To drum up hype for EDGLRD, his new creative collective/design studio, Harmony Korine put one of America’s greatest living filmmakers in his sights. EW reports (via a new GQ profile) that, with the recent advances in gaming technology (the same Korine uses to make his new film “Aggro Dr1ft“), videogames now look better than movies visually. And in the case of “Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare III,” the cult filmmaker thinks the game’s new trailer “looks better than anything that [Steven] Spielberg‘s ever done.”
READ MORE: Harmony Korine Isn’t Sure How To Describe ‘Aggro Dr1ft’: “Maybe It’s Not Even A Movie”
But will “Aggro Dr1ft” look that good? Korine’s first film since 2019’s “The Beach Bum” has its world premiere out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on September 2. The film stars rapper Travis Scott who plays an assassin, with Korine shooting the film entirely in infrared and thermal imaging. Korine’s term for the movie’s look? “Gamecore,” since he thinks EDGLRD’s aesthetic more closely resembles video games than movies. But what will audiences at Venice think about “Aggro Dr1ft”? Experimental films are more than welcome on the Lido, but they may look askance at a movie that’s closer visually to a shooter than a traditional narrative film.
Korine isn’t worried about any negative backlash at the film’s Venice premiere. He’s more interested in seeing if EDGLRD may push the limits of filmmaking in an exciting new direction as the industry remains in flux. “How do you take the whole idea of entertainment, of live-action gaming, and create something new?” Korine asked GQ in the new profile. “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.” And EDGLRD’s mission statement? Simple: “we’re trying to gamify movies,” Korine explained. “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.”
So, an interactive film experience that blands narrative film with videogame aesthetics/techniques. That may be a creative development fans of Korine never expected from the director of the likes of “Gummo” and “Spring Breakers,” but the director sounds all in on both “Aggro Dr1ft” and EDGLRD. And he’s also not interested in returning to more traditional filmmaking anytime soon, unless he makes a script Terrence Malick wrote for him. Let’s see how Korine’s latest does with critics at Venice a week from now before we declare the “gamifying” of movies a mission failure.
Expect a trailer for “Aggro Dr1ft” any day now as the lead-up to the Venice Film Festival continues.
