In his films, as in his troubled, volatile life, Harmony Korine has always been drawn to the path between creativity and self-destruction. The perfect person, then, to document David Blaine's 44 days in London.

The last time I met Harmony Korine, he was nursing a broken ankle and bruised ribs, and self-medicating with liberal doses of strong alcohol and even stronger pharmaceuticals. His physical disrepair was the result of a dogged work-in-progress entitled Fight , for which he had been wandering the night-time streets of New York provoking strangers to beat him up while his friend David Blaine secretly filmed the proceedings. Though there was no shortage of takers, Korine had seriously misjudged the timescale of an average fight and, half-a-dozen beatings in, had only garnered about three minutes of footage.

'I have some recollection of that interview,' he says now, laughing. 'I guess you caught me just as the fog was coming down.' That was more than four years ago. It would not be overstating the case to say that Harmony Korine was lost in that fog for most of the intervening time. Those of us who had lauded him for his still startling feature film, Gummo, a graphic depiction of a casually violent and terminally dysfunctional trailer-park America seldom seen on the cinema screen, were left wondering if that had been a precocious flash in the pan.

The follow-up, 1999's flawed but still fascinating Julien Donkey-Boy , made under the rules of Dogme, a cinematic movement that involves filming in the here and now with hand-held cameras and minimal props, provided few answers in its rambling and fitfully arresting anti-narrative. After that, there were vague rumours that Korine was making another Dogme-style film about boys who jumped off electricity pylons in, of all places, East Anglia. Then, nothing.

'Looking back, it's hard to say what went wrong,' he says, sighing and sounding still baffled. 'All I know is that my desire waned. I had come straight out of high school at 19 and wrote Kids [his first script, directed by Larry Clark] and, suddenly, a few years later I was burned out. I didn't really care about films or filmmaking. I just wanted to disappear.'

The word on the grapevine was that Korine was devastated following the breakdown of his on-off romance with Chloë Sevigny, the young actress who had been his muse, and whose subsequent move into the mainstream has been as surefooted as Korine's stumble into the margins. Whatever, for a few years he disappeared off the radar altogether and, in his absence, the rumour mill went into overdrive.

In places as far apart as New York, London and Mississippi, I heard variously that Korine had burned down his house in New York State, that he was living in Primrose Hill, London, in a flat belonging to a well-known Irish actress, lost in a chemical haze and, more recently, that he was 'in recovery' in Paris and actually doing pretty well. For once, all the rumours seem to have been true.

'Let's just say I was in a dark place, and leave it at that,' he says. How bad did it get? I persist. 'It wasn't good or bad,' he counters, 'it was just painful. As you probably noticed, I was headed in a bad direction the last time I saw you, and I just kept running towards the tornado.'

Did he burn his house down, though? There is a pause. 'That's not strictly accurate,' he says, sighing again. 'It was actually two houses. My home in Connecticut, that went first. Then I got another house, but that burnt down too. I lost everything,' he says, matter of factly. 'I mean, I'm lucky to be around at all. The thing is, I didn't want to die, I just wanted to disappear. I wasn't happy with myself and I didn't want to be around anyone. If I could have just evaporated, it would have been good. I figure it was something I had to go through, I had to destroy everything in order to start over again.'

The starting over began in earnest when he moved to Paris 10 months ago to begin his recovery. It continued apace when he resurfaced in London earlier this summer, wielding a camera and acting as a kind of postmodern ringmaster for the strange P.T. Barnum-like events unfolding by the Thames in and around David Blaine's Perspex box. The end result, Above the Below, is his most unlikely film to date.

'It's a Harmony film, right?' he grins, when I tell him how much I liked it, but, for that very reason, it may prove hard-going for the uninitiated. For a start, it often meanders away from the subject at hand to follow a face in the crowd, a balloon drifting into the sky or a flock of dipping and weaving starlings.

It has his usual mix of strange music and odd vignettes, not least a young man with Down's syndrome hamming it up for the camera. (In Gummo, the two teenage protagonists visit a prostitute played by a young woman with Down's syndrome, a scene that caused considerable offence in Amer ica. There is a tenderness in Korine's gaze, though, that is seldom remarked on, and that somehow mitigates the charge of exploitation.)

'The truly amazing thing is that Harmony seemed to capture all the things that I saw that stuck in my mind,' says Blaine, who was undergoing a series of medical check-ups when I caught up with him in London last week. 'He's the only person I trusted to be true to the original vision I had. Everything about his films is unique, and I think he is really the only filmmaker today who tries to render life as it is, the mess and the confusion, the beautiful moments that often don't make sense until much later.

'I believe in the honest moment, too, that brief time when you are totally unobstructed in what you do. There's an essential truth in what we both do, and that's why I trust him with my life.'

This, as it turns out, is true. Korine was the one person authorised in Blaine's contract to terminate the 44-day fast if things had gone wrong.

'I told him before I went in that if I was lying still at the bottom of the box for three straight days, and not drinking any water, to pull the plug. In a way, he was my life support, but I also wanted to make sure he filmed those three days. They would have been the most interesting.'

Korine and Blaine met when the latter attended the premiere of Kids . They share an interest in what might be termed extreme and self-testing behaviour. As if in homage to the now infamous, and still unseen Fight, Above the Below includes some visceral footage of Blaine being punched repeatedly in the stomach by a hyped-up local boxer while on a pre-fast walkabout in Brixton.

'It's basically my interpretation of what David is to me,' elaborates Korine, who is now living in Nashville, Tennessee, where, looking older but healthier, he is hard at work on a new script.

'It's what I believed he was going through at the time, but if you are looking for answers as to why he does what he does, this film does not provide them. Everyone seems to want answers these days, but I don't even know what motivates me, and I honestly don't think David really knows what drives him. I do think you can get glimpses of it in the film.'

The most powerful scene features a post-fast Blaine talking about his mother's death, his usually calm-to-the-point-of-comatose demeanour suddenly replaced by a rising anger that suggests everything he does when pushing his body and mind to the limits of endurance has its roots in this still unexorcised grief. 'I provide clues and the viewer has to do the rest,' says Korine. 'I'm not that interested in introspection because I believe it often leads to false answers. Hell, I even look away from the mirror when I shave in the mornings.'

Like his films, Harmony Korine is an oddly elusive individual, whose life and work seemed in the past to have coalesced in disturbingly dark and self-destructive ways. This is what makes a film like Gummo so new and challenging, and what makes a film like Fight - which he insists will be released soon as a half-hour short - so sick and shocking. Though hailed initially as 'the voice of the post-slacker generation', he is too oddball and wilfully wayward to be the voice of anyone other than himself.

Born 29 years ago in Bolinas, California, to 'hippy' parents, Korine's upbringing was nomadic going on unsettled. His father, an Iranian-Jewish émigré, travelled the states as a hippy, before starting a chain of successful boutiques. Korine has described his childhood as solitary and, at school, was marked down as a slow developer. As a teenager, he was prescribed Ritalin, the controversial drug to control hyperactivity, and claims not to have started puberty until he was 16.

Films were his escape and his inspiration. When his family moved to New York, he spent endless solitary hours in the city's repertory cinemas, and he can talk for hours about the work of Bresson, Herzog and the French nouvelle vague, as well as lauding 'the god-like genius of Buster Keaton'.

The last time I met him, he rounded off a monologue on the 'lost art of vaudeville' by tap dancing across the wooden floor of his Gramercy Park apartment in a pair of ill-fitting patent-leather shoes, then climbing on to a table and illustrating 'how to fall properly from a great height', a talent he developed by studying Keaton's films in some depth.

All these formative influences have inevitably found their way into his movies which, though emphatically American in their subject matter, are European in their tone and sensibility. (Werner Herzog, who has proclaimed Korine a genius, appeared in Julien Donkey-Boy. ) His two feature films to date are populated by misfits and outcasts, often amoral protagonists whose lives or actions he neither criticises nor condones.

His subject matter is the extreme outsider in American society: the glue-sniffing, cat-killing teenage boys in Gummo who exist in that great lost America of trailer parks and welfare homes; the damaged soul in Julien Donkey-Boy who, in grief and confusion, steals his sister's dead baby from the city morgue.

Though his films are not for the fainthearted and can be wilfully frustrating in their disregard for narrative, they do delineate an America that is utterly unexplored by mainstream and, indeed, independent film- makers. Korine once told me that he wanted to save American film, a medium that, though still relatively young, was 'jaded and cynical'. I ask him if that is still the case.

'I said that? When I see a lot of the statements that I made back then, it's almost like it was a different person talking. I mean, I was fired up, and there was nothing wrong with that, but I have no real big agenda except to make great and challenging films on my own terms. To tell the truth, I still don't see that much that excites or surprises me. Mystic River was good. Eastwood is an American master, but he's resolutely old-fashioned, and that's OK. I guess I'm not as angry and as confrontational as I was back then. I worked all that out the hard way.'

Could he ever see himself making a big-budget studio film? 'I don't really think on those terms. To me, they're too constrictive. But I would like to make something big and ornate and stylised. I always want to expand and negate the thing I've done before. Right now, I don't want to do another small film, and I don't want to shoot on digital video. So, who knows? The thing is, I don't have much talent for plot. I work in images and visuals. I just string it together in my own way.'

To this end, Korine's new script is, he says, 'about nuns falling out of aeroplanes without parachutes'. Not the kind of pitch, one hazards a guess, that will have the Hollywood moneymen beating a path to his door. 'It's just a great image to start from,' he elaborates, 'and already it's about something else.' What exactly? I ask, intrigued. 'Faith, I guess. And risk. They jump and then they start praying, and then they land safely.'

As metaphors go, it sounds pretty close to home, maybe even autobiographical? He thinks about this for a moment. 'Yeah, sure. Why not? It's all mixed up anyway, the life, the work, the creative and the personal, it's all one and the same for me. It can get confusing from time to time,' he says, ever a master of understatement. 'But that's just the way it is with me. I can't ever see that changing.'

David Blaine concurs: 'Harmony doesn't fit because he is the only person I know who actually puts on the screen in a pure and faithful way what he actually sees. He has a vision and he never sells it short. That's a rare thing these days, to be able to tell beautiful stories about how life really is.'

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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