If you like your Harmony Korine films with a side of controversy, you're in luck. Folks looking forward to the director's next film have had a bit of a wait since Spring Breakers landed in 2012. He was supposed to move into production on his gangster rap revenge film The Trap last year, and even lined up an excellent cast led by Idris Elba, Benicio Del Toro, Robert Pattinson, Al Pacino, and James Franco but disputes with an actor pushed the project and Korine set out writing a new script. Korrine has described that project, which remains untitled at the moment, as a cross between Cheech and Chong and Scarecrow.
Korine revealed to an audience at the Miami Beach Cinematheque last night that, while his untitled Florida-set comedy will film first, he's also digging into a new project, and it's right up his alley. Per The Playlist, Korine is working on an adaptation of Alissa Nutting's high controversial 2013 novel Tampa, which details a 26-year-old teacher (and complete sociopath)'s illicit seduction of a 14-year-old student. The book was praised as a cutting satire and criticized as a dangerous, sick and morally queasy tale. So Korine's pretty much perfect for it.
No details yet on when Korine plans to move forward with production, but it may be a while. Equally as interesting, Korine suggested he might bring Tampa to HBO, which would be exciting new ground for the director.
Here's the official synopsis for the novel:
In Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student.
Celeste has chosen and lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web. Jack is enthralled and in awe of his eighth-grade teacher, and, most importantly, willing to accept Celeste’s terms for a secret relationship—car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack’s house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celeste’s empty classroom. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure.
Tampa is a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.
