By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Korine cinema: 'Mr. Lonely' is not going to be a Prozac film
An unofficial Harmony Korine website has posted the writer-director’s interview with Screen International’s Fionnuala Hannigan about his latest, possible Cannes-bound picture, Mr. Lonely. [PDF download]. Korine talks about how his “dark years” got him to his new, $8.2 million movie, produced by designer-cineaste agnes b. (with costume contributions as well), collaborating with DP Marcel Zyskin (a frequent colleague of Michael Winterbottom), rehab, burning down two houses, and becoming a British resident. “Shot in the jungles of Panama (where Korine’s parents live), Scotland and Paris, Mr. Lonely is about a Michael Jackson impersonator, played by Diego Luna, who runs into a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton). He winds up in a Scottish-based commune of impersonators, including Marilyn’s husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and their daughter Shirley Temple, [as well as] the Queen of England (Anita Pallenberg), the Pope (James Fox)… and Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange).” (The Panama portion stars David Blaine and Werner Herzog.) “I’d been making movies since I was virtually a kid,” Korine tells Hannigan, “and it had always come very easily. At a certain point after [julien donkey-boy, I started to have this general disconnect from things. I was really miserable with where I was. I began to lose sight of things and people started to become more and more distant. I was burned out, movies were what I always loved in life and I started to not care. I went deeper and deeper into a dark place and to be honest movies were the last thing I was thinking about—I didn’t know if I was going to be alive. My dream was to evaporate. I was unhealthy. Whatever happened during that time, and I won’t go into details, maybe it was somekthing I need to go through.” Of the finished product, the mind behind Gummo assures, “It’s not going to be a Prozac film.”