It's maybe the most revealing and personal film Korine has ever made about art and life and how they relate: Moondog, like Korine, lives a life that aspires, in its wildness and freedom, to art; the art itself is just something he does occasionally, although very well, along the way.
In one scene, a nosy, inquisitive journalist visits Moondog in Florida to ask the poet about his past: Are the stories true? Did Moondog really do all the wild, reckless things he was rumored to have done?
Korine and I were standing on a second-floor deck in Miami talking one afternoon when I told him I couldn't help but feel like we were re-enacting scenes from The Beach Bum. That, in some ways, I wondered if he'd written it in anticipation of this moment, here in the February sun, and all the moments like it before that Korine's endured in real life.
But let's just say, when his dad was—uh, I was probably the background music to a few people in the pot business before legalization was around.
And so the movie—that's what it is, it's a cosmic America. It's an energy that kind of travels through. Korine's studio is in Miami's Design District, on the second floor of a shopping mall. On the day I visited, he was wearing a baseball hat with a nautical emblem on it, a striped button-down shirt, and baseball cleats with metal spikes that echoed on the mall tile.
Few people have ever looked so obviously mischievous. It was impossible to tell how sincere this explanation was. The studio itself is a wide, carpeted room with two walls of windows, which Korine had blacked out last year in order to edit The Beach Bum. Now sunlight shone in on a series of paintings Korine had made for an upcoming exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in New York.
They were beautiful in the way that most of the images Korine has made as an adult are beautiful: shimmering with color, streaked with yellows and blues. One painting depicted his wife, Rachel, and newborn son, Hank.
Another depicted what looked like his kitchen. On many of them, crude ghosts, sleeping or skateboarding or just observing, had been painted on top of otherwise domestic scenes.
Korine has always been a compulsive maker of things: zines, paintings, drawings, films, photographs, poems, myths, books, screenplays. All day, it was just coming to me. Now, at 46, Korine has a little more control over his own creativity, he said. But his studio is still dense with the products of his overflowing mind: Cohiba cigar boxes painted in bright colors, scrawled with Korine's child-like writing.
He showed me a bound manuscript that he said was a book of poems that he wrote entirely on his iPhone, using the Tom Hanks typewriter app. The manuscript's title was Destiny's Aborted Child. Korine led me back out of his studio, through the empty mall, to an unfinished outdoor balcony on the building's second floor.
From the concrete at our feet, he picked up a mostly smoked nub of a discarded cigar off the ground and lit it. We blinked in the sun. Korine and his family moved down to Miami from Nashville six or seven years ago. That's mostly what drew me to it in the first place: the redness of the sky, palm trees, salt water, the breeze, the iguanas, flamingos, the extreme wealth, the extreme hood—all smacked up against each other.
I like places that are undefinable. The history is only like years here, so it's really just inventing itself. I could never live in Europe or somewhere like that, because the history is so foreboding. In Miami, he said, he could smoke cigars, ride his bike on the boardwalk, go fishing in the Keys, visit the dog track.
His kids could go outside. He could spend most of his time painting and enjoying an unobserved life. For money, he directed music videos and commercials—one or two a year, for companies that he didn't find it humiliating to work for. He shot a Gucci campaign last month, he told me. Like Moondog in The Beach Bum , Korine seems to make the work he's best known for only when he's compelled to.
I never really understood the directors who have, like, ten projects lined up. I don't really trust those types of people. How do you map it all out like that? I can't trust you. How do you know what you're gonna be like tomorrow?
Shortly after Korine made Spring Breakers and then moved to Miami, he tried to make a violent gangster movie called The Trap. But he couldn't get the schedules of the actors he wanted—at various times, both Jamie Foxx and Benicio Del Toro were attached to the project—to line up; by the time he could, he'd moved on.
I wanted to laugh. It's almost like a chemical reaction. As a young filmmaker, Korine often talked about how bored he was with conventional Hollywood films.
He still feels that way. They were good. But I wanted it to only be pure joy, where you can just watch a scene and laugh.
That's why I loved Cheech and Chong so much. Because you could just stop and start anywhere, and they're always funny. Korine's definition of humor is not the same as most people's. In The Beach Bum , which is cheerful and even wholesome by the standards of Korine's often harsh past work, Moondog and Efron's character tip over a guy's wheelchair and rob him, among other dubiously moral acts. Korine's films, since the very beginning, have been full of people behaving badly in front of an appreciative camera—a world of id, without a superego in sight.
There's no self-censor. He's just a sensualist. Whatever feels good, he just acts on it. So he does good, and he does bad. When Korine was growing up, vaudevillians were his heroes. Fields falls down some steps. Buster Keaton robs the bank teller. It's a comedy. The actor revealed his friend had told him he was banned for pushing Streep backstage, adding: "Harmony is a very sane guy now, a great artist and great person to work with, but I think he had a period where he was going a little off the rails, so maybe he was on something that night.
Letterman then revealed the true story behind the incident in public for the first time. True story. And so I said: 'That's it, put her things back in her bag and then get out. Letterman said he would now be happy to have the director, who completed rehab more than a decade ago, back on his show. Korine, who wrote the controversial film Kids for director Larry Clark at the age of 19, has described the period as a "crazy time" that he could not live through again.
On Monday, his good friend and Spring Breakers star James Franco appeared on the show, where he proceeded to prod its host into explaining just why Korine had gotten the boot. Letterman played coy, pretending not to remember the three interviews, but then asked Franco to tell him what he had heard about the mysterious incident.
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