San Francisco International Film Festival 2012: Interviews With The Directors of The Fourth Dimension

Harmony Korine (Director) and Eddy Moretti (Executive Producer, Executive Creative Director at Vice Mag) 

YAM: How did you first decide to write down this brief and make this film?
Eddy Moretti: It has a slightly complicated beginning. Harmony and I have been friends for years. Ever since he wrote the screenplay for Mister Lonely. He made that film and we got to really know each other making that film. I learned a lot about the experience that he had making that film.

I think that we started bonding over the idea of making films in a different model. Faster, taking ideas and sketches and just going for it. Not doing the typical, you know, oh you write a script and then you finance it and then you cast it. Just changing the whole model. He talks a lot about some of his favorite filmmakers who just work incessantly.

So we were talking about stuff like that and these two gentlemen from Grolsch called me. Literally, they called one of my colleagues in London and they said, “We like what Vice is doing and we want to talk to you.” They didn’t even know really what they wanted to do. They just wanted to talk about what I’m up to and what we could be doing together. I got it into my brain that what they should do is support filmmakers and make some films.

So they miraculously said, “Yes, let’s make films. Instead of sponsoring something, let’s make something.” So that was cool. Then we started writing emails back and forth and these weird nonsequitur rules started popping out and we ended up with this idea that it was all about the 4^th dimension. It was just a fun set of rules that we thought it would be fun for another filmmaker to get a kind of set of instructions that you know, like, aren’t as serious. I guess the last big set of rules was dogma. This is not as earnest.

Harmony Korine: This is more whimsical. Dogma is more like church. This was more, you know.

John Cassavetes

YAM: I read that you went to a lot of art house and rivals in New York growing up. Were you inspired at all by Cassavetes?
HK: As a kid he was my favorite. He kind of set the model.

EM: And he was really good looking. He was. He was like a handsome guy.

HK: Cassavetes was more, I mean, a lot of people cite his techniques and his financial model; I never really thought of him like that. I always thought of him as magician. Like he conjured moments. And I thought what made him great was him. It wasn’t all the other stuff. It was that he was great. In fact, there is no model. It’s just him. It’s who he was. I don’t ever try to dissect him. I think he’s an American original. He’s like Ol’ Dirty Bastard or Tupac or Frank Sinatra. He’s cut from the same cloth.
EM: Jerry Lee Lewis.
HK: Yeah, it’s the same thing.

YAM: Can you expand on what you said after the screening about just doing your art regardless of what anyone thinks about it?
HK: I’s not such a smart guy. I just literally, I follow an instinct, a gut or a pull. Ever since I was little, it never really bothered me so much this idea what people get or don’t get. There’s something more important than that. There’s a focus and an idea that certain things have to be made and I guess in some ways, it’s harder in a personal way because it makes it harder for the people around you sometimes. But in the end I always felt that the work is the most important thing.
EM: What else is there?
HK: There’s a purpose to it and the purpose makes it holy.

Val Kilmer in The Lotus Community Workshop segment of The Fourth Dimension

YAM: Can you talk a little bit about working with Val Kilmer? He seemed to have had a lot of fun on this film.
HK: Yeah, that’s really what it was. It was a quick shoot, it was a couple of days. It was more like a stage play. It was kind of a social experiment. We had all these people, a lot of them were down on their luck, had diseases, a lot of them were on government assistance.
EM: That’s what I really liked about this shoot and the concept, was that he was going to put real people in the room.
HK: That was the same roller skate rink that I used to breakdance in when I was a little kid in Nashville, and, like, they hadn’t even changed the carpets. The carpets were the same so it was trippy for me seeing Val on the same carpets I used to dance on.

YAM: Was Orson Welles’s F For Fake an inspiration on this at all?
HK : No, I never thought about that.

YAM: As I was reading the brief on this film it sort of reminded me of that film and how it sort of blurs reality and fiction.
HK: I thought about it more as documenting a stage play or something. Like a live performance, kind of like it was. And then there’s the secondary story, but that is something more made up.

YAM: And you hadn’t met the other two filmmakers until yesterday?
HK: Yeah.

YAM: In the third segment they bring up cotton candy, just like in your segment. Was that on accident or all part of the plan?
EM: I think Jan (Kwiecinski) did get a copy of Harmony’s script. The whole idea was to drop a couple of references through all the films so they would kind of link up, but tangentially.

Harmony Korine on the set of Spring Breakers

YAM: Was there a reason you filmed your segment in anamorphic widescreen?
HK: I’ve been doing that on a lot of my films lately. Even my new movie, Spring Breakers. I just like the 2.35 scope.

YAM: I saw some promo images from that film. It kind of looks amazing.
HK: [laughs] That one’s gonna be pretty great.