Harmony Korine on Quentin Tarantino: “there’s a void there”
Few directors have proven to be quite as divisive as Quentin Tarantino. To some, the Pulp Fiction director is the last true Hollywood auteur, an enfant terrible with his sticky fingers on the shutter button. Others are less dazzled by Tarantino’s daring filmography. Take Harmony Korine, perhaps best known for directing 2012’s Spring Breakers.
Born in California in 1973, Korine wrote the critically-claimed screenplay for 1995’s Kids when he was just 19 years old. Two years later, he began work on a triptych of films called Jokes, which were left unfinished. Still, he was young, something that couldn’t be said for Quentin Tarantino, who was already well into his 30s when he found success with Reservoir Dogs.
Korine was compared to Tarantino from the off. “I mean, he’s 15 years older than me. That’s a totally different generation,” Korine told Roger Ebert when asked how he felt about being compared to the rising provocateur. “Someone wrote, ‘We don’t need another Boy Wonder at Cannes.’ And I was, like – well, I don’t think he’s a boy, and it’s like, he’s not my generation. There’s no one making movies that’s my generation, you know; no one’s as young as me.”
While Korine may have seemed a little flustered at first, he went on to give a more rounded criticism of Tarantino’s work. “I’m not a video brat. I don’t derive all my inspiration through movies. I get it from a lot of other places, too,” he began. “Quentin Tarantino seems to be too concerned with other films. I mean, about appropriating other movies, like in a blender. I think it’s like really funny at the time I’m seeing it, but then, I don’t know, there’s a void there. Some of the references are flat; just pop culture.”
Tarantino’s body of work certainly owes a debt to straight-to-video movies of the ’70s and ’80s, something Korine used to distinguish himself from the director. “You can be inspired by other movies but not be derivative,” he continued, again pointing the finger at Tarantino. “I think that’s a problem with a lot of the video kids I don’t even like video. I think you should see movies on the big screen. Because if you look at their movies, all these video brats, their movies to me look like… television, you know what I’m saying?”
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