Director Harmony Korine describes how he made Spring Breakers and turned four college girls' quest to extend spring break forever (bitches!) into a hypercolored ecstasy trip through the teenage psyche.
Harmony Korine grew up in New York City at the turn of the 90s. When he was 18, he co-wrote the indie blockbuster Kids with director Larry Clark, based on the skaters, truants, and burgeoning druggies he hung out with in lower Manhattan. It was one of the first major films in which teenagers actually acted and spoke (and fucked) like real teens—which was alternately refreshing, extremely hot, and completely fucking terrifying.
Following Kids' success, Harmony began making his own films, starting with 1997's Gummo, a surreal rural mirror-take on Kids' city youth, and moving into increasingly experimental turf from the Dogme 95-certified Julian Donkeyboy to the aborted Fight Film (in which Harmony went to bars to pick fights on camera, resulting in his hospitalization) to the stunningly gorgeous Mister Lonely, all the way to 2009's Trash Humpers, which even he admitted he couldn't believe was a real movie somebody let him put out.
Spring Breakers is a return to Harmony Korine's original stomping grounds: It's about horny young Floridians and what they do with their bodies and lives, but it's also a dizzying visual tribute to the sex-drenched minds of American youth that sympathizes with its subjects' desires. It may end up being the biggest influence on teenage partying since Animal House.