Harmony Korine: ‘I don’t watch movies anymore. I’m bored by them’

Controversial and provocative are maybe redundant terms to describe Harmony Korine. Plucked from anonymity at a Washington State Park in New York at 19 by Larry Clark to write Kids, Korine rose to fame for the transgressive cult NYC film starring his real-life friends. Then, he started directing his own work, Gummo, his debut film, had audiences walk out in the first ten minutes with its non-narrative cat-killing, glue-sniffing freakshow aesthetic. Julien Donkey-Boy and Trash Humpers received similar receptions, and many didn’t know what to make of his commercially successful cult film Spring Breakers. His newest film Aggro Dr1ft sparked mass walk-outs at the Venice Film Festival premiere while also receiving a ten-minute standing ovation from those who remained.

Korine’s films are for the freaks. They are meant to disturb the status quo: they are ugly, they are free and they are beautiful. Some of his earlier films are set in his hometown in Nashville; Korine tells me “I grew up behind a parking lot. I used to hang out and there would be Bible salesmen, drug dealers, weapon dealers, armed robberies. I found it entertaining. I’m just attracted to these images growing up around that kind of American vernacular.”

Trash Humpers and Gummo are anarchic vandalism with a surprising grace – the delicate ring of the sound of an old TV being smashed with a hammer, the way the misfits sing and hump any inanimate object – trash, lampposts and trees. “I love the way a broken street lamp and a toppled go-kart look all together in the back of a parking lot,” Korine muses. Korine’s outcasts are liberated, they are disgusted with the social order and the pain of living in this pedantic American neoliberal dream of home-owning, child-raising: a “stupid, stupid way to live,” laments one of the trash humpers.

Korine’s own chaotic life has constantly been fighting against living in a boring, normative way. During the 90s, two of Korine’s homes burned down due to ‘mysterious’ reasons, and he lost all his footage for his film Fight Harm (Leonardo DiCaprio had been one of the cameramen), a comedy consisting entirely of footage of Korine being beaten up by strangers. Then, during his recovery from his drug addiction, he lived with a cult of fishermen in Panama who were searching for a fish with golden scales. Korine eventually fell out with the cult leader, accusing him of living a lie, before moving back to the US.

Aggro Dr1ft possesses this same sense of anarchy, although in a different form. Set in Miami, Aggro Dr1ft can be described as a video-game and the most primitive action-film – it’s got the skeleton of what you can expect from an action-film – an assassin, guns and speedboats, but to call it a narrative is a bit of a stretch. The film follows an assassin named Bo (Jordi Mollà) who’s directed to assassinate a “big man” who lives in a mansion with strippers in cages and humps the air with his big belly.

However, Bo is a reluctant assassin, he’d rather spend time at home being a good dad to his two kids and dote on his perennially twerking wife (for almost every scene she’s on screen, she’s twerking). But to support them, he must work – he recruits a team of assassins and imparts his wisdom in the trade to his protégé Zion (Travis Scott). That is the only narrative arc. Instead, Korine’s rich images are what keep you mesmerised.

Korine says the images came to him first, before any idea of what he wanted to make the film about. “I’ve been playing a lot of video games, and I can just play them for hours. Have you seen the new Legend of Zelda? It’s insane. I’m trying to make something post-cinema, this sensory feeling of being inside the film, something almost transcendental.”

Made with Infrared NASA cameras, the film is awash in unctuous, radioactive reds, blues and yellows, and imprints itself on your senses. You can see the warmth of a body, almost feel its shifting textures. The thermal imagery scratches beneath an image, beyond the skin to something that feels even more intimate beyond what a normal camera can see. The hallucinogenic images of Miami with its dark rolling waves and red and blue palm trees seem to capture the soul of Miami more than any picture has. “Florida is the most inscrutable, most eccentric, most beautiful place in the world – guns, palm trees, pink skies. Florida automatically becomes science fiction because anything is believable in Florida.”

Korine takes it further by manipulating the images with AI-generated drawings etched on the skin of the characters, little skeletal wires, machinery winding along their arms like a cyborg skin. “I think we are already transhuman,” Korine says. “I think it happens when you hold your phone, and I’m interested in that sense of what comes after the human.” At points throughout the film, the camera floats and glides like a machine, before cutting into a first-person perspective, a manifestation not only of a video-game perspective, but almost of the camera as an extension of the body.

AraabMuzik’s ominous score drives the whole film, and music is at the centre of much of Korine’s work, having recently also directed Circus Maximus for Travis Scott and Bladee and Yung Lean’s new music video for One Second. He says, “I think of my films as pop songs. Definitely with Spring Breakers and Trash Humpers. I don’t really like listening to people talk. I like the way pop music is about refrains, hooks, and choruses, and so I’m trying to make films as pop songs with these repeated refrains.” In Spring Breakers, we hear the girls repeat the dream-like mantra “Spring break forever!” In Aggro Dr1ft, we hear the assassin repeat “Daddy’s got to work to make money”, “I am the world’s greatest assassin”, phrases that call to the hollowness of maintaining his role – both as a father in this dysmorphic nuclear family, and his empty destiny as an assassin.

When I ask if any films inspired Aggro Dr1ft, Korine says “I don’t watch movies anymore. I’m bored by them.” Disinterested with traditional models of theatrical releases, streaming platforms and increasingly commercialised studios, Korine is tired of making “formal stuff that feel too much part of the system. Everything now feels so boring and homogenous.” Many sentiments arise from his own relationship to filmmaking, films that received controversial reputations without large audiences, making “films that nobody watched”.

So what comes after? “That’s why we started EDGLRD.” EDGLRD (pronounced Edgelord) is Korine’s design collective consisting of gamers, artists, skaters, programmers and designers working together “to use gaming engines to build worlds,” Korine explains. “I’m as obsessed with images as I was as a kid, but now I’m thinking just in terms of how far I can push them.” EDGLRD is making films, video games, music, clothing – all with cutting-edge technology. He’s currently making a game called Leprechauns vs Yakuzas and a new film called Baby Invasion, where Korine is “trying to build a mechanism that allows people to take the footage and remix it kind of into their own films and patterns with their own control.” While venturing into the unknown may scare some filmmakers, Korine leans into the chaos: “I barely leave the EDGLRD offices. We’re creating everything in real time. It finally feels like technology is starting to coincide with the level of dreams.”

Even with Aggro Dr1ft, the premiere in London comes not in a cinema, but at a music venue at EartH Hackney on May 10, with DJ performances by Arca, Evian Christ and Korine himself. “I want it to be a sensory experience more than just a film. I feel like that’s life now – we are listening to music, watching TikToks, while watching films.” Korine feels like maybe we are moving on from cinema to a new medium, comparing it to the fallout of radio. “Something new will always come.”

Yet Korine has not shed his love for mediums which are more primitive – his paintings are currently on show at Hauser & Wirth, a collection called Aggressive Dr1fter, based on stills from Aggro Dr1ft. “Painting is in some ways the most traditional thing I love, it’s the purest way to create for me. I like how physical it is,” Korine says. “But I need all of them to work together. I look back at everything that I’ve made and I feel like they are all connected. They all really speak to one idea – to create.”

“How do we take entertainment somewhere new?” Korine asks. I respond, teasingly: “You think your films are entertaining?” He bursts into laughter and shakes his head. I’ve always loved Korine’s work precisely because his films are not necessarily ‘entertaining’, as they are not made for easy consumption. They are impish and strange little creatures, almost always fetched from the gutter, made anew in his vision. “I guess I’ve always made films because I want to make images that no one else has made. I’m compelled to make images that don’t exist.” Korine demands that the world entertain him, rather than the other way round. All the world is a trash-humping, drainer-pop, infrared playground, and Korine is still playing.

Buy a ticket for the UK premiere of Aggro Dr1ft at EartH here.