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April 11, 2008 9:48 am
When photographer and video artist Brent Stewart chanced upon Harmony Korine in London five years ago, they were two Southern boys far from home and happy to hear a familiar accent. But the meeting proved to be one of like minds, as well: Korine and Stewart both wound up settling back down in Nashville, where a local filmmaking scene has blossomed around their friendship. O’Salvation!, the production company Korine founded with Agnès B., helped get Stewart’s short film projects off the ground; Stewart has returned the favor by keeping tabs on “Mister Lonely,” Korine’s first film since 1999’s “Julien Donkey-Boy.” Stewart’s fly-on-the-wall documentary about the “Mister Lonely” shoot, “The Lonely,” will be released later this year; tonight, meanwhile, his photographs from Korine’s set go on show at the Agnès B. boutique in Beverly Hills as part of the L.A. Art Weekend festivities. Here, Stewart tells Style.com about what Little Red Riding Hood and Abraham Lincoln get up to when they hang out together, and why French sportswear and Deep South cockfighting have more to do with each other than one might assume.
You and Korine seem to have been working pretty closely together for the past few years. When you met, was it one of those cases of instant creative simpatico?
I’m not sure I’d go that far—I mean, we liked each other, and I was already a fan of his work, but at the time we were both pretty involved in our own stuff. I was getting my MFA at Goldsmiths in London; he was there working on the David Blaine documentary for British TV. The connection was more basic—I think there was a level of regional identification. The work relationship didn’t really get off the ground until we were both back in Nashville.
Samantha Morton and Diego Luna star in “Mister Lonely,” and as best as I can tell from the synopsis, the movie actually has, you know, a plot. Is this Korine’s big commercial picture?
Well, there’s something to that. It is pretty straight-ahead for Harmony, but then again, I mean, the movie’s about a Michael Jackson impersonator and a Marilyn Monroe impersonator who travel to an impersonator commune at a castle in Scotland. So I’m not sure “commercial” is exactly the word. And then there’s the parallel subplot, with Werner Herzog playing a priest, and a flying nun.…
That must have been a rather odd set.
Oh, man—just fascinating. You’d have these actors playing impersonators, and some of them, like the guy who played the Charlie Chaplin impersonator, they’d just stay in character through the whole shoot. The most interesting moments, to me, were the ones in between takes, where you really couldn’t tell who was in character and who wasn’t—I’d look through the camera lens and there would be Little Red Riding Hood and Abraham Lincoln, chatting it up with Sammy Davis, Jr., and meanwhile Chaplin’s blowing by on his unicycle, playing a pennywhistle. I just kept shooting.
Was the documentary intended as more of a companion piece to “Mister Lonely,” or will people be able to get it without seeing the film?
They might get more from it if they see the film, but I tried really hard to make the doc immersive and experiential and cinematic enough that it wouldn’t just feel like a behind-the-scenes DVD extra. Having said that, it may wind up as a DVD extra. In Japan, anyway.
Korine seems to be spearheading quite the filmmaking renaissance in Nashville these days; he helped make your short “Blackberry Winter,” for example. What does that scene look like from the ground?
The big thing is that Harmony paired up with Agnès B. on starting O’Salvation!—they’re not just doing indie films, they’re doing art projects and getting into some book publishing, too. So, yeah, they got behind “Blackberry Winter” and this other short I made with James Clauer, “Aluminum Fowl.” That one played everywhere—Sundance, Cannes, you name it. Kind of a crazy movie, about two brothers into cockfighting down in Louisiana. O’Salvation! is helping me get my next short done, too; this one’s a narrative based on a feature script I wrote. Two Mennonite sisters take their first trip into mainstream America, and it’s like they’re aliens watching us consume. I guess that’s one thing Harmony and I do have in common, creatively. We’re both interested in the people on the outside.
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