All images: ©Harmony Korine Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Julian Cousin
HARMONY KORINE Hey. What's up, bro?
HANS ULRICH OBRIST Good morning. How are you? I'm glad we connected. Congratulations on the film. It's amazing. I was grateful to be able to see it yesterday in Vancouver. Thank you for arranging this.
KORINE Of course. My pleasure.
OBRIST We've known each other for nearly thirty years! This is almost like an anniversary. Agnès B. introduced us in 1997.
KORINE Oh my gosh. Unbelievable. Time really flies.
OBRIST But today we are going to talk about the future, not the past, because in many ways the future is in video games. Last year, for the first time, more than three billion people were playing video games. That's more than a third of the world's population. It’s bigger than the music and the film industry put together. When I visited your studio in Miami, you told me that your new film and paintings have a lot to do with video games. Also, I remember speaking to you about Spring Breakers (2012), which you told me was like a video game. Can you talk about when and where your interest in video games began?
KORINE I grew up playing video games, in the ’80s. After school, we'd spend all day in arcades. It was always an escape. It was fun for me, obviously, in a similar way to films and art. Thinking back to Spring Breakers, I was feeling like life was starting to meld with gaming. And gaming was starting to meld into real life. In Spring Breakers, [Ashley Benson’s character] repeats the phrase, over and over again like a chorus, “Just pretend it's a video game.” It was a way of desensitizing herself to commit crimes.
OBRIST The notion of violence is present in some of the games. There's a conversation you had about violence with Paul McCarthy where you discuss the different stages of violence. Can you talk about how you see violence?
KORINE Violence in games, or violence in live action, always plays a role. It’s a transgressive action—something that you can consistently go to because there are many different shades of violence. Sometimes, depending on how you do it, violence plays out like a dance. In first-person shooter games, it's exciting. It becomes a basic premise for the narrative. That's something you can see with Aggro Dr1ft. In a lot of ways, it’s like Assassin's Creed or Halo: violence is part of the language.
OBRIST My next question is about rituals and our relationship to ritual. I was thinking about Trash Humpers (2009), which has all of these strange rituals. But also, in the new film and the paintings, there are quite a lot of ritualistic moments. In the ’70s, Andrei Tarkovsky said we live in a time bereft of rituals. And more recently, the philosopher, Byun-Chul Han, wrote a book about the lack of importance in ritual in the digital age.
KORINE I guess there's a certain connection between rituals and belief and even some type of a religious element. At the end of the movie, one of the characters says, “There's nothing but love in God, even after all the destruction.” He still has a belief in ritual and transcendence.
OBRIST Aggro Dr1ft has this very immersive dimension, like in video games.
KORINE I've always been interested in and strived towards something that has a total effect. Something very immersive and all-encompassing. I've always wanted a physical component to what you're watching—something that was just beyond the explanation.
OBRIST There’s an almost liquid narrative in the new paintings and in the new film. Can you talk a little bit about this liquid narrative?
KORINE If you play first-person shooter games, like Deathloop, Apex Legends, or any of the Overwatch games, you have a sense of being inside them. And there's a world creation that's very exciting to me. With the new film and the paintings—when we talk about this kind of liquid narrative—it’s more about this idea of stepping into a world where the narrative is not so one-dimensional. It’s much more immersive.
OBRIST Can you talk about the genesis of Aggro Dr1ft?
KORINE The name came late. I went through several different names. I was listening to this aggressive drift phonk remix, which describes the BO character perfectly. And obviously, there's a correlation between cars and drift music, and drifting. I think Aggro Dr1ft will probably be the name of the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth.
OBRIST When did you first start writing the script?
KORINE I had a storyline and characters, but there was no actual script. Honestly, I started to lose interest in conventional movies. I haven't felt much attachment or excitement in a while. And then, I noticed a singularity happening—where films, live-action, artwork, and music were starting to merge. But the real unifier, for me, was gaming. Gaming is capturing the culture in a way that nothing else is. Because graphics have gotten so good, and storylines, and role-playing games have gotten so immersive, it almost started to feel limitless. And so, I started this company with a lot of gaming developers, VFX kids, and people in this world. The question became: what's beyond movies? While Aggro Dr1ft is not a game, there is something that bridges the two things. Can you use gaming aesthetics in a way to tell a live-action story? We spent close to a year trying to develop a language, a look, and a feel of something I hadn't seen before. It was a challenge—we involved a lot of different elements of tech and art. Then, we started to crack it with the infrared, VFX effects, AI, and using gaming engines. We started to merge all of that into basically what the film became. Honestly, I wasn't even trying to make a movie. I was trying to make something else; I didn't even have a name for it. I was just drawing pictures.
OBRIST Since Kids (1995), you have always worked with a script. Was this the first time you worked without one?
KORINE What’s funny is that I started as a writer and then as the decades progressed, I lost almost all interest in writing. And so, I wanted to be able to almost freestyle a film in the way you could freestyle rap. I wanted to freestyle the film based on characters and ideas. And that's kind of what Aggro Dr1ft is. It was freestyled around a certain structure and the tech dictated a lot of the storyline.
OBRIST When I was watching it, it made me think of this text by the cultural commentator, Venkatesh Rao, on the unnarratability of the world.
KORINE I just don't even think time exists anymore. Time has been obliterated. I don't feel like there is even a past or a present. I think it's just the endless now.
OBRIST Can you tell me a little bit about the casting process in this film? You have Jordi Mollà and Travis Scott.
KORINE Jordi Mollà was one of my neighbors in Miami. I was hanging out with him a bunch. And I thought he was great in the movie Blow (2001) and Bad Boys II (2003). I just love the way he speaks and moves. So, he felt like the perfect BO. And then, Travis Scott just felt perfect for the Zion character.
OBRIST Since we have known each other—since the ’90s—you have always had this very holistic practice. You draw, practice photography, write books, and then of course, make movies. But these have all been parallel realities. With the upcoming show at Hauser & Wirth, painting and cinema are becoming one. Can you talk a little bit about how this fusion happened, which has led to your first show in Los Angeles in nine years?
KORINE I always liked the idea of a unified aesthetic. Painting, in a lot of ways, has taken over my life. But, I think it's the first show that I've ever done where the paintings directly relate to any of the film work. The paintings are stills from the film—done with oil on canvas. They're very simple, versus the film, which is very technical. I wanted to make the paintings in a very traditional way, but we're using a thermal coat of paint so that they resemble the film.
OBRIST When I saw the film yesterday, I was thinking that one could almost stop and take a screenshot at any moment. The film is almost an infinity of paintings. How did you choose the moments in the film that you would then paint?
KORINE It was so hard. Like you said, almost every frame you could stop at could be a painting. A lot of it was just random. I tried to jump from character to character and experiment with different moods. It was a process of elimination. What tone or ambiance felt the strongest? And as far as the show, what story can I tell through sixteen paintings?
OBRIST In the early ’90s and 2000s, you made a lot of doodles and drawings. And now in this digital age, does drawing still play a key role?
KORINE I draw much more than I write now. With Aggro Dr1ft having no script, really everything came from my drawings. Then, we started to develop things in-house that looked more like what you see in the film.
OBRIST In all your previous exhibitions, I always thought that the drawings are the heart of the work. They're so important.
KORINE It's like Dieter Roth. At his shows, the drawings are always the most exciting part.
OBRIST Or Paul McCarthy.
KORINE Or Paul. Exactly.
OBRIST I read this interview you did with Rita Ackermann about a previous series of paintings with teddy bears inspired by the professional arm wrestler, Cleve Dean. How did the new paintings grow out of that series?
KORINE They kind of progressed from that series, but I feel like this new series of paintings is a whole other thing. I started this design collective called EdgeLord which has some of the most innovative game developers and VFX guys. Sometimes, we'll sit there working with gaming engines, and sometimes we go in there and just play video games—it’s all to see how far we can push the imagery. The look of Aggro Dr1ft, both the live action and the paintings, comes from that process, which is very similar to putzing around with drawing. It’s a similar instinct or creative inclination. I’m using tech in a way that I never have before.
OBRIST You also said that there is freedom in painting, which you don’t have in any other medium. Why does painting give you the greatest freedom?
KORINE The other stuff requires a lot of time spent with other people, which is fun, which I like, but it can also be exhausting. There's something nice about going to the studio—in a similar way that I used to enjoy writing—I could just lock the door and start throwing paint and messing around. And then, there's nobody to talk to, no one to tell you they don't like a specific color that you're using or a gesture. Painting is very direct and immediate in a way that everything else isn't.
OBRIST In the teddy bear paintings, you inserted a radiating quality, which is also present in the new paintings. There’s that great song by Blondie, “Fade Away And Radiate.” Can you talk about this radiating quality?
KORINE Yeah, radiation is good. I wanted the new paintings to feel like they could just melt the walls. (laughs)
OBRIST Do you have a favorite color? You told Rita that your favorite color is yellow, but the new paintings have a much different color palette.
KORINE There's not much yellow in the new paintings, because it's all infrared. I was almost trying to figure out how to go beyond normal color. So, the new paintings are very red. They're kind of on fire. They're a bit dystopian.
OBRIST Very post-apocalyptic.
KORINE Yeah, a bit dystopian, post-apocalyptic for sure.
OBRIST You’ve said that you have recurrent elements in your films—images of the ocean, guns, marginalized characters, and laughing. Can you talk a little bit about these four elements?
KORINE There are just certain images, now looking back, that I have always been obsessed with. I think they are built into my subconscious. I don't even know where they come from or how to explain them. But, there are definitely themes and images in all the films and artwork I’ve been repeating for years. They are probably things that I love.
OBRIST The film and paintings remind me a lot of what I saw when I visited your studio in Miami: the boats, the water. Miami has had an influence on your current work, but I was wondering why you originally moved there.
KORINE [points to view] Well, look at the view! I always loved Florida in general. I always thought it was the most interesting state in the Union. But Miami, specifically to me, feels like a city of the future. The city is built into the ocean, so it's like a floating metropolis. And it's culturally all over the place. It's closer to Latin America than it is to conventional America. For me, it is mostly about the vibe here: the way things look and feel, the way cultures are mashed up. That’s why it has inspired a lot of the work in the last decade. Miami has extreme wealth and then extreme poverty, and then everyone is rubbing up against each other. And both those worlds influence each other. You have high culture and low culture. It's also a city that exists without irony. Even the hipsters here drive Range Rovers.
OBRIST And you have a lot of technologists in Miami.
KORINE There are a lot of people that are working on tech innovation and game development. We have hired a lot of them. Miami has become a real cultural mecca for that.
OBRIST As you know, I'm very interested in this idea of artists making video games—not only making work inspired by the aesthetic of video games, but actually making video games. I curated this exhibition, WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age, which started at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf. And now, it’s on view at the Centre Pompidou Metz. And we are gonna show your work there. It’s an exhibition of more than thirty artists who all either invent games or work with video games. So, I am very curious if you have any plans to do your own video game.
KORINE That's pretty much all I've been working on besides the paintings. We have three crazy games that are in development. And actually, what I'm sending you for your show is a first glimpse at this game that we're going to introduce called Baby Invasion. It will have a live-action component. It's all about home invasions. And it's a game we've been developing for like a year. We're working on a first-person shooter. We have one role-playing game being developed, and then a really wild mobile game.
OBRIST And for the exhibition, you're going to send a teaser, or prelude, of the game. It will be in a series of light boxes with moving images, which are going to change all the time.
11 Aug 2023 / page 1 of 3Harmony Korine (b. 1973)UOU2023Oil on canvas123.8 x 183.5 x 4.1 cm / 48 3/4 x 72 1/4 x 1 5/8inchesKORIH125550Harmony Korine (b. 1973)MANT1X FAZE2023Oil on canvas179.7 x 122.6 x 4.1 cm / 70 3/4 x 48 1/4 x 1 5/8inchesKORIH125543
KORINE The lightboxes will have these digital black and white silhouettes of the characters doing home invasions. They will run simultaneously. They're very beautiful, very haunting, kind of violent, but extremely exciting. I'm going to send them to you probably in the next day or two. We're putting them on a loop so that they never end.
OBRIST One thing we didn't talk about, which is always in my interviews, is unrealized projects. Architects sometimes publish unrealized projects because they do competitions, but we don't know much about filmmakers’ or visual artists’ unrealized projects. And the range, or scope, of unrealized projects can be pretty wide: either the project is too big, too expensive, too utopic, or too time-intensive to be realized. The late composer [György] Ligeti said he had forty to fifty years of music to write. And then, other projects might be self-censored or simply are censored. Can you tell me about one or two of your favorite unrealized projects?
KORINE I used to dream of putting a book together called Commercial Failures. I spent a lot of years working in advertising. In the very beginning, I was obsessed with this idea of radical advertising and trying to infiltrate the mainstream. I think I lost hundreds of jobs because the ideas were too subversive, or strange, or outside the box. But, some of the most interesting things of mine that were never realized were commercial failures. They failed to even become commercial. I have another movie called The Trap that I was about to make. We got very close—then the film collapsed within a couple of weeks of principal photography. That's something I would probably turn into a game. We've already been talking about how to create the whole thing in Unreal Engine or use a gaming engine to create the film itself.
OBRIST Do you have a script for The Trap?
KORINE We had the actors, the script, we had the whole thing. It was probably my largest budget up to that point. I spent a solid two years prepping it, and then at least half a year just drawing the storyboards. I have thousands of pages of boards—from the first frame to the final frame. Then, there was an issue with an actor at the last second. He couldn't be in the film, and then everyone's schedules collapsed, and the whole film was nixed at the last second. But it's probably my favorite thing that I've written. It's a revenge film that takes place in Miami. People have been trying to get me to come back to it, or maybe turn it into a book.
OBRIST One of the things that has been very important to you is publishing. We talked a lot about your fanzines when we met in the ’90s. You also have some amazing artist books. Is publishing still relevant to you? Are you working on any books related to the film and the show?
KORINE Yes, I need your help, Hans. (laughs) I have a pretty significant-sized archive. There's a lot of text and writing that I guess should be fanzines. Also, there are a lot of books in there that I just never published; just because I'm too lazy to finish things, or life gets the best of me.
OBRIST You mentioned that some ads were too radical to be realized. But you have realized quite a lot of ads and you told me that they were fun to do because it’s a sort of language. It’s interesting because a lot of great little films have been made out of advertisements. For example, [Federico] Fellini created a beautiful commercial for Barilla noodles. It's one of my favorite advertisements of all time. Can you tell me about one or two of your favorite ads that you have realized?
KORINE I've done a lot of fashion. I worked with Gucci, Valentino, YSL—those are all fun. But I have also done things for 7-Eleven and Velveeta Cheese. I love them all. I've always liked advertising because it's a technical exercise and it's a way to tell a story in a very short period and you can be very creative. Advertising, in a lot of ways, has influenced the live action and art just because they can become quite experimental.
OBRIST What did you do for 7-Eleven?
KORINE I did an ad for their Slurpee. I made it look really delicious. (laughs)
OBRIST Something that I always felt has gone missing, but is now coming back is the relationship of art and poetry. And one of the least known publicized aspects of your practice is the fact that you are a poet. Can you talk a little bit about this? Have you made any recent poetry? And what's the role of poetry in your practice? Who are some of your favorite poets?
KORINE I love poetry. I love Richard Brautigan and sometimes it's just a couple of words on a page. I just love the way that certain words fall on top of each other. Even the way letters look and the way that certain things sound. Poetry is such a maligned art form now. It’s strange, but can poetry compete with Twitter? At the same time, there is this interesting thing about the idea of putting disconnected words and letters, seemingly randomly, to discover the meaning and context. And I like what's not said. For me, it's poetry, horror films, rap music—they're transgressive and it can be exciting.
OBRIST The 20th-century poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote this really beautiful book full of advice for a young poet. I think a lot of students will read our interview, so I am wondering, what would be your 2023 advice to a young artist, painter, or filmmaker? Or maybe a game inventor.
KORINE It's hard because I'm not that smart and I never took advice when I was a kid. I would just say: look at the world, look at what's out there. Maybe we're living in a moment that's post-meaning; maybe it's impossible for anything to have a real impact in the way that it used to. I'm not sure. But I think in a lot of ways, it's never been a more interesting time to be creative than it is now. People romance the past but in a lot of ways the past sucked. You were so limited in how you could put things out. There were so many gatekeepers, and naysayers, and so many people that put up blockades that you really, really, really had to be creative to get your work out. There are so many avenues now where you can release work that there's really no excuse. The hard part, though, because there's so much out there, is how do you cut through the noise and how do you make something that affects the culture? The advice I would give is to look and see what's out there, see what's missing, and then see what you can add to the equation, and then just be bold. If you believe in it, never stop.