There’s a long, invariably strange GQ profile detailing Harmony Korine’s latest attempts to reinvent the moving image, about which TBD––calling your company EDGLRD and combining moving-image efforts with video-game people and skateboarders: all right!––and whose oddest detail exists as just a stray line of information. Amidst the talk of his company’s multimedia excursions (e.g. letting viewers scan a QR code and play video games side-by-side with characters in a movie) the writer, Zach Baron, asked Korine if he’ll ever make a “real movie” again. And lo:
It’s possible. Terrence Malick wrote a script that he wants me to direct. 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.
More than the satisfaction of knowing Harmony Korine likes Song to Song (or frankly the eye-roll induced by this supposed indignity of “people speaking at a table”) it’s a remarkable move by Malick, whose past as a for-hire Hollywood screenwriter––dirtbag comedies like Deadhead Miles or The Gravy Train, or the Badlands-adjacent Pocket Money––is perpetually forgotten. (If it’s known at all. Not even Knight of Cups‘ autobiographical allusions got anybody firing up those movies.) For good reason, mind: being the most innovative feature-length American filmmaker of the last 50 years might obscure a low-rent comedy about Alan Arkin driving a truck. Malick (who only keeps busy) sidetracking for Korine is more or less an ultimate testament for someone who once named Badlands and Days of Heaven their two favorite films ever. Which is not me saying he’s absolutely obligated to make the film, but…
Maybe we’ll hear more after AGGRO DR1FT premieres at Venice on September 1. GQ detail the film just a bit further, noting it is “not quite a feature film,” defined less by cinematic grammar than “the repetitive cadence of a video game cutscene.” Guns, strippers, and a horned demon play into the picture, from which a new still and director’s statement is below.
Wild days, wild nights. Wasn’t wanting to make a movie. Was wanting to make what comes after movies. Was wanting to be inside the world. More like a video game. But who’s playing who. GAMECORE. Edglrd. Something new on the horizon.
Life is good. Without it we’d be dead. AGGRO DR1FT. In between worlds. Locked and loaded. An ode to the aggressive drifter.
