Harmony Korine is too busy admiring stomachs to direct a script Terrence Malick wrote for him
Harmony Korine says Terrence Malick wrote a beautiful script for him to direct, but also, Korine wonders, what if a “beer gut” had a tap?
Aux News Harmony Korine
Harmony Korine doesn’t make movies so much these days. Sequestered in his Floridian compound just outside of Mar-a-Lago, he dismisses the idea of directing dialogue scenes as he develops interactive home invasion video games and A.I. animations of old ladies in Crocs cruising on Rascal scooters. He seems happy to be away from it all, admiring the state of stomachs on nearby beaches and letting his flights of fancy drive his work.
It would be all well and good for Mr. Korine to follow his deeply strange but fascinating muse, such as beer guts and what could go into them, but apparently, he’s sitting on a screenplay by Terrence Malick that Malick wants him to direct. Speaking to GQ about possibly making a new movie, Korine casually informs the moviegoing public that Malick wrote a “really beautiful script” that he wants Korine to direct.
The director of Spring Breakers and The Beach Bum takes great pride in believing he is responsible for New York Times critic Janet Maslin moving from movie reviews to book reviews after declaring Gummo the worst film of 1997. Though he’s directed commercials and art projects and participated in Travis Scott’s Circus Maximus omnibus, Korine hasn’t directed a feature since 2019. Nevertheless, Korine says the screenplay is “one of the only things that I could imagine pulling me back into like actual, traditional moviemaking.”
Unfortunately, the tediousness of making movies and “looking through a viewfinder and filming, like, people speaking at a table” doesn’t thrill him. Also, unfortunately, that’s a big part of making movies. Still, that Malick wrote this script for him is 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,” he said before getting his peepers on a “shirtless older man with a stomach that is like one side of a beach ball” and instantly switching gears. This man’s “beer gut” inspires Korine to go on a tangent about what would happen “if you took, uh, what is the thing you stick in a keg?” After being told that “the thing you stick in a keg” is called “a tap,” he ponders what it would be like if “you just inserted it into their gullet and then you turned it on. The lager would be flowing out of his belly,” Korine concludes.
Yeah, it doesn’t seem like he will be directing that Terrence Malick movie anytime soon. However, a film about a man with a spout in his belly does sound like a Korinesque premise that could cause a critic to quit cinema.
16 Comments
Why don’t you just interview him yourself? It’s not a hard get.
You mean like do actual journalistic work?
Oh, come on. It’s not like the AV Club moved across an entire continent to be in a city that’s the very centre of cinema, thus affording them better and easier to access to the people in the industry-Wait. Shit.
If this is an opportunity to advocate for Malick’s most recent movie, A Hidden Life, it is an incredibly beautiful film. Challenging but powerful. Don’t let any ill will created from his prior works affect your opinion on this one. It was a magnificent return to form.
Nothin screams “written by ai” like that paragraph whose two sentences both end “has a script that Terrence Malick wants him to direct.”
“Harmony Korine doesn’t make movies so much these days.”Do you mean besides the movie premiering at TIFF in three weeks?https://tiff.net/events/aggro-dr1ft
WTF would a Malick x Korine joint even end up looking like? I need to know.
Gummo is a remarkable film, and a great Nashville time capsule.
Never gonna top it.
Remarkable, but ALSO very hard to watch. It’s one of the few, maybe only movie, I have watched once and have never wanted to watch again.
reading this made me dummer
Read the GQ article and you’ll feel extra dumb
Korine is a sack of shit that has made some of the most reprehensible exploitative films of all time.
“Harmony Korine doesn’t make movies so much these days.
He made one that’s premiering in Toronto in three weeks.
Malick so famously rewrites his films in editing; Tree of Life, Thin Red Line and Days of Heaven were all heavily reconceived post-shooting, going way off script. I remember Sean Penn saying he had no idea even what he was doing in Tree of Life. So, by giving Korine a script, one might get the chance to see what a Malick film would look like if the director stuck closer to the page. Though, maybe his secret plan is for Korine to go similarly rogue.
I just want to see a poster with the tag line: “From the creators of TREE OF LIFE and TRASH HUMPERS”.