"I just knew what it was like to be lonely and down on your luck in a place that’s really beautiful, like Paris."
In selected theaters now is Mister Lonely, a strange, quiet little film from director Harmony Korine once described as "the future of American cinema" by the legendary Werner Herzog, who happens to have a role in the film himself. It's about a soft-spoken Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who joins commune of celebrity impersonators - featuring a touching performance by Samantha Morton as Marilyn Monroe and an unsettling one by Denis Lavant as her husband, Charlie Chaplin - and begins to find a home among their simple lifestyle free of judgmental eyes. That is until they start to seek recognition by putting on "the greatest show in history." This is underscored by an allegorical parallel story in which a group of nuns discover that their faith is true enough that the can skydive without parachutes and live to dive again, until their miracle is to be ordained by the Pope himself.
Korine, the writer of Larry Clark's Kids and the director of julien donkey-boy, talks about his latest work and the rough spots in his life that inspired it.
On the inspiration for the film:
I just started dreaming – having these lucid dreams, images, visions of nuns jumping out of airplanes. Nuns riding bicycles in the clouds, doing tricks. Surviving. Around the time of my last movie, something happened to me and I just didn’t feel like making movies anymore. I just felt like I couldn’t do it anymore. I spent eight years doing other things, and then around this time, I just started to think ‘well, maybe I could do it again, I have these visions.” Then I called up my little brother [Avi Korine] and asked him to come write with me.
On the choices of who the characters would be impersonating:
I wanted to stay away from Elvis. Elvis is toxic or something, I don’t know. They needed to be instantly recognizable, they needed to be iconic, and then they were also people whose mythology could bleed into the narrative, the actual story. So I could take certain attributes from different characters – certain things from Marilyn and Charlie’s sadistic tendencies – and I could make things bleed. Then, most importantly, they were people who I liked, and I knew I’d never get to direct James Dean or Sammy Davis Jr., and I’d never actually get to hang out with the Three Stooges. This was as close to that as I could get.
On his choice of subject matter:
Ever since I was little, I’ve always been attracted to marginalized characters or strange characters - people who live outside of the system, people who invent it as they go, people who make up their own logic, design their own lives. Isolated people. In my experiences, there’s an inherent drama there, because those people are the biggest dreamers, so it’s easiest for them to get hurt. Both the nuns, the missionaries who fly, and also the impersonators, are examples of that.
Watch the Mister Lonely trailer.
Watch Michael Jackson entertain at a retirement home.
Watch Marilyn Monroe chat up Michael Jackson.
Watch Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe take a walk together.
Romantic tension with Marilyn and Michael.
On working with actual film over digital photography:
I just have no loyalty to any technology. I don’t really feel like anything is better than the other. I know there are certain things image-wise or format-wise that I feel a stronger emotional tie to, but I would have no compunction about shooting an entire movie on a camera phone. I just don’t really care. The aesthetics are dictated mostly by the characters, the story and the feeling that you’re trying to get across. All the movies I’ve made reflected my emotional state at the time of making them. With Gummo or julien, I wanted images coming from all directions. A lot of it was about creating chaos and shooting it on all formats and making sense of it later. With this, I felt the story was maybe slightly more classic, and I wanted to go with creating the image, making beautiful pictures, and that’s why we shot on 35mm. I just wanted something slightly more romantic.
I can’t play instruments, and I can’t really improvise myself – filmmaking, there’s something studied and stunted about it. So I like the idea of trying to play the camera like you’d play an instrument, to improvise, invent it as you go, to riff on it. Shooting at different speeds, camera placement, really long lenses. I try to entertain myself with it. I try to make everything interesting.
On how Werner Herzog got involved:
Werner is a friend of mine, he was perfect. When I think of an alcoholic jungle priest, I think Werner. He’s someone I knew has an affinity with vultures that fly in the sky in that part of the jungle. So when I told him there were a lot of vultures in the sky, he jumped on an airplane and came out there.
On the moving scene at the airport, where Werrner's priest character elicits a confession and comforts a man waiting for his wife to arrive:
That was one of those really special scenes. One of those things that you hope for, what I live for as a filmmaker. We were setting up a shot, and we were by this little airport in the jungle. I saw Werner between takes out of the corner of my eye, talking to this guy holding these roses, and the guy was crying. I walked up to Werner and he said [affecting a thick German accent] “Come quick, put the camera on me right now. There is something very special going to happen. Please hurry up, do not waste time.” So that’s all we did. We just stuck the camera on him. I’d seen this guy, he was kind of the village idiot. Werner had gotten this guy’s story, and what you saw is basically how it happened. This is a guy whose wife left him years ago, and he comes to the airport every day with these roses, waiting for her to get off the airplane. He’s waiting for her to come back. Werner somehow figured out that he fornicated with four or five women, and that’s why his wife left him. It wasn’t just one woman, because he would deny that. Finally Werner said “it was four women,” and the guy said “yes, yes, how did you know?” Werner said “I read your heart.” That’s when the guy begins to break down.
I flew back there a couple months ago to visit my parents and he was still there. He was drunk and he said “where’s the preist?” I would guarantee you he’s still there right now.
On choosing the locations:
Originally, the movie was set in Iceland. I wanted it to seem almost lunar, really magical. The landscape was almost otherworldly, like a subtle science fiction. We went to Iceland and found a cool location, and I knocked on this woman’s door and when she answered it in a sheer nightgown. She was middle-aged and naked underneath the nightgown and she was crying, black makeup running down her face. Completely naked, and the lights in her house were all on, so it was shocking. She said she wanted to take us to the barn behind the house. We went and opened the door, and she had three black, dead horses that were frozen with their legs sticking straight up. I got creeped out, I said “let’s get out of here.” I decided not to shoot in Iceland. I took it as an omen.
On the inspiraton drawn from his own troubled life in Paris:
I was really down on my luck. I had turned into a bum. I wasn’t doing so well, and it’s no secret I was a fan of narcotics. I couldn’t speak French, and I started forgetting everyone’s phone numbers. I would write them on my wall, but all the digits were all six times too long. It started doing a number on my head. At a certain point, the only friends I felt I had was the furniture in the house. The chair, “how’s it goin’?” I just knew what it was like to be lonely and down on your luck in a place that’s really beautiful, like Paris.
