Alt film-maker Harmony Korine on AI, art and letting your kids play first person shooters

It’s halfway through my video interview with indie film-maker and artist Harmony Korine and so far, I have seen one of his eyes, one nostril and some eyebrow hair. I can see he has sunglasses on his head and his hair is silver these days. I’ve caught the plumes from the giant cigar he’s smoking (he’s obsessed with Cuba’s ‘super old women smoking cigars… it’s a good look.’). And there was one swoosh where he showed me the waterfront, and a flash of a kid riding past on a giant bike in even bigger sunglasses whom he thought had a cool look (‘Those massive, massive sunglasses on that tiny little head’). But mostly I have seen blue Miami sky. Palm trees. And now, the — as he calls it — ‘Tiffany blue’ industrial underpinnings of a pier which he’s hovering beneath. It’s a unique, destabilising point of view, but once you get to know Korine, aesthetically and emotionally, you’ll know that’s how he wants it.

Korine’s early film career was built on chance encounters and riffing on his environment — picking out characters, much like with the cool kid on the bike — and building a youth collective to showcase subcultures set against American decay. His script for Larry Clark’s New York cult classic Kids was born out of his own mooching as a skater. He knew those characters because he was those characters. The actors in Kids and Korine’s films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy and later Spring Breakers were newcomers like Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, who then became friends and collaborators — one muse, Rachel Korine, is even his wife. Now his latest phase is built on tapping into underground youth, but this time it’s to facilitate his creative process to go far beyond a movie on a screen.

Edglrd (pronounced Edgelord, the term for an exaggerated provocateur) is a 40-strong games company and design collective of twenty- and thirty-somethings (‘The kids’, he calls them — ‘but only because I’m the oldest one in the room’). Korine has enlisted the best gamers, hackers and artists, skaters, programmers and designers from around the globe, so I guess they work from their scattered bedrooms?

‘No, everybody lives in Miami. There’s 40 people working in the room.’ It is ‘much different’ from the writers’ rooms he cut his teeth in. ‘Much more exciting because the level is very high.’ They use gaming engines to create worlds. ‘You can almost make things as quickly as you can think of them,’ says Korine.

We’re here to talk about Edglrd’s first major project, the gamified heat-cam film Aggro Dr1ft (which premieres at Earth in Hackney on 10 May) and Korine’s ensuing collection of paintings based on stills from it, Aggressive Dr1fter, showing at London’s Hauser & Wirth from next week. ‘I’ve always got bored of conventional movies, even art in a lot of ways, and I was always trying to get to a place that was more sensory, closer to like, a feeling or even a kind of transcendent space — more of a euphoria through the image.’ The Aggro Dr1ft vibe, captured via thermal-imaging cameras overlaid with AI, is a neon nightmare that provoked walk-outs when it was shown in Venice. ‘It’s hyper colour, it’s hyper violent, hyper extreme,’ says Korine.

The impermeable colour scheme makes it more visceral and frightening than the usual horror trope of shrouding things in darkness. ‘It’s a nightmare but there’s like a strange beauty [to this] world. I wanted to make them a dream or more kind of hallucination,’ he says. ‘Like a kind of transcendence. But it’s based in this dystopian future world where it’s just gangs and goons running the planet.’

The result is ‘closer to a first-person shooter game’, with immersive effects and truncated platitudes in place of true dialogue. Even with his background of loose, avant-garde film-making, this is a departure. What it continues to explore is Korine’s obsession with American decay and the counterculture that lies on the outskirts of society. ‘It’s not that different than when Clint Eastwood has made Westerns…. John Milius is writing Dirty Harry. It’s really the tension of that. It’s like the extremes. It’s the kind of regional outlaw ideology. People living on the margins, creating their own sense of the world — their own universe. The innate violence of it. It’s embedded in the DNA of this culture. The strangeness, the mood of it is, in some ways, very American.’

The film, which stars an unrecognisably heat-mapped Jordi Mollà and Travis Scott, sees men wielding weapons in horned masks. We’ve seen these insurrectionist images before. In this election year, is he horrified by the prospect of a return to Trump? ‘I just think that it’s instantly dramatic, right?’ he says. Aggro Dr1ft holds a mirror to this side of America. ‘There’s a chaos and a sense of survival and the world doesn’t make sense and things are upside down and people creating their own laws. This is the real world but pushed into something hyper, hyper real.’

A lot of the project’s structural style is influenced by Korine’s enjoyment of FPS games like Rainbow Six Siege and Halo. Does he feel like they glorify guns, in a time when there are more mass shootings than ever in the US? ‘I mean, America. That is America,’ he says. ‘It’s baked into the DNA here.’ So does he ever want to pull back from that? ‘It depends on the project. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. We’re making a film about gangs taking over a tropical paradise. Obviously weapons feature heavily and obviously the same thing in gaming,’ he says. ‘I was just playing Fortnite and I got 20 kills in the last game, which was like the best I’ve ever done. And, you know, it was a great feeling.’

Perhaps there’s an opportunity here, making films this immersive and breaking the usual screen-viewer boundary to give people that sense of violent gratification, without executing it in real life? ‘I don’t have the answer to that.

I would say that people love to play GTA [Grand Theft Auto]. There’s a reason GTA is so popular.’ He plays Fortnite with his kids, six and 14 (he also has a ‘little one’) and has set his eldest son up as an advisor on the games Edglrd is developing. Does he think his children’s generation, Gen Alpha, will approach gaming, social media and the internet differently from Gen Z?

‘Trying to gamify everything? I don’t know if it’s possible for them to. I’ve heard people talk about the generation stepping back from that, but I don’t see that.

I think that only accelerates things — you only accelerate as tech accelerates. You know, [my kids] mostly play games or watch streamers. Twitch is pretty big. Then obviously Snapchat and TikTok. It’s closer to DJing most of the time: they like to control what they interact with it. But it’s hard. Sometimes I put on an older film. I tried to make one of my kids watch Ferris Bueller, but it’s the pacing. Even though the content can be funny, the pacing is a real challenge.’

He isn’t worried that there’s a kind of neuro reprogramming going on. That we’re collectively altering our attention spans so we sort of have ADHD. ‘Or do we? It’s just everyone. This is really kind of the idea of transhumanism. And definitely, we are there already.

I find it exciting. I think it’s already happened. I think you know, when you hold your phone as we all do all day long. You become neurolinked with a lot of these things coming up. That’s the future.’

I wonder if he spends much time doing things in real life now? So much of his work is a VR, AI fever dream, how does he bring himself back down to earth? ‘I go fishing, sometimes really, really early in the morning, and stare at the ocean. Take walks and yeah, I think all those things will still exist.’

And with his art, his work loops back to reality — tangible materials and 2D forms. ‘I love painting the best. At night, my kids go to sleep, I’ll go to my studio and work and it’s nice,’ he says. ‘The creative is very singular and very direct. I think writing and painting probably give me the most satisfaction. There’s something physical about it. It’s also maddening when things don’t work. But the process is rewarding. When things do work, or when you create something from your imagination that didn’t exist. That’s always fun.’

In the Aggressive Dr1fter paintings, he has found a way to ‘simplify focus and carve the imagery out of colour. I wanted to make them feel like they existed in this hyper realm, but they’re very simple, just oil on canvas. Whereas the origins of the imagery went through all this other process.’

Next up, he’s putting the finishing touches on a project ‘we’re calling Baby Invasion, but we may change it. There are babies in it, but everyone is an avatar,’ he laughs. Then there’s a game that’s nearly ready to go called Leprechauns vs Yakuza, he’s developing a prank show (‘for me, pranks are relaxing’) and is toying with making a comedy, as well as decamping the Edglrd gang to South America.

‘I feel like Brazil is pretty fun right now, we’re heading there for the next project.’ Either way, don’t expect anything to be traditional. ‘There’s like a singularity to everything. It’s starting to feel like it’s all just one thing that we’re going towards.’ So, how immersive is too immersive? ‘I can’t wait for the day when it’s 10 times more immersive,’ he laughs. ‘It’ll be fun when we can transcend the human form.’

Aggressive Dr1fter Part II, 9 May to 17 July, at Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row, W1 (hauserwirth.com)