Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Spring Breakers helmer Harmony Korine, on the verge of having his first breakout hit after a most eclectic career, has made a deal for his next film to be produced by John Lesher’s Le Grisbi Productions and DCM Productions. Spring Breakers will open wide this week through A24 after garnering a huge per-screen average in limited release, starring James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson and the director’s wife, Rachel Korine.

The title and log line of the new film are under wraps, but I’ve heard it involves a multi-generational family of criminals in the South. Spring Breakers producer Charles-Marie Anthonioz will also produce the film. This is likely to be Korine’s next directorial effort, but he is also developing projects with Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures; she bought Spring Breakers at Toronto last fall. Korine’s new jail-bait sex kittenesque heist film seems to finally have delivered on the commercial promise he showed with his early breakout film, Kids. Some of his follow-ups, including Trash Humpers, you could imagine David Lynch watching and going, “What the hell? This is really out there.” Lesher has long been a Korine supporter; he was his agent for many years at UTA and then Endeavor, before he took the top job at Paramount and then became a producer.

Lesher most recently produced End Of Watch, and he also produced Blood Ties, the English-language debut of Guillaume Canet that stars Clive Owen, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup, Mila Kunis and James Caan. Lesher’s about to begin production in New York on the Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu-directed dark comedy Birdman with Michael Keaton, Ed Norton, Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis, and Naomi Watts, and Black Mass, the Barry Levinson-directed crime thriller that will star Johnny Deep as Boston crime kingpin Whitey Bulger.

Berlin-based production/distribution company DCM’s production division is run by Marc Schmidheiny and Christoph Daniel. They co-financed and produced the Dustin Hoffman-directed Quartet and the Oscar-nominated Norwegian film Kon-Tiki. CAA reps Korine.