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.

Trash Humpers seems like two overlapping movies in one. There was the loose narrative of the three main characters going about their day destroying things, and then there are these verite documentary moments where local eccentrics get a chance to tell their stories. For me these moments were the most affecting. Do you see yourself ever making documentaries? Probably not. I don’t think I have the patience to make documentaries. If I made documentaries, they would probably just end up like the movies that I’m making. I don’t like this idea that you’d have to adhere to this certain kind of truth. I think that what’s fun for me as a director is imposing my will or my vision. So there’s elements of what you’d call a documentary in my movies. Things maybe feel real, and sound and smell real, but there’s something else beneath the surface. I’m usually trying to manipulate it a little bit.

With all of the non-actors used in Trash Humpers, do any have particularly interesting back stories? All of them. They’re all much like they are in the movie. Like Chris, the guy who got up last night [at the screening], he’s someone who’s known for telling hours and hours of jokes with no punch lines. At one point he was doing these ten-hour monologues that were just kind of like anecdotes with no points. I think that’s just what he does. He’d do them in front of the Circle K and 7-11 by the house. He would sit on a milk crate and would just do that all day.

What about the boy in the suit playing basketball in the beginning of the movie? Oh yeah, he’s a boy preacher. He’s a really, really talented preacher. I’ve seen him light candles and hold several serpents at once, and I’m always amazed at his dexterity and the way he could quote Bible verses at the drop of a hat. It’s interesting because I think in his case he was born Jewish, and he had a conversion at like five years old or something and went really far into that [the Pentecostal church]. I think his father was a Hasidic rabbi, but also a very famous chiropractor.

Do you develop a relationship with them before using them in movies, or are these mostly people you already know from the neighborhood? Most of the people in this specific film, I’ve known and been friends with for a while.

Do the fictional elements blend into your own real life? They all do, kind of. But this one stars my wife, and I’m a trash humper in the film, and it was shot around where I live, and we would just wander around and hang out under bridges and overpasses and parking lots and just kind of dream up new places to destroy things. The movie in some ways is an ode to vandalism.

There is a speech in the car, where one of the masked characters explains why they behave in the way that they do, why they live outside of the rules of normal society. This appears to be the only instance in the film where this is made explicit. Sure. I think there’s some truth to what he says. I feel sorry for people that maybe have to go to church every Sunday.

You were born in Nashville and lived in New York for 10 years. Why did you move back to Nashville? Just because I didn’t want to live in these big cities anymore. It just didn’t feel right anymore. I didn’t like what was happening here. So for me, with Nashville, I grew up there and I understood it and I understood the landscape and geography. I had friends there. And it was just kind of easier for me to live there and not be reminded of certain things every day. It’s a question mainly of space. Here [New York] you have no space, and you’re constantly fighting for space. And I didn’t want to be in a place that you were constantly fighting all the time, and wanted to be somewhere that I could feel the day go by and it wasn’t like living in an office. And also, here there are so many people walking down the street at once, and you can’t really look at the faces. So it’s nice to live in a place where maybe there’s one person who walks down the sidewalk per hour. You can really focus on that person.

Is there a creative advantage to living there? Do you think you could be the same kind of filmmaker you are living in a place like New York? I mean, I could live here -- I lived here for a long time. So I could, I just wouldn’t want to. Probably just with the way I am now, I probably couldn’t live in Manhattan again for an extended period. It just wouldn’t work out for me. The streets have too many ghosts and memories.

Lets talk about the murders in the film. Both the characters and the camera seem to treat them with the same casual indifference as everything else in the movie. The suffocation seen in particular seems like a snuff film, where we are witnessing something we shouldn’t be seeing. The only real model for this movie, was the model of a home movie -- a VHS tape that had been unearthed that had been found and buried in a ditch somewhere. So in sticking to that premise, that idea, I felt like there would be no more attention paid to a murder scene than it would be someone documenting a tree branch blowing in the wind. It was all the same thing for these guys, it was about documenting their exploits -- this kind of extreme, sadistic voyage. There was no right or wrong in the way that there isn’t in a home movie.

More then a sense of consciously doing wrong, the eeriness for me was in mixing the acts of violence, absurdity, and banality. The costumes, and the cars and the landscape, everything felt sort of colorless and almost painfully ordinary. The idea behind it was that if you could make the argument that it was a horror film, that it was horror film more in the tone and the ambiance, that there was something that was even worse than what they were doing. There was something in the air -- that the atmosphere had been corrupted. Not only was there no more morality, the idea that morality was inverted, that maybe morality was nonexistent. They did these things with just pure glee. There was some kind of poetry to their horror.

With the exception of Mister Lonely, your movies feel very distinctly American. What is it about those specifically American landscapes and people that interest you? Well, it just makes sense to me. There are certain colors, things, and lights that I always found attractive. It’s just like anything else. They become a part of you, the American landscape, the geography, the strip malls, the urban sprawl, and the trash bins and the overhead lampposts and soiled couches. They become like characters or permanent fixtures. There’s a kind of street vernacular, or a rural vernacular that I just always loved, the way it looked and felt. After awhile, it feels like home.

Both Trash Humpers and Gummo seem like tributes to small-town America, revealing them as places which can be gross but also beautiful and freeing. Yeah. I would say it’s closer to Gummo than probably anything else that I’ve done just because of the similar locations.

And is this the direction that you see yourself continuing in? No, I think movies are just like moods or ideas, and you feel a certain way at a certain time and you want to explore that. The next movie hopefully that I’ll make will be very different from Trash Humpers. But at the same time, there’s always some kind of connectedness at least in theme or character-wise. It’s always a singular body of work. I kind of look at them all as being partners in crime.

Keep the tap dancing in. I’d like to see that being a common thread. Yeah, I promise you there’ll be tap dancing in every fucking movie I make.

That’s good. Do you know what the next movie is? Well, I can’t really talk about it, because it’s like a jinx. But it’s something I wrote ,so hopefully if it works out ... it should be funny.