Throughout a career that’s covered film, photography, art, authorship, and many other spinning plates, Harmony Korine has been called many things, but predictable has never been one of them.
As well as directing seven feature films – with an eighth on the way – and dabbling in music videos and commercials amongst his many other pursuits, the 50 year-old has also found the time to found a design collective that for some reason involves him wearing a horned devil mask, and proudly calls itself EDGLRD.
That’s right, it’s pronounced exactly how you think it is, and not even GQ was sure to make of it during a profile on Korine, describing it as “a creative factory” that “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.”
When asked, Korine hardly shed more light on the matter, describing his latest business venture’s modus operandi as “Instead of someone writing a check for $50 million to make one film, how do you make 50 $1 million films? I’m saying ‘films,’ but they’re not really films either.”
It all sounds fairly experimental and deliberately eccentric, but it’s hard to get past the name in all honesty. If you work for EDGLRD, then technically what does that make you? Pretty much what it says on the tin, although being provocative has been one of Korine’s defining traits for the last quarter of a century, so it’s perfectly apt in this case.
He might have scored the biggest mainstream hit of his career with scantily-clad crime caper Spring Breakers, but it’s clear that he’s keen to keep pushing the boundaries across every imaginable medium.