"I had been a fan of [Harmony] Korine since his 1997 directorial debut, the disturbingly quirky Gummo. However, I had no idea that the fidgety, punky livewire I recently spent two hours chatting with at a London party was Korine. I never thought to ask him what work he did — we were laughing too much, exchanging ever-more outrageous stories, and comparing near-death experiences. Only when I was leaving the party did we exchange phone numbers. A week later, as I was about to fly to Los Angeles for a three-month run of the Tom Waits/Robert Wilson/William Burroughs theatrical collaboration The Black Rider, Korine called me and announced: 'Hey, I want you to play Abe Lincoln in my new movie. We film in the Highlands of Scotland, June through August. Do the dates work?'" Thus begins actor Richard Strange's account of how he can to appear in Harmony Korine's latest freak-out: Mister Lonely, set in "an isolated commune for retired impersonators. A place where everyone is famous and no one gets old." (The cast also includes directors Werner Herzog and Leos Carax, Samantha Morton as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson stand-in, and "a man who looked worryingly like Larry, the shock-headed klutz from The Three Stooges.") The piece includes descriptions of Korine at work that will just sound bizarre if you're unfamiliar with his films but are oddly reassuring if you've seen them: "Although Mister Lonely is scripted, Harmony used the script as a working sketch rather than the finished painting. One day, having rehearsed a scene in which we are planning a barbecue for the newly arrived Michael Jackson, Harmony leaned towards me to whisper, 'You are not going to do any of that. I want you to tell them about your experience of acid and napalm in the Vietnam war,' and left chuckling. His directorial style is akin to that of the solicitous hostess of a cocktail party who makes sure that all her guests have their glasses charged, then leaves the room, lobs in a mace grenade, and locks the door." If nothing else, it does sound about like what you'd expect.
Korine, who recently turned thirty-five, is now a married man — his wife, Rachel, appears in Mister Lonely as Little Red Riding Hood — and Strange describes him as now being "cleaner and happier than he has been for many years." (Oddly enough, it's the second part of that combo that seems to me the bigger shocker: he's always seemed unaccountably jolly to me. Trying to imagine him even happier just makes me picture Ed Wynn floating around his study in Mary Poppins.) If nothing else, Mister Lonely will qualify as some kind of event for marking the reunion of two of the stars of the 1970 Performance: Anita Pallenberg, who plays an impersonator of the Queen of England, and James Fox, as Pope John Paul II. Legend has it making Performance weirded Fox out to such a degree that it caused him to retire from acting for almost fifteen years. Now that he's had the experience of being directed by Harmony ("Do a card trick with your ass sticking out, then dance like you're in a swamp"), we may never see him again. Certainly none of Fox's or even Anita's old associates can tell their director anything new about self-destructive behavior. He told Strange that his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor "didn't go out for four years. He stayed in a room, and shat in pizza boxes. He felt bugs under the skin, and used a 100-watt light-bulb to burn them out. Then poured disinfectant on the burns. If you want to know what pain is, try that." Or, if you really want to know what pain is, see Julien Donkey-Boy...