Just up the beach from Mar-a-Lago, Harmony Korine is out on the sand, wearing a horned demon mask, staring at the ocean. Palm Beach in June is humid and a little dazed. I would tell you how one of the most transgressive and perpetually youthful filmmakers of his generation looks now, at 50, but again: horned demon mask. “This is EDGLRD,” he says, pointing at it. Pronounced “edgelord.” Slightly muffled, vocal-wise, from the mask, but you get the idea. Then he takes it off—face still mischievous, if also a little professorial these days; eyes as gleeful as ever—and asks if I want to go inside and see the rest of it for myself.
There are many ways to describe EDGLRD, it turns out, none of them simple. This is the first time Korine or his partners have talked about it publicly. It’s a design collective; it’s a creative factory; it makes movies that are not really movies, movies that are closer to video games, that sometimes are actually playable as video games. It also makes video-game video games. EDGLRD is using AI in exactly the way that people in Hollywood speculate AI might somehow be used, to help make the things it makes, except it’s already doing so. Plus, EDGLRD is prototyping clothes you can wear and clothes that your digital avatar can wear while you play EDGLRD games (that are also sometimes movies). Posters for various characters Korine and his team call FloridaLords—a girl with a hamburger face named Patty Melt; Trinika Young, a Caribbean tech psychic—line the walls of the beach house they’re using for an office.
There are maybe 15, 20 people in the house. Animators, game and fashion designers, 3D printers, character riggers. Men and women who used to work for Marvel, or the big video game studios. Sean Pablo, the great 25-year-old skater from Los Angeles, is here, sitting on a couch in the living room, because EDGLRD has a skateboarding component too. Korine’s main partner in this venture, Matt Holt, who owns the house, is a private-equity guy and the president of the board of The Paris Review. He and Korine began hanging out during the pandemic. “I started talking to Harmony about starting his own company,” Holt says. “And I remember the moment he said, ‘That’s a great idea. Will you be my partner?’ ”
They’ve since found other investors; their ambition is not small. Korine says they’d like to get to a point where they’re dropping films once a month. “It’s like: Instead of someone writing a check for $50 million to make one film,” Korine says, “how do you make 50 $1 million films? I’m saying ‘films,’ but they’re not really films either.”
A few weeks earlier, in Los Angeles, Korine had arranged for me to see what had been described to me as his newest movie, something called AGGRO DR1FT. Korine’s films, starting with his debut, 1997’s Gummo, made after he’d already become famous for writing the screenplay for 1995’s Kids, have always played with notions of time, of continuity, of narrative itself. But even by the standards of Korine’s past work, AGGRO DR1FT—shot in the blurry red-yellow-green palette of thermal imaging, starring the Spanish actor Jordi Mollà and the rapper Travis Scott, and scored by AraabMuzik—is not quite a feature film. It’s got the repetitive cadence of a video game cutscene, plenty of strippers and plenty of guns, and tells the story of “the world’s greatest assassin,” played by Mollà, who is watched over by a horned demon, the likeness of which Korine was wearing on the beach. The film will be the first EDGLRD project to be released into the world. Korine calls its aesthetic “gamecore.”
Korine says he spent a lot of time trying to imagine “what is the feeling of being inside of a game? Or even something close to a drug experience? Is there a physical kind of component to what you’re watching? Is there something that blurs the line between reality and unreality?”
EDGLRD has arisen out of a suspicion Korine and his collaborators have: that movies as we know them are on their way out, victims of increasingly corporatized studio systems reliant on broken financial models so fragile and strained that, within a month of our conversation, Hollywood’s writing and acting guilds would both be on strike in protest of them. Part of the issue, Korine thinks, is the demolished attention spans of younger people, who are seeking something else, something that we don’t quite have words for yet, even as the EDGLRD team is busy trying to invent them. “It’s not even anyone just sitting down watching one thing,” Korine says, about how people approach entertainment these days. “There’s multiple things. You’re listening to music, you’re on TikTok, and you’re watching a film.”
The question is, says Korine, “How do you take the whole idea of entertainment, of live-action gaming, and create something new? The obsession here is that there’s something else after where we’ve been—that one thing is dying, and something new is being born right now.”
When I first met Korine in 2019, it was at his painting studio, which is in Miami’s Design District. I was there to write a profile of him loosely tied to the release of The Beach Bum, which stars Matthew McConaughey as a talented but reluctant poet. But I had other questions too. Korine has led many lives, all of them fascinating, and I spent a lot of time trying to pin him down on the details of those lives: Did he really punch Meryl Streep backstage at an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman? Was Leonardo DiCaprio really a cameraman on Korine’s lost film, Fight Harm, a comedy consisting entirely of footage of Korine starting fights with strangers on the street? Why did the various houses he was living in have a way of burning down? And so on.
Rereading what I wrote about our encounter now, I have the distinct feeling of missing the point. Korine’s art has always pushed on reality in fascinating ways: Kids both starred and was about Korine’s real-life friends, and showed them exactly as they were, but in the context of a lurid and entirely fictional plot, which unnerved audiences then and made the film a sensation. Subsequent movies, like Gummo and Trash Humpers, went further, doing away with narrative almost entirely, even while Korine often employed nonactors and other techniques to make the films feel, well, real. To ask what was fake and what actually happened, as I spent a lot of time doing in 2019, was to misunderstand the project, which was always about trying to bring into existence a category-less world Korine could sense right around the corner, a world he was doing his best to create in his life, his films, and his other artwork.
As a student at NYU, Korine would often spend nearly all of his waking hours watching one film or another. But at some point, as he got older, his relationship to the movies changed. “They became less and less interesting,” Korine says, lighting a cigar and staring at the ocean. Especially in the modern era of streaming and increasingly consolidated production, there was an artificial quality to movies that Korine couldn’t help but notice. “They just all feel like they’ve been so processed. Even the dialogue, it all sounds like it’s written by the same person. Everyone speaks exactly the same.”
Korine’s films have always been a response to this feeling, that there were things to be made that did away with the artificiality, the contrivances of plot, of backstory, of context, and went straight to the good part. “I would always just remember, like, one or two scenes that would stay with me,” Korine says. “And I was like: Why can’t you just make a film that consists entirely of those scenes? Why do you have to waste all this time with people having conversations at a coffee table, at a dinner table? I remember looking at these books that my mom made that were just photos of us as kids. And, like, she’d put them all behind plastic. They were all washed out and grainy. But it was great. I was like, ‘Wow, this goes from me on the beach skateboarding in South Carolina in the ’80s. Then it jumps to like, you know, my grandfather on his deathbed.’ There’s a story. It’s almost as much about what’s missing as about what’s there. So, narrative always felt like a place for disruption.”
For a long time, he tried to do this in conventional feature filmmaking, often hand in hand with studios. These films—*Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, Mister Lonely—*had reputations, but they didn’t always have audiences. “I spent so many years making things that nobody saw,” Korine says. His movies were nonlinear and fluid in a way that feels contemporary now, when each YouTube video or TikTok or Instagram reel bleeds into the next, but at the time, audiences often didn’t know what to make of them.
Famously, the critic Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times in 1997, called Gummo “the worst film of the year.” Korine remembers this moment well. “But I noticed,” he says, “that she stopped working right after that.”
This is not true, I say—Maslin just switched beats and started reviewing books instead.
“Makes sense,” he says, grinning again. “She should have gone to books.”
Korine went through some dark personal years at the end of the ’90s and into the next century, but he kept making things, and every once in a while, something he made, like Spring Breakers, a neon fever dream of a film, would sneak through to the larger consciousness—these fleeting, fascinating moments where we all dreamed the same weird Harmony Korine dream. Korine says he enjoyed that friction, of seeing his films “in a commercial context,” but he also, in the past decade, became more and more skeptical about whether it could ever happen again. “I don’t really see that many kids going to movie theaters anymore,” Korine says. “I watch my own movies and it’s almost like when my mom tried to make me read books, you know what I mean?”
After The Beach Bum, Korine says, something that was always fraying finally snapped. “I just lost interest in normal films,” he says. Entirely. “I was like, There’s something else. That really became the obsession. I was like, What comes after all this?”
Today, Korine says, what people pay attention to has been shattered into a million pieces. “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 says. “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.”
Some filmmakers might find themselves depressed at the loss of one single, unified audience. But Korine feels the opposite: “I waited my whole life for this. For this moment, and the ability to function like this and to create like this. Like, I’ve always just wanted to get to a point where you go beyond 2D, where it is like aesthetic drugs. Do you know what I mean? And then, how can you be thrown? Like, how can I throw you off? There is no center. There’s no actual.… Narrative has been completely obliterated. And what you’re watching really is just an experience.”
“This is Home Invasion,” Korine says, pointing at a computer monitor inside the house. On the screen plays security–camera and GoPro footage of masked men and women, wearing horns, rampaging through various Miami McMansions, tying up various innocent-looking families. “We’re trying to gamify movies,” Korine says. So Home Invasion is designed to look, at times, like a first-person shooter, and inside the film the home invaders are sometimes playing games —the idea being you can scan a QR code and play along with them. “What we’re trying to do is to build some mechanism that allows people to interface with the footage and basically remix, or make their own, films,” Korine says.
They also have been experimenting, Korine says, with replacing the faces of the home invaders with the faces of babies. That film, he says, has a title too: Baby Invasion. Korine has EDGLRD cofounder and head of production Joao Rosa, a grave, priestlike native of Brazil, cue up some sample footage: terrifying.
At a table nearby, Jill Ubando, a real-time 3D artist, and Dominic Barriere, a character rigging artist, show me what they have in progress. Barriere cues up some images of an animatronic Chucky doll; Ubando shows me the same doll, skating through a nighttime environment she’s built. “We create everything here,” Korine says, from over my shoulder. The whole idea is to “create as quickly as you can think it. She’ll just sit there and she’ll build, and in a couple days she’ll show us what 10 seconds of this would look like.”
But that’s only the beginning, Korine says. It’s a game, now, or could be one. “Then you’re like: What would a feature look like with that character? Or what would a clothing design look like?”
Korine bounces from station to station, weaving through the house, introducing me to people: Nicolau Vergueiro, a creative director with a big swoop of hair, designs most of EDGLRD’s prototype clothes, some of which are dimensional, with various bumps and protrusions; one design has a monitor placed on the chest of a sweatshirt. “So when you’re wearing this,” Korine interjects, “this will then become a screen.”
I meet a fashion designer. I meet a guy who owns several skate parks. I meet a bunch of video game designers. Sean Pablo drifts in and out, sometimes wearing a mask made out of a transparent veil. More people, working from all over the world, cluster on Zoom screens visible from all over the house.
Carlos Fueyo, one of EDGLRD’s creative directors—kindly eyes, extremely competent vibe—was in the virtual art department for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. He says he came to work here because unlike in the traditional studio system, there’s no bureaucracy, no barriers. On Ant-Man, he says, “I think every single set was created way in advance a year before the shot.” Here they just make stuff as soon as they can think to make it.
Fueyo shows me on a monitor something he’s been working on: a scan of Korine’s face and head, but with cornrows. He hands me a tablet, has me look at its camera. All of a sudden my facial expressions are transposed onto Korine’s face—unsettling. “This is the future of entertainment,” Korine says, laughing. This is basic, though, Fueyo says. Gaming engines have come so far that you can do whatever you want, almost instantaneously. They’ve gotten so sophisticated, Korine says, “that it’s almost gone 360. You could look at the Call of Duty trailer now, and it looks better than anything that Spielberg’s ever done.”
There’s also a concept they’ve been playing around with, Korine says, called Leprechaun Yakuza. It’s what it sounds like. “It’s basically about these leprechauns that fight these yakuza. We should show that.” Korine says. “Casia, can we show that?”
Casia Levine, another creative director working this week from what looks like her bedroom, in East Hollywood, cues up footage of a rampaging leprechaun via Zoom. “We’re making a blinx that can guide the creation of the game,” she says.
“We should explain what blinx are,” Korine says. “Blinx is something that we’re using to describe what everything is now. Instead of films or games, a lot of these things—we’re just calling them blinx.”
Korine says Levine is really wise about everything they’re working on. All of the EDGLRD kids, I’m finding, are philosophers, living as they do at the verge of what’s possible. Levine is particularly adept at explaining both the purpose of and the theory behind EDGLRD’s model—how they are making things for people who are spending increasing amounts of their time online; how EDGLRD’s aesthetics, which are often beautiful but just as often disturbing, mirror the unbalanced lives of their intended viewers.
“We’re in this moment right now where people are existing in new ways,” Levine says, from her Zoom screen. “Like, public life has kind of disappeared, and I feel like the virtual space really needs to address this in some way. I feel like a lot of virtual reality is like: Make an avatar and never leave. And that’s like one way it could be—you can become your most beautiful self and look at yourself in the mirror. But I think what’s interesting is we’re kind of going between the hyper-virtual and the hyperphysical in the way where it’s like, we’re interested in this virtual embodiment, this way that people can feel empowered and excited and just have a lot of kinetic fun in the virtual space. But we’re also interested in bridging that to the reality of going out into the world.”
Which is where the clothes and the skating and the collectible figures and the real-life masks come in, she says.
“So I feel like EDGLRD’s all about us being at the edge of being really iconic and really pathetic,” Levine continues. “I think people have these glimpses of themselves as deities, and these glimpses of themselves as, like, hyperphysicalized beings, a lot through social media and virtualization. And then day-to-day, you know, we’re, like, eating 7-Eleven rollers and, like, our cars are a little messed up. So I do feel like people are living double lives in the virtual realm.”
The idea behind EDGLRD, she says, is to live on that border: You can go be a glorious being in its insane virtual reality and then bring some of that demented but appealing reality back into our world.
Game director Corey Martin pipes up from another Zoom window. “We’re really excited about making these heavily sensory experiences that are, you know, just everything turned to 11, and then down to zero.”
“Aesthetic drugs,” says Buck Weiers, EDGLRD’s chief product and technical officer and another cofounder.
“That really is the whole thing,” Korine says. His voice sounds muffled, and when I look over, he’s got the horned mask on again. “That’s the next frontier. That’s the fourth wall.”
These Days, Korine says, the excesses of his youth—performance art appearances on late-night television shows, drugs, physical combat, never sleeping—feel like they happened to someone else. “You’re almost talking about another person,” Korine says. “The world doesn’t function in that way for me anymore. The stuff that we’re working on now is maybe.… How can I say it? Transgressive enough.”
One morning Korine and I meet near the water in Palm Beach and take a walk along the ocean. I say that it’s funny to see Korine, who may be older but who still loses his wallet constantly, breaks electronics on contact, and has generally been staggering down his own unique path since he was a teenager, now managing an entire team of people.
“Yeah, I know,” he says. He’s wearing lavender corduroys and a polo in the Florida humidity. “I think even my wife is like, ‘What the fuck?’ I don’t know. It just makes sense. It feels right. Like that’s just the progression. And to be honest with you, it’s also in some weird way the most exciting.”
But whatever it is, he’s all in. “I don’t have such a big life savings,” he says. “But it’s more like: You sink your life into it.”
When he gets sick of being around people, which does happen, he goes to his studio and paints. Recently he left his longtime gallery, Gagosian, for Hauser & Wirth, where he will have a show of paintings opening in September. “New show, new gallery, new body of work,” Korine says. “This whole thing is kind of like the next phase.” He shows me photos on his phone of some of the paintings: brilliant, photorealistic renderings, done in oil, based on stills from AGGRO DR1FT, made up of lush, beautiful colors on giant canvases.
The paintings remind me of something I noticed about AGGRO DR1FT, which features an assassin who is great at what he does but does not particularly enjoy doing it. It is the second film in a row*—*in The Beach Bum, McConaughey plays a lauded poet who doesn’t actually like to write—about this kind of recalcitrant artist. I ask Korine if this was intentional, returning to this idea.
“Yes,” he says. “I’m obsessed with that character. I’m really drawn to that. Like, people with an extreme talent who are reluctant.”
I say I always assumed the obsession was autobiographical—that he was talking about himself. “Yeah. I mean, you almost become your own worst enemy,” Korine says. “Or you fight whatever gifts you have.”
Korine has always been a great filmmaker, but he hasn’t always liked making movies. “Honestly, I always got more satisfaction from painting,” he says, staring at the ocean. “I don’t really have fun making movies.”
So why does he keep making them? I ask.
“I’m still drawn to it somehow. It’s interesting because I don’t watch movies that much anymore, but especially not new films. And then my wife’s been watching all these John Huston movies and John Milius films, and I see her watching them and then I’ll look for a second and then I just get transfixed. There’s still a pull. Those movies are so great.”
Do you ever think you’ll make a movie again? A real movie.
“It’s possible,” Korine says. “Terrence Malick wrote a script that he wants me to direct. It’s a really, really beautiful script. And that’s maybe one of the only things that I could imagine pulling me back into like actual, traditional moviemaking. But even then, the hard part now is just the idea of looking through a viewfinder and filming, like, people speaking at a table. All this dialogue always gets in the way. All these things that you don’t really care about. I don’t know. That would be 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.”
Korine stops and points. Making his way off the beach, shuffling up the sidewalk, is a shirtless older man with a stomach that is like one side of a beach ball. “You know when you see someone with a massive beer gut?” Korine asks. “I always imagine what it would be like if you took, uh, what is the thing you stick in a keg?”
The tap?
“Yeah, the tap. And you just inserted it into their gullet and then you turned it on. The shape is so specific, it’s like a keg. So that would be like a FloridaLord sequence, right? The lager would be flowing out of his belly.”
When Korine was a child, he could barely sleep, he was so besieged with images that would come into his mind, day and night. Now he’s got a beach house full of cutting-edge technology and skilled collaborators that can realize any idea within seconds, hours, days. “When you realize you have the ability to, like: This dream creates another dream, creates another dream, creates another universe, creates another universe. It can become almost overwhelming creatively,” he says. “For me, the most difficult thing is just—once you start dreaming, it can never end.”
Zach Baron is GQ’s senior special projects editor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of GQ with the title “The Lord of the Edge”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Harmony Korine
Photo illustrations and video by EDGLRD