Harmony Korine Sounds Off on ‘Aggro Dr1ft,’ TikToks Being Better Than Movies and More: ‘I Feel Nothing’ and ‘Dead Inside’ Watching Films

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Harmony Korine used to be a movie junkie, someone who’d watch anything and everything. These days, when people recommend a movie, “I’ll look at it and I feel nothing, like dead inside,” says the guy whose own films, from “Spring Breakers” to the controversial screenplay for Larry Clark’s “Kids,” are nothing if not disruptive. “Watching a lot of this shit, you really feel the algorithms,” he says the day before receiving the Pardo d’onore Manor prize at the Locarno Film Festival.

Whereas, “I’ll see a clip on TikTok that is so inexplicable, so outside the realm of what I even imagine someone creating. Like, I can have an experience with a 30-second clip that goes so far beyond” what movies do for him.

TikTok. YouTube. Video games. Those are the influences operating on Korine’s latest feature-length provocation, “Aggro Dr1ft,” which is premiering at the Venice Film Festival.

It looks and sounds unlike any movie he’s seen — or made. Korine and DP Arnaud Potier shot on thermal cameras, relying on 3D imaging, visual effects and AI tools to render the result. “It’s closer to being inside of a game,” says Korine, who is using the project to launch a company he calls EDGLRD, with backing by Matt Holt, president of the board of The Paris Review. “It’s probably like the most excited I’ve been about anything I’ve made in forever.