He rocketed to notoriety at 19 with the shocking film Kids. Now, at 51, he’s smoking two fat cigars for breakfast – and making retina-burning work with acids and infrared cameras. Our writer gets deep with the eternal enfant terrible
ave you ever wondered whether the interview you’re about to read is actually real? Are you reading it thanks to your own free will, or are you merely set on a preprogrammed course that’s entirely out of your control? Is everything just code? Are we a simulation?, who is the first interviewee I’ve ever had respond to one of my questions by wondering whether or not I actually exist.
It’s 10 o’clock in the morning when we meet at a London art gallery and Korine has already started the day in his favourite way – by smoking two fat cigars.“I can’t really think unless I have a cigar,” he says, reaching into his jacket to show me a pristine Padrón he’s saving for later. I tell him that I can’t think of anything I’d want less first thing in the morning.Korine didn’t make his name by obeying convention.
Although Korine’s younger years are often depicted as a period of unruly delinquency – fights, drugs, skateboarding – for as long as he can remember he was also painting, making collages, writing things. “It wasn’t, like,,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to be a painter or whatever, I was just fucking around. When I was a kid, I could pick up a ukulele and just hit a string for hours and hours and hours. In my mind, it was like the greatest thing.
“I just burned out. I couldn’t handle it and I didn’t even know if that’s what I wanted to do,” he says, although his description of his wilderness years is rather different from the crack cocaine stories of lore. “I just started, like, mowing lawns,” he says. “Delivering flowers.”“Yeah. I even did that recently, for a couple of weeks. I thought, well, the people that deliver flowers get to go to all these houses and condos that I’ve never seen before in Miami, which is where I live now.
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