Harmony Korine Quotes

What I remember myself from films, and what I love about films, is specific scenes and characters.

Spaceman 3 was one of my favorite bands growing up, and Jason Spaceman is someone I got along well with. I always felt his music was like narcotic gospel - there's something very moody and ethereal about it. Sun City Girls is the same, but different. To me, they're like the premier American avant music act. They're like the Marx brothers of music. I don't mean they're funny like that, but they turn everything on its head.

I've always been pulled toward people who can't seem to make anything fit. It's like a cinema of isolation, of loneliness. They go outside the system and create their own society to develop their obsession to an insane degree.

A lot of times you can write a scene with a specific song in mind, and then you lay it over the image, and it kills it. I can never figure out why certain music works. Some music you listen to and say, "Man, that would be great for a movie." But when you try it, it's horrible, because the music itself is cinematic. The weight of it kills the image.

Rap is the only interesting music left - it's the only genre that's still pushing itself, and experimenting in a way that I find exciting.

I've just always liked watching people dance. I can't explain it. It used to just make me laugh. Sometimes you can tell a lot about a person by the way they shake their ass.

I never cared so much about making perfect sense. I wanted to make perfect nonsense.

I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze through it until the next scene. That was the thing about vaudeville: You didn't have to worry about the beginning and ends of these things.

I like things that are never one way. Usually, emotionally, I make the films based on a type of energy. I try to work with things that are more difficult to articulate. And so, that's more of a feeling. And so, the things that have attracted me are more of the things that are morally complicated or emotionally complicated.

Directing, to me, starts even before we get to the set. Directing is a fluid, an abstract thing. It's not done only purely in the moment. It's an idea that you plant before. It's a location that you show. It's something I whisper in someone's ear. It's a freeform thing. It only takes me a week to write the script, but it's years that you're thinking about it. The execution is really the fast part.

For me, making a movie is kind of like vomiting. Not that film is like vomit, but more like this mass of ideas and thoughts that you have and just have to put them out there. It's not even about making perfect sense - it's more about making perfect nonsense. I don't do too much soul-searching or self-analysis. I just enjoy making things.

For certain things, certain audiences, people will laugh. And in other places, there's dead silence. And I enjoy them both. You try to make films where it's never one way - like life.

I just haven't let myself get to a place where I've felt a part of any kind of a community, so I've always stayed outside of it.

Everything has to have some kind of a point for people to breathe easy. What's the point of life? I have no clue, but sometimes there are things that just attract us and pull us in a certain way.

After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.

The first time I hung out with [David Blaine], he took me to this condemned building, and it had a pizza oven and he crawled into the pizza oven and turned the heat on to 400 degrees or something like that, and he stayed in it for I guess a half hour. He came out, and except for one or two second-degree burns, he was unscathed. You meet a lot of musicians and filmmakers and actors, but it's rare to meet someone who can step inside a pizza oven and take the heat. I was intrigued by that.

I tried working odd jobs that had nothing to do with creating, and it was difficult for me. In the end, I just always loved movies. When I'm making a film I feel most alive, like I'm doing the right thing, and I'm in the place where I need to be.

Life is beautiful. Really, it is. Full of beauty and illusions. Life is great. Without it, you'd be dead.

I see things in a specific way. All the films are different. There are specific characters and scenes and locations and ideas. There are colors I want to see. There are movements and things ... The films are different, but the approach is the same.

I have no desire for any type of introspection at all. I don't ever ask myself any questions. I don't want answers.

I've never been into alternative, hipster rap music.

Gucci Mane is trap rap's Frank Sinatra.

Even Gene Kelly: I always preferred him to Fred Astaire, just because he was more athletic, like skateboarding. His leaps were big. There was something really great about his moves.

Often the biggest dreamers get hurt the most. They were pure in their insanity and in their isolation. They were living the dream amongst themselves and didn’t realize it. It’s when they invited the public inside their world that everything went wrong.

I just wanted it to be American.

I like working with family and friends and people I admire. All my movies are filled with family members of some capacity. I think it means more when you have a personal relationship with someone.

If Richard Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the 'Great Art Form' would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.

A scientist shouldn't be asked to judge the economic and moral value of his work. All we should ask the scientist to do is find the truth and then not keep it from anyone.

Editing is fun for me. That's where you make things happen. Filming a movie, I just try to set things up and see where it goes. Editing is a puzzle. I often don't even know what I'm trying to say. I'm just trying to make myself laugh. That's it. It's musical, or something.