In this latest edition of “things we never expected to occur,” it turns out that we might be getting an unlikely collaboration between two famous filmmakers who have absolutely nothing in common, stylistically or thematically.
While he’s also been busy editing the hell out of “The Way of the Wind,” Terrence Malick has written a a script and he wants none other than Harmony Korine to direct it.
Here’s Korine, in a new interview with GQ, talking about this mysterious new film, which is the first time we’ve heard anything about it:
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.
The entire interview is well worth a read. Journalist Zach Baron even sheds a bit more light on Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft,” which is set to premiere at the fall fests next month:
But even by the standards of Korine’s past work, AGGRO DR1FT—shot in the blurry red-yellow-green palette of thermal imaging—is not quite a feature film. It’s got the repetitive cadence of a video game cutscene, plenty of strippers and plenty of guns, and tells the story of “the world’s greatest assassin,” played by Jordi Mollà, who is watched over by a horned demon […] The film will be the first EDGLRD project to be released into the world. Korine calls its aesthetic “gamecore.”
In that same interview, Korine claims that, with the exception of the Malick project, he is done with “normal films”. The “Spring Breakers” auteur says he “just lost interest in normal films”. “I was like, There’s something else. That really became the obsession. I was like, What comes after all this?”
Korine adds that his perception on films as a whole changed over time, 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.”