbing, and genuinely strange.

Tap dancing seems to be a recurring theme in a lot of your work. Why tap dancing?
I don’t know, I‘ve just always loved tap dancing. Before I made movies I thought it would be great to be a tap dancer, and then I was very close with these two brothers that lived on my street that were juvenile delinquents, but they would tap dance. And they invented this kind of tap dancing where they would steal sidewalk curbs and put them in their backyard, and then they would dance on these curbs. They would take the shoelaces out of their shoes, and then I started to dance on these curbs. Sometimes we had BBQs, and one of the mothers had a record for eating the most kielbasas in one sitting.

Compared with your other movies, especially the last one, Mr. Lonely, this seems more playful.
I think the making of Mr. Lonely was great, it was more just the things that came before it and putting it together that took me so many years, and it took so long to get that out to the world. I didn’t want to go through that again. I felt like there was another way to make movies. And I guess it starts with an idea, so I had this idea, “The Trash Humpers.” And then, once I came up with this idea of found footage or something archival, a tape that had been unearthed—it was something very freeing and more spontaneous. And that’s not saying it’s any better or any worse or any less serious. It was jut made with more of a kind of spontaneity and an extreme amount of freedom.

The whole project was conceived and shot and edited in a very short time. Is anything sacrificed through this approach—does this make it a less serious movie?
I don’t know what’s serious or not serious. I’ve found that with movies, people have their own take on things. I don’t ever go into something thinking a movie is any one way. I used to try to gage reactions beforehand and I was always wrong. Now I just kind of make things and then put them out there.

So you’re okay with some people laughing and others being shocked?
Yeah that’s great. You want that. I never made a movie thinking that it was one emotion or one thing or adhered to a singular idea. Of course you encourage individual interpretation. There is no right or wrong. It’s like life. It’s everything and nothing. I don’t know what the meaning of them is, I don’t know, they just are.