Harmony Korine says new Call of Duty trailer 'looks better than anything Spielberg's ever done'

Cult filmmaker Harmony Korine (Kids, Spring Breakers) believes that the future of movies will intersect with advances in gaming technology. In a new GQ profile, he goes so far as to say that a modern-day Call of Duty trailer — like, say, this new look at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III — "looks better than anything that [Steven] Spielberg's ever done."

He's putting his money where his mouth is, too. Speaking to GQ, the Beach Bum director shed light on EDGLRD (pronounced "edge lord"), a creative collective and design studio he co-founded that is cooking up films, video games, and films that are experienced like video games.

"We're trying to gamify movies," Korine said. "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."

Amy Sussman/Getty Images Harmony Korine

In the piece, Korine expounds on the collective's animation and imaging technology that helped bring to life their first film, Aggro Dr1ft, which stars rapper Travis Scott and is shot in the style of thermal imaging. Korine labels the film's aesthetic "gamecore," noting that the collective's movies are closer to being video games than traditional films.

"How do you take the whole idea of entertainment, of live-action gaming, and create something new?" Korine asked. "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."

However, he left the door open to making a more traditional film again, particularly in one "special case."

"Terrence Malick wrote a script that he wants me to direct," Korine said. "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."

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