Harmony Korine is too busy admiring stomachs to direct a script Terrence Malick wrote for him

Harmony Korine doesn’t make movies so much these days. Sequestered in his Floridian compound just outside of Mar-a-Lago, he dismisses the idea of directing dialogue scenes as he develops interactive home invasion video games and A.I. animations of old ladies in Crocs cruising on Rascal scooters. He seems happy to be away from it all, admiring the state of stomachs on nearby beaches and letting his flights of fancy drive his work.

It would be all well and good for Mr. Korine to follow his deeply strange but fascinating muse, such as beer guts and what could go into them, but apparently, he’s sitting on a screenplay by Terrence Malick that Malick wants him to direct. Speaking to GQ about possibly making a new movie, Korine casually informs the moviegoing public that Malick wrote a “really beautiful script” that he wants Korine to direct.

The director of Spring Breakers and The Beach Bum takes great pride in believing he is responsible for New York Times critic Janet Maslin moving from movie reviews to book reviews after declaring Gummo the worst film of 1997. Though he’s directed commercials and art projects and participated in Travis Scott’s Circus Maximus omnibus, Korine hasn’t directed a feature since 2019. Nevertheless, Korine says the screenplay is “one of the only things that I could imagine pulling me back into like actual, traditional moviemaking.”

Unfortunately, the tediousness of making movies and “looking through a viewfinder and filming, like, people speaking at a table” doesn’t thrill him. Also, unfortunately, that’s a big part of making movies. Still, that Malick wrote this script for him is 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,” he said before getting his peepers on a “shirtless older man with a stomach that is like one side of a beach ball” and instantly switching gears. This man’s “beer gut” inspires Korine to go on a tangent about what would happen “if you took, uh, what is the thing you stick in a keg?” After being told that “the thing you stick in a keg” is called “a tap,” he ponders what it would be like if “you just inserted it into their gullet and then you turned it on. The lager would be flowing out of his belly,” Korine concludes.

Yeah, it doesn’t seem like he will be directing that Terrence Malick movie anytime soon. However, a film about a man with a spout in his belly does sound like a Korinesque premise that could cause a critic to quit cinema.