Harmony’s “Humpers” Hits NYFF

Harmony Korine and Richard Pena at the New York Film Festival press conference for “Trash Humpers.” Photo by Peter Knegt.

“They kind of seemed like they lived in the shadows,” he said. “And I guess what it is, is that I live in a place that allows me to close my eyes and just dream and fantasize and let my thoughts go in certain directions. With this movie, I just started by putting these images and ideas together. It started out as photographs. I would dress my assistant up like these characters and go out late at night with these really bad disposable cameras and just kind of photograph him. I used these images as a kind of template for this movie.”

Korine started filming “Humpers” four months ago, and said that made for a much more liberating process compared to this last film, “Mr. Lonely.”

“The experience I had with my last movie was really terrible,” he said. “The making of it was great, but everything that surrounded it was awful - in how long it took and in how frustrating the process was. I wouldn’t say that movies need to change, but the way in which films are made, maybe, needs to change. It’s too slow. It’s too inhibiting. It costs too much money. There seems to be an opposition to experimentation. And so, I wanted to get to a point where I could just kind of have an idea. The way a painter would have an image that he could just quickly begin to paint. I wanted to do something like that with movies.”

Korine said he wanted to make “Humpers” as quickly as he could think up the idea. So he figured out some locations and gathered some friends to help him, and then started filming.

“Once I took these photos and I figured out what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it, the whole shoot was like a little over two weeks,” he said. “And it was kind of like real time. We were just out there wandering around. Most of the time we didn’t even have cars. We would just walk through tunnels and under bridges and swamps and go into houses, just knocking on doors.  That was it. Once we were committed to those characters and that kind of psychotic behavior, it was more about losing yourself in it.  So in the way it was directed - I would just close my eyes and say, ‘just go.’”

Korine cautioned that taking in “Humpers” under the expectations of what most consider a “movie” could be problematic. 

“Maybe it’s not a movie,” he said. “I’ll be the first to say it. Maybe it’s something else. I wanted to make something that’s more like an artifact. Something that was unearthed. Something that was found. And you can imagine it buried in a ditch somewhere, and you just happen upon this old VHS tape. So, once the characters worked themselves out and we figured out how we were going to do it techincally, it became a kind of journey. What you see very much resembles the way we did it.”

“Trash Humpers” screens at the New York Film Festival again tonight. It currently does not have distribution.

[Eugene Hernandez contributed to this article.]