Harmony Korine Talks ‘Trash Humpers’ @ NYFF

There’s been a tendency in some of the writing about Trash Humpers to consider it a kind of back-to-basics film for director Harmony Korine. I don’t entirely agree with this -- there’s more variety in his work than people give him credit for -- except to the extent that it clearly inhabits the same filthy suburban demimonde that Korine first limned in 1997’s Gummo. The familiar parking lots, back alleys, and low-rent tract houses from that film are here being ransacked by a quartet of feckless, giggling assholes with the bodies of boys and the faces of geezers. But the look of the picture is very different, which his to say deliberately shitty. Anyone who thought some of his work unpolished before will have to reset the bar. Trash Humpers was shot on dated VHS equipment.

Korine’s been around long enough that the audience at yesterday’s NYFF screening was used to him and thus didn’t flip out at his outré shenanigans, though a couple of old-timers did make for the exit after ten minutes. (It was probably out of boredom). The Q&A that followed was pretty tame, considering I’ve sat in the same auditorium and watched some jerk absolutely scream his head off at as inoffensive and undeserving a person as Claire Denis. That said, Harmony still managed to tell some fairly dubious stories, and act as if he’s the first person to ever find conventional filmmaking a cumbersome ordeal. Highlights are below.

On where the idea came from: My wife got me a dog and had me walk it two or three times a day. I would walk it in these back alleyways, and I remembered that as a kid I used to spend most of my childhood in places like that, parking lots and alleyways, only now they’re just littered with garbage. Sometimes when I would walk through these places and see this trash it would look like humans. I don’t know what happened, but I started imagining what it might be like to hump them.

On the choice of the old-man look: When I was a kid there used to be a group of guys, elderly people that would sometimes peep in windows in the neighborhood, and I would always look out my window and catch them looking at the girl next door who lived in a yellow house. It was common thing. They kind of seemed like they lived in the shadows.

On the script: There was no script. In some ways I don’t even want to call it a movie, because maybe it’s not, and I’ll be the first to say it. It’s something else. I’ve been wanting to make something that was more like an artifact, something that was unearthed, something that was found. The closest film you could say it resembles stylistically is the William Eggleston movie Stranded in Canton, just because it was a home movie.

On how the shooting went: Once we figured out technically how we were going to do it, it became a kind of a journey. It happened naturally. There was no type of coverage, but rather one moment after a moment after a moment. The order you see it is the way it was shot. The editing was organic. There were no re-shoots.

On how long it took to make and prepare: I just started filming it, like, four months ago. The experience of my last film was really terrible. Well, the making of it was great, but everything around it was awful. It was frustrating how long everything took. I felt like, in some ways, the way in which films are made is maybe too slow, too inhibiting, it costs too much money. There’s an opposition to experimentation. I wanted to make things as quickly as I could think them. The whole shoot took maybe two weeks.

On what kind of camera he used: We used, like, VHS. I wanted the worst cameras possible.