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office magazine issue 5 - Harmony Korine

October 31, 2016

Introduction Marc Palatucci
Photography Stef Mitchell
Styling Zara Mirkin

Harmony Korine
in conversation with
James Franco

I’m trying to get Harmony on the phone. Rather, I’ve got him on the phone, but as I’m realizing with heart-wrenching panic, the overlapping recording apps I’ve opened to ensure I capture the conversation have created an echo chamber, parroting every word we speak in psychedelic recursion. Harmony’s too entertained to be fazed. We’ve arranged for him to talk with actor and artist James Franco, a recent collaborator of his, who mercifully has yet to join the call. Meanwhile Harmony ad libs with the eerie sound effects, amusing himself as I scramble to sort things out.

As a writer, director and artist, Harmony Korine loves to experiment with discomfort. His script for Kids, written for photographer and director Larry Clark after the two struck up a conversation in Washington Square Park, tracks a wayward group of downtown New York teens satisfying adolescent compulsions—fucking, fighting, getting high—with the looming dread of AIDS casting the story in a particularly harrowing light. The now infamous film, shot with convincing realism and released in 1995, made audiences squirm and kicked off Korine’s career with high-profile controversy. Over the next two decades he would write and direct about twenty projects, from shorts to features, continuing to polarize but often impressing critics and festival juries by sowing his oddly intimate brand of unease by casting non-actors, disarranging narrative structures, and providing insight into deranged and neglected pockets of America. With his most recent film, the backwater Florida crime caper Spring Breakers, he used guns, girls, and stars—including Franco, Selena Gomez and rapper Gucci Mane—to reach a more traditional viewership with a tale of bikini-clad party girls drawn in and quickly corrupted by a showy dope dealer. Though more garish and glamorized than his earlier work, the movie is characteristic of his canon—unsettling, bizarrely entertaining and sordidly human.

Minutes later our technical issues have been sorted, nerves have settled, James has joined us on the line and the audio is clear. But as I preface the call and do my best to gracefully settle into my role as eavesdropper, Harmony just can’t help but to make things weird, leaving me with a wry, discomfiting threat.

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