The things kids do on spring break. Or even the things kids do while filming a movie about spring break.
Writer-director Harmony Korine decided to shoot his artsy drugs- sex- and booze-fueled “Spring Breakers” during the actual annual bacchanal in St. Petersburg, Fla. As a result, the production was constantly beset by paparazzi and semi-sloshed civilians, hoping to catch a glimpse of stars Vanessa Hudgens, James Franco, Ashley Benson and Selena Gomez.
“It was insane. It was one of the most difficult filming experiences I’ve ever had,” Korine says. “I wasn’t used to working with people who had that much chaos and fanaticism follow them.”
The filmmakers discovered curious fans hiding in laundry bins on the set and spotted them climbing nearby trees to take photos. In one case, a couple actually stashed themselves in the ceiling of a hotel location, hiding for 48 hours until the production arrived.
“They had brought food and wine. They were trying to film a sequence through the cracks in the floorboards,” Korine says. “The only way we figured it out was that we smelled menthol cigarettes coming up from the floorboards.”
No doubt curiosity was high because of the names involved in the movie, opening Friday.
“High School Musical” star Hudgens, Benson of ABC Family’s “Pretty Little Liars” and Disney Channel staple Gomez all have squeaky-clean images and big tween followings. They’re not the types of actresses usually associated with Korine, whose movies, including “Gummo” and “Trash Humpers,” tend to be experimental and occasionally disturbing.
Despite its title, “Spring Breakers” is anything but the typical teen comedy. It follows four girls (Korine’s wife, Rachel, rounds out the quartet) who rob a local restaurant to pay their way to Florida spring break. Once there, they hook up with a local rapper and drug dealer named Alien (Franco, wearing cornrows and a shiny silver mouth grill), who steers them to the dark side.
While the story sounds straightforward, the movie is shot and edited to become almost dreamlike, with repeated imagery, slow motion and a soundtrack by Skrillex and Cliff Martinez thumping underneath.
It also — in typical Korine fashion — includes chat-worthy scenes, such as Hudgens and Benson having a threesome with Franco’s character in a swimming pool, and a bloodied Alien and the AK-47-toting girls singing a Britney Spears ballad, “Everytime,” on a white grand piano overlooking the sea. Perhaps most memorable and creepy of all is Alien enthusiastically fellating a gun jammed in his mouth by one of the girls.
“In rehearsal, I started to notice the odd way the girls were holding the guns and the placement of the guns. There was something bizarrely sexual,” Korine says of the Franco gun scene. “I pushed them to stick it in his mouth and emasculate him and freak him out. We did that, and then Franco made the suggestion that he is excited by it, and then he took it that extra step that you see.”
And it cannot be unseen.
For many viewers, the big question around “Springs Breakers” will be, what made the three female leads go against their images and sign up?
“I think they’re actresses, and they got to a point in their lives when they wanted to try something more challenging and extreme,” says Korine, whose breakthrough was the script for 1995’s controversial “Kids.” “From the very beginning, they were excited about trying something different and just going for it.”
“It was getting kind of repetitive in terms of the roles I was picking, and I really wanted to do something that was completely different,” Gomez told Interview magazine. “It was a mark thing for me — like, ‘This is what I want to be doing.’ I want to take myself seriously as an actress, and this was definitely a stretch.”
But it was a stretch not everyone was willing to take. Another shiny young star, Emma Roberts, 22, was originally attached to the film but bailed out.
“That was just — what do you call it? ‘Creative differences,’ ” Korine says. “I make a specific type of film, and it goes hard. It’s not always for everyone.”
Those who did sign up were game for most anything, be it lugging around machine guns in skimpy bikinis, snorting crushed-up vitamin B pills to simulate cocaine or various levels of nudity. (Though Hudgens has said she has since asked her agent never to book her a sex scene again.)
“I think at times it was overwhelming for them,” he says. “But I thought that was part of the scene, and that’s how they should be feeling.”
Franco had fewer reservations and embraced Alien’s outrageousness, from his hip-hop attire to his slang-heavy, accented style of speech.
“He’s a maniac,” Korine says. “He just goes for it in every way. He’s just attacking life in the same way that Alien does.”
Franco went all Daniel Day-Lewis method for the role, generally staying in character for the entire three-week shoot.
“He always looked and walked and talked like Alien for the whole time,” Korine says.
In the end, the movie turned out more hardcore than even Korine had envisioned.
“I was actually rewriting the script as we were shooting because of the way the girls were playing it and the way Franco played it,” he says. “It evolved into something more extreme, even further than what I had imagined originally.”