Have you seen Spring Breakers yet? If you read my review, then you already know I thought it was AH-MAY-ZING. Maybe not perfect... but AH-MAY-ZING. You should go see it, and let me know what you thought—because I can also see why some people would not like it at all. In the meantime, check out this very interesting interview with Spring Breakers' director Harmony Korine from Stereogum, in which he explains his thought process while making the film. For example...
STEREOGUM: Even within the first few minutes of the first movie, it plays like it could be a really effective indictment of this particular aspect of youth culture — just bouncing tits and teenagers with booze spewing out of their faces — but as the movie goes on, it’s becomes a weird kind of celebration, not so much “spring break” culture, but of youth itself … which is beautiful.
KORINE: Right, definitely. That is something that I think will be for some people off-putting and difficult. But it’s too easy to condemn, or too easy to celebrate purely and only that. It’s too easy, and it’s not interesting, and it’s not life. So you want things to be both in some way, there are parts of that culture and that world that are worth celebrating that are beautiful and performative and insane and chaotic and wild and there are also things within the movie that are the complete opposite.
STEREOGUM: I think the movie does a really great job of striking a balance between the two. Was it hard to maintain that? I mean it could so easily have slipped into only being one way or the other. It could have easily become this ironic parody, but you don’t really play it that way.
KORINE: Yeah, I mean … it was never meant to be a documentary or an essay. It was meant to be kind of a pop poem, or an impressionistic reinterpretation. It was more of this idea of something that was more experiential, like a ride or a video game that was more manic and physical. So once we got into the edit room — as I started to develop it — the move had this really liquid narrative and this energy. This film that was closer to a sort of drug trip, more hallucinatory, with a kind of peak, a transcendence, you just disappear for a little while … and then you’re back. So once I started to figure that out, it kind of led itself. But I was never interested in being ironic or making these characters seem like a joke.
