Question: What are you up to at the moment?
Korine: I'm just off to the Venice Film Festival. My new film julien donkey - boy is premiering there. It's the first American movie made under the Dogme95 manifesto and it stars Ewen Bremmer, Chloë Sevigny, and the German director Werner Herzog. It's based on my uncle, who's a schizophrenic. It's my best work ever and the response has been pretty scary. I've never had such a positive reaction to my work.

Question: Who is julien donkey - boy?
Korine: I don't know. I just liked the name.

Question: Did you find the Dogme rules restricting?
Korine: We were using 30 video cameras at once and I wired the actors up and put them in situations where they didn't know they were being filmed and I would steal scenes from them. The whole movie was improvised, we worked from a skeleton script and ended up with about 70 hours of footage. I wanted to make a movie that was completely new, one that worked like a completely cinematic experience. It was definitely the most cerebral experience I've ever had because the Dogme 'Rule Of Chasity' means you can't rely on any movie tricks. If you're using 30 cameras, you have to have 30 people to hold them and you have to place them where they're not filming one another, so it became very much like a game of chess. Also, I wanted to make a movie that was never fully finished even when it was done - we did a special transfer process so it doesn't even look like a movie, it looks more like a painting.

Question: How is your other film, Fight Harm, doing?
Korine: I've had to put it on hold for a while because I'd gotten so badly injured making it that both my ankles were broken and my ribs were busted. I've been to court seven times but I've only gotten three assault and battery charges. But over here it isn't three strikes and you're out, you have to serve a mandatory jail sentence, and I don't want to go to jail.

Question: What's the point of it?
Korine: I wanted it to be 90 minutes of complete and utter violence, me making people beat the shit out of me. I wanted it to be one of the funniest movies ever made, like a cross between Buster Keaton and a snuff movie. I was thinking about comedy and humour, conceptually humour is tragedy, like a guy slipping on a banana skin.

Question: Did you have to psyche yourself up to do it?
Korine: I was really out of my mind when I was doing it. I always had to get drunk beforehand.

Question: So how exactly does it work?
Korine: The only rules to the film are that no one is allowed to stop the fight no matter how bad I am getting beaten unless it looks like I might die. The only other rule is that I cannot throw the first punch. The goal is to fight every racial and sexual demographic. I have already fought two thick lesbians, one Arab, one Negro, two honkeys, and I got really fucked up by a Puerto Rican. I wanted it to be a 90 minute feature to be shown in movie theatres and not to be like an art piece, but each fight only lasts about four minutes until one of us is unconscious or unable to move. I've done about 15 fights and edited it down so it's just a stream of continous brutality - but now it's only 25 minutes long which means I am going to have to do another 60 fights to complete the feature. I don't think, physically, that my body can do it. I was trying to invent a new type of tap dancing but I can't tap dance any more because of my ankles.

Question: Did you ever win any fights?
Korine: I fought this girl, like this really butch lesbian, and I guess you could say that I won. But it's never about winning, you either fight 'til the police come or until neither of you stand. Its not like Rocky.

Question: Who gave you the worst beating?
Korine: A bouncer in New York. It took me forever to get him to fight me and I didn't think he was going to do it; he just kept laughing at me. Then this girl came out and I pretended to hit her and the next thing I know he took me by the back of the head and threw me into the middle of the street. I got really excited and picked up a brick and started smashing him in the head. There was blood everywhere. I kept making him chase me around this car then I made him get real close to me and I went to pick up a trash can to throw at his head, and this is where the comedy element would come in, because the trash can was chained to the post and so the guy just smashed me in the face. When I came to I was like, 'Yes, yes, come on, come on.' My left leg was on the sidewalk and he jumped on it and broke it in half but I didn't actually feel it so I got back up and started chasing him. Then the cops came and threw me in the back of the van and took me to the station. They were like asking me my address and booking me and there was this stream of blood gushing down my head and I looked down and there was this bone sticking out of my ankle.

Question: Was it worth it?
Korine: Of course. As far as regretting anything, the only thing would be if I had done it and failed to get it documented. After each fight, the producer would jump out from a hidden place with a waiver and ask the guy that's just beaten me to sign it for the movie. It's weird, absolutely everyone agreed to sign it, even those who pressed charges.

Question: What does your girlfriend Chloë Sevigny think about it?
Korine: Chloë was really freaked out about it and my family thought I was trying to kill myself. They tried to get me comitted, institutionalized, but I was totally aware of what I was putting myself through, it was just something I had to do.

Question: Will you be working with Chloë again in the future?
Korine: It depends if there's a part for her. I want to make a movie about Ian Curtis … Well, not really about him but about, well, actually I just wanted to make a movie where someone wears an Ian Curtis T - shirt. But I'm continually amazed by Chloë's acting, she’s really great.

Question: You've been working with Macaulay Culkin recently.
Korine: I've just done a book of 200 pictures of Macaulay Culkin called The Bad Son. I shot the Sonic Youth video with him. I like him, I like the way he looks, he symbolizes America. I shot him and his wife over a period of a few weeks after they got married when they were 17.

Question: How is New York?
Korine: New York sucks, it's full of Euro - money fuckheads. I don't like New York, it's where people come to do business. I don't socialize much here any more, I've just bought a place by the water in Connecticut. It's really posh. It's a good place to work and a good place to go fishing.

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