How Matthew Mcconaughey got really stoned
Director Harmony Korine reveals five bizarre stories from his new stoner comedy, The Beach Bum
1. THE FILM WAS INSPIRED BY HIS PASSION FOR SMALL REPTILES
A decade ago, Harmony Korine — the enfant terrible filmmaker behind Kids, Gummo and Spring Breakers — went to Miami to write. And because he is an avid lizard fan. “I love them,” he says, speaking from Miami, where he now lives permanently. “There are so many iguanas here. I mean, they shit everywhere.” While visiting the Florida Keys, he began to notice a certain type of slacker: “The kind of person who would just be drinking, smoking weed, pissing into the ocean, dancing on the boardwalk, rejecting the politics and embracing a lack of ambition.” Soon, the character of Moondog, a wildly hedonistic slacker poet, began to take shape.
2. MCCONAUGHEY ACCIDENTALLY WENT FULL ‘METHOD’
“Obviously Matthew can’t be stoned for a whole film,” said Korine. The actor smoked prop weed for the most part — except for one scene, where co-star Snoop Dogg surprised him with the real thing. “[Snoop] handed Matthew the wrong joint. Snoop’s own strain. The next take, Matthew started talking about how there were potato chips stuck to his toes. I remember looking at the script supervisor and saying, ‘Is this in the script?’ He got so blitzed it was almost impossible to shoot anything else for the rest of the day.”
3. SNOOP DOGG WAS… INTERESTING TO WORK WITH
Korine originally intended Snoop Dogg to play himself. “Then, a couple of weeks before filming, Snoop called me late at night,” he recalls. “He’d gotten super stoned and had this vision. He said, ‘I want to play the same character, but I don’t want to be Snoop. I want to be called Lingerie, because I’m smooth and silky.’ It made me crack up. I was like, ‘Of course!’” Despite playing a fictional character, there are traces of the real Snoop. “If you look closely, he is wearing clothes that say ‘Snoop’ on the lapel. It had some stoner logic that we went with.”
4. ZAC EFRON’S BEARD CAME FROM A PANINI
Creative inspiration comes from all corners. “I sent Zac pictures of this panini I was eating,” recalls Korine. “I said, ‘Let’s get your beard to look like that!’ He immediately sent me a thumbs-up emoji.” His character, Flicker, an unhinged pyromaniac who Moondog befriends at rehab, was partly influenced by people Korine knew from childhood. “At the shopping malls, all the guys at this sneaker store Journeys looked like Flicker: they’d wear those JNCO jeans, they’d have lines shaved in their beards, and they listened to Christian rock music. I just thought they were so funny.”
5. MARTIN LAWRENCE CAME OUT OF SEMI-RETIREMENT TO PLAY A DOLPHIN TOUR GUIDE
Korine wrote the part of Captain Wack for Lawrence. “I’m a huge Martin Lawrence fan,” he says. “But I hadn’t seen him in anything in, like, a decade. I was thinking: who would be the funniest person to play a character who has a cocaine-addicted parrot?” Captain Wack’s eccentric dolphin tour guide claims to have had his balls blown off in Vietnam, despite being six at the time the war started. Korine’s favourite Captain Wack line? “Lots of dolphins, motherfuckers!”