Harmony Korine made his reputation on being a wunderkind provocateur, but now that he’s a fortysomething dad whose film Spring Breakers has earned its place on the BBC’s list of the top 100 films of the 2000s, it’s time for him to sit back and take a break. Maybe try something a little more conventional. A romantic comedy? A family film? One of those feel-good holiday movies where Diane Keaton wears a Christmas sweater and everyone bickers a lot but in the end they realize just how much they love each other?
Nah. How about a movie based on an uncomfortably explicit novel about a 26-year-old middle-school teacher’s sociopathic seduction of a 14-year-old student? The novel in question, Tampa, was published in 2013 and, unsurprisingly, stirred up quite a bit of controversy for its author, Alissa Nutting; The A.V. Club’s Becca James described it in 2014 as “as disgusting in subject matter as it is enthralling in prose.” Sure sounds like a Harmony Korine movie to us!
Korine confirmed his involvement last night during a Q&A held—appropriately enough—at the Miami Beach Cinematheque in Florida, America’s most Harmony Korine-esque state. (We imagine him hanging out ouside the Piggly Wiggly in a Tazmanian Devil T-shirt, furiously taking notes.) Aside from implying that the project could end up at HBO, Korine simply confirmed that he’s working on an adaptation of the book. In the meantime, he’s got a script for something he describes as “a cross between a Cheech and Chong movie and Scarecrow” as well as The Trap, a super crazy-sounding revenge thriller that cast Idris Elba and Benicio Del Toro in its main roles last year but hasn’t progressed much beyond that since.
Both of those films are also reportedly set in Florida, and if they all get made, they’ll compromise Korine’s Sunshine State quadrilogy, or, as we just dubbed it, a “Hulk Hogan bandanna trick.”
[The Playlist, via Vulture ]