"Gummo" Dislike and praise, shadow and light, Harmony Korine's shocking debut work

If you do something bad, you'll be paid $1,000 on the spot.

Gummo is often thought of as a work that relied heavily on improvisation by amateur actors, but Harmony and Nick Sutton, who played Tamler, can attest that most of the scenes were scripted in advance. However, Harmony said, ``Even though we had a script, we had no intention of exploiting the performers, and we didn't force them to do anything they didn't want to do.'' However, it seems that things were different for the actors who were on set.

Although Sutton was grateful to Harmony (and Chloë Sevigny) for keeping him away from drugs when he was addicted to them, Harmony strictly determined Tamler's role and the acting he should do, and he was very impressed by Gummo's role in Gummo. The performers described Harmony as being like a mud puppet that could be formed into any shape it pleased.

Also, Harmony, who wanted a crazy video, gave her a $1,000 cash bonus on set. Sutton wants $1,000 so he eats some sheep brains that Harmony found at a general store. Jacob Reynolds also confessed that he earned $5,000 in addition to his appearance fee by sticking his finger in a rat-infested hole at Harmony's behest. However, when Harmony asked to drink water from a bottle with cigarette butts in it, the staff discouraged her, saying that she would be rushed to the hospital and filming would stop. All of these scenes were cut from the main story, perhaps because they thought they were too artificial.

However, Harmony's directing policy of not having actors perform pre-prepared performances also applied to the scenes in which they appeared. Harmony plays a fearful gay boy who sits on a couch and has an awkward conversation with a black man who has dwarfism. Harmony dared to drink a lot of beer and came to the shoot completely drunk. I decided to shoot the film at the last minute on the last day because I wouldn't be able to direct it if I was drunk. It is said that pouring beer on his head during the performance was an improvisation while he was drunk.

According to Harmony, he got so drunk that he passed out just as he was cranking up, and when he woke up, his sister was there, so he threw him out the window, and before he knew it, he had been stabbed with someone's pocket knife. I don't know if this actually happened, if it was just a fantasy I had while drunk, or if it was just a hoax created as an image strategy.

What are the merits and demerits of a cult work that has not faded even after a quarter of a century?