Film and gaming technology will converge argues the Spring Breakers director, as he steps away from traditional cinema.
Harmony Korine has seen the future of cinema and it looks a lot like a video game. The director of Spring Breakers and Gummo has been chatting to GQ about his latest endeavour, the co-founded creative collective studio named ‘Edglrd’. (It’s pronounced ‘Edgelord’.) According to Korine, the studio is currently working on films, video games and crucially, movies that are experienced like video games, which he has called the ‘future of entertainment.’
Korine didn’t stop there either, stating that ‘you could look at the Call Of Duty trailer now, and it looks better than anything that [Steven] Spielberg’s ever done.’ That’s a pretty bold claim and we’re not sure we can agree with the filmmaker there, but we see his point. With films relying ever more on digital effects and video games striving for ever-increasing photo-realism, we are heading towards a convergence point. We’d argue that we’re not yet as close as Korine claims, however.
The creator is going all in on this new approach, claiming that cinema is ‘dying’ and stating that [I] ‘just lost interest in normal films,’ whilst the ever-changing channels of distribution are accelerating this process. “The way it used to be was that movies would come out, films would come out, games would come out, music would come out, and everyone knew about it,” he adds. “Now, not only do you not know what’s out there, you don’t even know the channels that exist that it’s out there on.’
As such, Korine sees the future as something entirely new, an amalgamation of cinema and gaming.
Korine did add that he would come back to traditional cinema to direct a script that Terence Malick has written for him, but he seems more interested in what he describes as a way to ‘gamify movies,’ to build interfaces that allow people to work with cinematic footage to remix, or create their own, films. The studio’s first project, Aggro Dr1ft (pictured) is currently slated to premiere at the Venice Film Festival next month.
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