The future of entertainment lies in movies that can be experienced like video games, argued the filmmaker behind “Spring Breakers.” Harmony Korine spoke to GQ about his co-funded studio Edglrd, where he noted that gaming systems have advanced to the point where “you could look at the Call of Duty trailer now, and it looks better than anything that [Steven] Spielberg’s ever done.”
“We’re trying to gamify movies,” Korine continued. “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.”
The director, who broke out in 1995 with the bracingly of-its-time “Kids,” has “just lost interest in normal films.” He’s now more curious about what’s next.
“The way it used to be was that movies would come out, films would come out, games would come out, music would come out, and everyone knew about it,” he stated. “Now, not only do you not know what’s out there, you don’t even know the channels that exist that it’s out there on.”
The first Edglrd product to be released to the public will be a movie called “AGGRO Dr1FT.” Reportedly shot in a palette closely resembling thermal imaging, it features Jordi Mollà and Travis Scott. Scored by AraabMuzik, it’s not quite a conventional feature film and Korine described the aesthetic as “gamecore.”
“How do you take the whole idea of entertainment, of live-action gaming, and create something new?” Korine asked. “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.”
The filmmaker noted that while a return to “real movies” was possible, it would only be for one person.
“Terrence Malick wrote a script that he wants me to direct,” Korine continued. “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. 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.”
