Spring Breakers writer-director Harmony Korine is interested in stepping away from making what he has described as normal Hollywood films, but may make an exception for a possible collaboration with Terrence Malick. The Kids auteur revealed during a new interview with GQ that the Tree of Life filmmaker penned a script that he wants him to helm.
The news comes after Korine decoded to step away from Hollywood for a period of time, following the mixed critical reception to, and commercial disappointment of, his 2019 comedy, The Beach Bum. “I just lost interest in normal films,” the filmmaker 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.”
As a result, he scribe-director founded creative collective and design studio Edglrd. The company’s goal is to democratize gamecore productions.
Korine’s latest project at Edglrd, Aggro Dr1ft, will premiere at the 80th Venice Film Festival on September 1. It will then go on to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival.
GQ described Aggro Dr1ft as not quite being a feature film. The project is instead defined less by cinematic grammar than “the repetitive cadence of a video game cutscene.”
However, Korine may return to traditional feature film directing after Malick sent him the sceenplay he scribed. Korine praised his fellow filmmaker’s work, calling it 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,” Korine admitted.
The Gummo writer-director 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.”
Korine added that over time, his perception on movies as a whole has changed. “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,” he said.
The filmmaker also said watching modern movies is akin to a kind of obligation to consume media. “I don’t really see that many kids going to movie theaters anymore,” he 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?”
Korine 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.
“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,” the filmmaker added.
The Trash Humpers scribe-helmer 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.”
Meanwhile, besides penning the script for Korine, Malick is also currently working on his long-term project, The Way of the Wind. The biblical epic movie, which stars Mark Rylance, has been in post-production for several years.