VENICE - Harmony Korine made his first splash as the screenwriter of the 1995 sensation “Kids,†which was both hailed and denounced for its in-your-face depiction of sexually active, substance-abusing teenagers. His latest film, “Spring Breakers,†is another generational portrait of youthful debauchery, but Mr. Korine, at 39, is observing from the outside this time.
With “Spring Breakers,†shown this week in the official competition at the Venice Film Festival, Mr. Korine has also gone from his grubbiest film - “Trash Humpers,†from 2009, was shot on lo-fi video - to his glossiest. But early claims that this nominal heist movie could be a commercial breakthrough for this perpetual troublemak er are perhaps misleading. “Spring Breakers†lives up to its title with plenty of slo-mo booze- and bong-fueled girls-gone-wild montages, but above all it's a strange and stylized trance film, in which the glazed heroines' repeatedly murmured refrain - “Spring break forever†- goes from hollow wish to nightmare come true.
The skeletal plot follows the misadventures of four college friends (the Disney Channel alumni Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, with Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine, the director's wife), on what they hope will be a riotous and spiritually transcendent vacation in St. Petersburg, Fla. Things turn positively surreal when they fall in with Alien (James Franco), a cornrowed, metal-mouthed rapper who serenades them with a Britney Spears ballad. (“Spring Breakers,†which is also being shown this weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, will be released by Annapurna Pictures in the United States.)
On Wednesday, before and after the film's official screening, the Excelsior Hotel, where most of the festival's VIP guests stay, was swarming with young fans, many of them clutching photographs of Ms. Gomez. Mr. Korine and Mr. Franco spoke to us in a small, windowless meeting room at the hotel. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:
Harmony, you've said that your films usually begin with images that you want to put on screen. What was the starting point in this case?
Harmony Korine: I was sitting at home daydreaming, and just had this image of girls on a beach, with ski masks and bikinis and guns, holding up tourists. I thought there was something iconic and strange about it. I started to think, well, if that was really to exist, where would it be, and I started thinking about spring break: as a place and as a cultural metaphor maybe.
Did you both ever experience spring break?
James Franco: I didn't. I went to UCLA but left after a year. I went back later but I was too ol d to go on spring break. I would've been like Alien.
Korine: I never went either. I grew up in Nashville, and in high school, all the kids would go to Daytona - we called it Redneck Riviera - and when I started to write, I felt like I needed to be there. But I flew to Daytona Beach and there was no spring break there - it had all changed, there were just these fat bikers who had run them out. So I went to Panama City, Fla., and I wrote the whole movie in nine days, staying in three hotels. Kids were vomiting on my door, having sex in the hallways, listening to Taylor Swift 24 hours a day, it was pretty unbelievable.
Franco: One of the cool things about working with Harmony is the script is just a blueprint. It's what we start with, but he's great at finding inspiring images or videos on the Internet for reference. And when we finally picked St. Petersburg to shoot, he found real people at the locations who then became part of the fabric.
Korine: I wanted to make something that was free and liquid and boozy and without time. I wanted the movie to be about surfaces and look like it was lit with Skittles candy. You don't want it to be shallow, but you want it to be about the way things look and feel, and a lot of it was about going there and finding the right places.
The trancelike feeling you're talking about - a lot of that comes from the editing and the music. James, how much of that was apparent in the script?
Korine: [to Franco] You probably figured it out when we started doing the same scene in different locations over and over again, right?
Franco: I had a sense that it was going to jump around in different ways. But it's not as if that inhibited me - I felt like I could just go for it. But even when you sent me that first treatment, you said I want this to feel like a Britney Spears video meets a Gaspar Noé film, which says a lot.
Korine: Britney's like a cultural touchstone for the film. Thematic ally she runs through it. She's like the beginning of this generation. There's a pathos to her, and I thought of these girls kind of as the spawns of Britney.
How did you both conceptualize the character of Alien?
Korine: I liked the idea of Alien not being what you think he is. There's something a bit hippie-ish about him. He's someone you find miles and miles away from the boardwalk in a dilapidated house but he has stacks of gold in the closet and shotguns on the bed, living on the water, maybe he takes pictures of dolphins in his backyard and then goes back and sells drugs on the corner. I wanted him to be an amalgamation of different types: he's a beach bum, he's a murderer, he's sensitive, he's dangerous, he's like a gangster mystic. The mannerisms came from older Southern rappers. I would send James clips of them, and say hey I love the way this guy Tommy Wright III speaks, or Project Pat.
Franco:Â I knew that Harmony wanted to make the film very fl ashy on the surface, and I thought there should be something in the character that goes with that but also something that pushes back against it. In the scene where the girls pull the guns on him, originally we were thinking, this is when Alien gets really scared. But then before shooting, we thought, actually it's probably a huge turn-on for him.
Harmony, can you talk about the casting of the actresses? And James, what was it like working with young performers for whom a film like this was presumably a new experience?
Korine: These girls were who I always wanted to cast because I felt like it had more meaning - they're representative of a culture and of a world. Once they signed up it was more about making them relaxed. I tried to create an environment that allows things to happen. Trust was everything.
Franco: There's a lot of energy that's generated just by putting them in this context. But as performers, I think Harmony got so much out of them because t hey're so eager to do something different that they gave it their all. I came in halfway through the shoot and they were raring to go.
For many Selena Gomez fans I assume this will be their first encounter with a Harmony Korine movie - that is, if they're actually allowed to watch it.
Korine: It's maybe taboo to say this but I made the movie for those kids to see as well. I don't know what age groups will be allowed to watch the movie but I was thinking about them as much as anyone. A lot of people accuse that generation of being soulless and without any type of merit or poetry or anything, and I felt the movie was in some ways an exploration of the poetry that's in their world.
Besides Britney Spears and Gaspar Noé, were there any other reference points?
Korine: A lot of it came from things I'd experimented with when shooting ads and trying different techniques. The movie I watched most, believe it or not, was Michael Mann's “Miami Vice.†The re ason I love his movies, and that movie in particular, is I could feel the place. When I watch that film, I don't even pay attention to what they're saying or the storyline. I love the colors, I love the texture.
Michael Mann, I'm sure you aware, is the jury president here.
Korine: It's crazy, right? There's a kind of poetry to it.
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