Harmony Korine's cigar-chomping Venice panel was suitably deranged

Say what you like about director Harmony Korine, but the man is rarely dull. (Whether that same descriptor can be applied to his deliberately provocative, formally formless films has varied over the years.) Korine’s in Venice this weekend for a midnight festival screening of his new movie Baby Invasion—a first-person film where people with their heads digitally swapped with babies stage a home invasion, natch—and he didn’t disappoint in his panel today, where he lit up a giant cigar, talked about casting actual criminals in his films, and came out accompanied by a man in a bright green, face-obscuring mask (who, per Variety, was apparently Korine’s fellow provocateur Gasper Noe, wearing a get-up that Korine himself was sporting while showing off his previous movie, Aggro Dr1ft, last year).

While discussing the ways Hollywood is “crumbling,” and how young creatives are being pushed toward alternate outlets like streaming and online video-making, Korine handed out a number of delightfully weird tidbits about his new movie, including the fact that, yes, some of its stars were “actually people that tried to rob a lot of friends of mine. Once they were arrested, we cast them and it just added that extra sense of reality.” He also revealed that, after commissioning a soundtrack for the film from the famously reclusive British electronic music artist Burial, Korine ended up receiving the audio files in the most natural way possible: Transmitted via PlayStation 5. Saying he’s never actually met Burial or spoken to him, Korine said, “It was all done through Discord messages, and we’d kind of talk on PS5. And then the music was sent through PS5.” (Given that Baby Invasion was reportedly generated, like Aggro Dr1ft, through a combination of AI and video game engines, this feels weirdly fitting.)

Oh, and don’t worry, Baby Invasion isn’t just one movie about people with CGI baby faces trying to murder you: “When we release the film, there’ll be a way to watch it through your phone, but there’ll be certain codes within the movie that’ll take you to other movies,” Korine promised, as cigar smoke reportedly filled the auditorium. “So the film, what you’re seeing, is just a base layer film. There’ll be three or four other sub films.” As to the content of the movie itself, and its baby-faced villains, well, it’s just a shame that directors aren’t usually allowed to write their own press blurbs, because we would genuinely enjoy seeing this on a poster: “What they’re doing is horrible, but they’re also so cute. They’re so adorable to watch. But these little children are just menaces, just vile creatures.”