Harmony Korine is done with “normal films,” except possibly a Terrence Malick movie.
The “Spring Breakers” and “Kids” auteur told GQ that he is stepping away from Hollywood as a whole, following the more muted reception to 2019’s “The Beach Bum.”
“I just lost interest in normal films,” Korine said. “I was like, There’s something else. That really became the obsession. I was like, What comes after all this?”
Korine added, “Honestly, I always got more satisfaction from painting. I don’t really have fun making movies.”
The writer-director founded creative collective and design studio Edglrd with a goal to democratize “gamecore” productions. His latest project “Aggro Dr1ft” will premiere at the 80th Venice Film Festival, and later screen at TIFF and NYFF.
However, Korine may return to traditional directing after Terrence Malick sent him a script.
“Terrence Malick wrote a script that he wants me to direct,” Korine said. “It’s a really, really beautiful script. And that’s maybe one of the only things that I could imagine pulling me back into like actual, traditional moviemaking. But even then, the hard part now is just the idea of looking through a viewfinder and filming, like, people speaking at a table. All this dialogue always gets in the way. All these things that you don’t really care about. I don’t know. That would be a special case.”
He continued, “I always loved him, and his movies were such a big deal for me as a kid, and even still now. But that would maybe be the one thing.”
Meanwhile, Malick is currently working on long-term project “The Way of the Wind,” a biblical epic starring Mark Rylance that has been in post-production for years.
Fellow director Korine mused that over time, his perception on films as a whole changed, saying, “They became less and less interesting. They just all feel like they’ve been so processed. Even the dialogue, it all sounds like it’s written by the same person. Everyone speaks exactly the same.”
Moviegoing, according to Korine, is akin to a kind of obligation to consume media.
“I don’t really see that many kids going to movie theaters anymore,” Korine said. “I watch my own movies and it’s almost like when my mom tried to make me read books, you know what I mean?”
He added, “Narrative has been completely obliterated. And what you’re watching really is just an experience.”
Instead, Edglrd is seeking to assist users to “remix or make their own films” with a goal to produce one movie per month. “What we’re trying to do is to build some mechanism that allows people to interface with the footage and basically remix, or make their own, films,” Korine said. “It’s like, instead of someone writing a check for $50 million to make one film, how do you make 50 $1 million films? I’m saying ‘films,’ but they’re not really films either.”
Korine concluded, “How do you take the whole idea of entertainment, of live-action gaming, and create something new? The obsession here is that there’s something else after where we’ve been—that one thing is dying, and something new is being born right now.”
