Filmmaker Harmony Korine at the press conference for his most recent film, “Baby Invasion,” at the Venice Film Festival, asked Hollywood to begin accepting the entertainment mediums synonymous with millennial culture, such as gaming and streaming. “What’s happening in Hollywood — and you’re starting to see Hollywood, I think, crumble creatively — is that they’re losing a lot of the most talented and creative minds to gaming and to streamers. Like IShowSpeed is a movie, Kai Cenat is a movie,” the director of “Spring Breakers” said, referencing the two of the most prominent patrons on Twitch and YouTube.
Korine said, “They (referring to the budding talent) go other places because movies are no longer the dominant art form. Always, they were the dominant art form, but nothing is linear anymore. And so they’re going to start to lose all the talent to all these other places, and film is going to — not all film, but a lot of film — stagnate with just huge IP, or just this kind of very rarefied experience. But IShowSpeed is the new Tarkovsky,” implying that Hollywood stalwarts are so bound by tradition that it discourages fresh, imaginative brains from pursuing conventional filmmaking.
The second movie that Korine and his multimedia design collaborative EDGLRD have developed is called “Baby Invasion.” The movie, which was influenced by first-person shooter video games, follows a bunch of mercenaries who race to rob wealthy and powerful people’s residences while wearing baby-face ikons.
“The concept really comes from this moment, this idea that people will, in the future or even now, start to livestream their crimes. And this is now entertainment in a lot of ways for people,” the filmmaker remarked. At the beginning of the press conference, Korine also disclosed that the version of “Baby Invasion” that would be shown at La Biennale is merely a “base layer,” and that the complete version will include three or four more films. The director furthermore added, “You’ll be able to scan QR codes with your phone, and it will take you to games and other perspectives from other shooters and players in the film. So really the film itself, the whole thing is probably maybe 80 hours of film.”
In the conclusion, Korine states that he thinks “This idea of conventional films is ending” at the moment in his career. “They’re still going to exist, but now something is ending, and something is being born. And so films, what we call films are changing, and it will be experiences, and how we’re able to experience them.”