The most beautiful shot in Harmony Korine's new film is the only uninterrupted travelling shot in a movie otherwise frenetic in its cutting. It is a restaurant robbery shot from the getaway car after it drops off two girl-robbers at the backdoor, then glides around the building capturing the chaotic but, to us, completely silent hold-up of the diners through two distancing layers of glass, before picking them up again at the front door and speeding off into the sultry night. In Spring Breakers it performs the same transitional function as the tornado in the Wizard of Oz or the rabbit hole in Wonderland. Before it, the colours are muted and monochromatic and the four leads are bored and broke; afterwards the colours go all neon and ice-cream, fluorescence dialed up to 11, and the girls, as they say, go wild.
Meeting the 20-year-old Selena Gomez, it's easy to draw a connection between the bad girls' pupa-to-imago transformation and the cast members' desire to cross the difficult threshold between teenage superstardom and the adult careers they surely now crave. If any movie gets that particular job done for Gomez and fellow teen superstars Ashley Benson and Vanessa Hudgens, it will be the toxically dreamlike Spring Breakers, a surprise hit in the US. But one has to ask how the former seven-year-old co-star of Barney and Friends and The Wizards of Waverly Place ended up in a movie that shows drunk girls urinating through their bikinis in public and forcing a gangsta-looking James Franco to suck off his handgun.
"Oddly enough, it was my mom's idea!" Gomez laughs, her voice a little deeper than you might expect. "She's a huge Harmony fan. She got the script and said it was totally what Harmony's vision was, summed it all up. So we watched all of his old movies and, I gotta say, I was a little hesitant at first. But I went to Nashville and met Harmony and I instantly became comfortable with him."
But just being in a Korine movie is a career statement in itself, isn't it?
"I feel like it's evolution. You've got to push yourself as an actor if you're going to grow, and that's what we're doing, pushing ahead, learning all the time. Plus, with a Harmony movie, my movie-buff friends are a little more impressed by me now," she chuckles.
And what of Franco, playing a greasy gangsta pimp and gun-dealer? She rolls her eyes in amazement: "Fabulous! Our jaws were on the floor when he showed up with his grill and his tattoos, and he stayed in character the whole time. He's a dream actor. Astonishing. He lures people in, and regardless of how he looks a spell is cast. He pushes them off into the unknown and the girls become even more perverse and subversive than him."
Not that it was all plain sailing. The movie was shot last year during a real spring break in St Petersburg, Florida, amid the kind of week-long teen chaos – motels on fire, pools filled with furniture, kids shagging in the street – that it takes a resort town a year to recover from. Korine set up fiestas of his own in party hotels where no one had slept in a week, or just affixed his cast and story to bacchanals already long in progress.
"The whole filming process was a party," recalls Gomez. "Parties that we were thrown into, real parties in these kids' apartments, their dorm rooms, their motel rooms – their party outside and ours inside, mixing them all up."
Predictably, the paparazzi would get word. And Gomez, tabloid-catnip for a while now given the Justin Bieber connection (the couple split up last November after almost two-years together), bore the brunt.
"I had a mini-breakdown on set,"she remembers. "There was too much attention, photographers, hundreds of fans, and all of us in bikinis in the pool. I got overwhelmed doing some of the things we were doing and having such an active audience at all times, even though I knew at heart we were super-safe."
Rachel Korine, Harmony's 26-year-old wife, playing a dual role on the set as elder cast member/den-mother, and as emissary from the director's chair to the cast, remembers: "Harmony went over to her and said: 'This is really happening, this is you right at this moment,' and he encouraged her to use it, and from that moment on she imbued her character with a whole new extra dimension."
"It really did work," agrees Gomez. As the symbolically named Faith, she is the only character who goes to church, the only non-participant in the robbery, the only one who keeps her bikini on throughout, and the first one to realise that this craziness will lead to mayhem and violence, and leave.
Meeting Gomez alongside her three co-stars (I see my jotter contains the unfortunate notation: "Jailbait Apocalypse!"), it is evident that her own personality is akin to Faith's. Korine is big-sisterly and diplomatic, Benson and Hudgens are goofy, gabby, earnest and lovable by turns, while Gomez, the youngest and the only non-blonde in the movie, is often the one who sensibly and self-deprecatingly re-routes a conversation going adrift, who actually answers the original question, exuding the kind pragmatism, sanity and poise you might expect from a hard-bitten 13-year veteran of the kiddie-showbiz wars.
Gomez spent 2012 away from her music career, specifically to develop film work, but also because music "is always about me-me-me. There's a team and all – dancers, musicians – but in the end it's my name and face on the box. On a movie, it's these four beautiful girls and Harmony in a group project – it's no longer all about me-me-me – every single person matters. I love being part of that kind of family, you feel like you're educating yourself, going to a common destination, all in it together. While with music it's more like: 'Here I am in a sparkly dress – look at me!'"
I joke that not having to get naked for Spring Breakers must mean her agent is really earning his crust.
"Well, yeah," she laughs, "but it's also true to the character – the right thing for me to play, a good match of actor and role. I love Faith and relate to her. It was half easy for me and half hard, trying to balance myself out against how crazy the other girls were getting, since my character has to oversee things and thinks a little differently."
The gossip sites would have us believe that Bieber's ongoing public meltdown – if that's what it is – has a lot to do with the withdrawal of Gomez's steadying presence as his partner. The word is that if Gomez were still in the picture, it is likely that Bieber wouldn't be bashing paparazzi, gobbing on his neighbours, getting his bizarrely Jacksonian pet monkey seized at customs, or forcing his exhausted band to endure endless tour-bus reruns of his appearance on Saturday Night Live.
Meeting the real Selena Gomez, instead of the one compounded of rumour, innuendo, gossip and digital malice, it is easy to take this assessment at face value (though today, the subject of Bieber is out-of-bounds). Despite the lingering puppy fat, her diminutive stature and inarguable girlishness, she can sometimes seem like, if not the only adult in the room, then the most adult young-adult. Bieber's right to miss her calming and emollient presence.
Living under the heaviest public scrutiny, subject to wild rumour and gossip, and relentless pursuit by the paparazzi, I have to ask her what it is like inside this hurricane of unreality?
"Luckily I've been able to experience it all before," she says with an air of almost gravelly road-weariness. "I grew up in one of the biggest high schools in the world – The Disney Channel. I grew up with the Jonas brothers and Miley [Cyrus]. I got to experience all that at such a young age, unfortunately – or fortunately – that now it just doesn't faze me. At this point in my life I have really good people around me. It's the people who don't have much going on in their own lives who get more out of this than anyone, more than me, even." Evidently the science and art of raising showbiz kids has come a long way since the school nurse at MGM high school in 1939 would call Judy Garland out of class for her "vitamin shots".
Does she ever look online and say: "Hey, looks like I'm in a feud with –?"
"Oh yeah, that happens. Vanessa walked up to me last month and said, about some TMZ rumour or online thing that claimed we were arguing: 'Selena, I guess we're fighting!' And I was like: 'Aaall-right! Let's get into it! Put 'em up!" Somewhere out there is a fat, unhappy, middle-aged man at a computer wondering aloud to himself: 'Hmmmmm, what can I say about a 20-year-old girl to ruin her whole day?' It's crazy. But it's worth remembering that it's not in any way real, either."
Source
