Interview: Ari Aster on America’s Need For a Reckoning and Creating a Political Rorschach Test with ‘Eddington’
Over the last decade, there are very few writer/directors creating as many unique cinematic experiences within their filmographies as Ari Aster. Known mostly more making horror films with a dark, humorous edge, Aster has become one of the modern masters of his craft, gaining the trusts of audiences around the world by taking them on unsettling, uncompromised rides that tackle complex issues like trauma, broken relationships, parental issues, and our own human insecurities, just to name a few.
Born in New York City, Aster was the son of two artistically driven parents; his mother was a poet, his father was a jazz musician. Over the course of his life, Aster became interested in filmmaking from his love of screenwriting, as well as becoming obsessed with films in the horror genre. After graduating as a member of the 2010 class of graduate fellows at the AFI Conservatory, he wrote and directed several short films, most notably the psychological family horror thriller The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, one of the most unnerving films you’ll ever see. From the years of notable work, he built up to Hereditary, his 2018 directorial debut about a family being haunted by a mysterious presence after the horrific death of one of their own. It garnered massive critical acclaim and commercial success, with the film’s star Toni Collette praised for delivering one of the best performances of her career. He followed it up with another successful outing with 2019’s Midsommar, which follows a group of American students who travel to Sweden for a festival that slowly turns into the realization that they have entered the world of a cult due to celebrate their paganist holiday for the first time in ninety years. Four years later, following the pandemic and his first two films, Aster returned with Beau Is Afraid, about an anxiety riddled middle-age man who goes on a personal, inner journey to visit his mother in what Aster would call a “nightmare comedy.”
The blending of inner, personal horror with dark comedic overtones in Beau has led up to his latest feature film Eddington, a COVID-19 social, political satire about a sheriff who runs for Mayor of his small town against the incumbent for whom they share a mutual, personal hatred for one another. In doing this project, Aster set the film in a fictional town within New Mexico, the state the director was raised in once his family returned to the US from their time abroad in England in his adolescence. This familiar setting for Aster is the perfect backdrop for the director to use an area of the country he knows well and spent time with during the pandemic, to then bring alive for his most radical, introspective film yet; only this time instead of just examining his character’s basic human instincts and behaviors, he explores what happens when their choices affect our political, social, and cultural identities that make up the United States in the modern era. In his review out of Cannes, our own Erik Anderson beautifully states that fundamental message at the core of Eddington, which is Aster “director pulls back the veil to reveal the true horror isn’t anything supernatural or otherworldly, it’s us, it’s always been us,” resulting in a film that “is bound to make a lot of people mad” in all the best ways possible.
As he makes his way around the country promoting his film, I was able to recently sit down with Aster and talk about Eddington, the themes found within the world he created, the origin of project, the various feelings, emotions one gathers with watching a film like this and the natural responses one has when seeing a modern examination of the everyday problems we face as a collective country. We also discussed his collaborations with Eddington’s all-star cast, the dangers of lingering issues facing our world like AI, and why he feels most of his contemporary directors look to the past for answers rather than worry about the present and the future of our world. Much like his new film, Aster was very open, willing to offer his unfiltered, distinctive answers to a discussion centered around his creation that speaks to the biggest questions facing our troubled times. In doing this, he offers his take on where we are currently at as a society, with a glimmer of hope as to how we can get things turned around for the better sooner rather than later.
Ryan McQuade: When did you start coming up with the idea of Eddington? Was there a specific event that you saw that really triggered you to jump into this?
Ari Aster: So I started writing this film at the end of May, the beginning of June 2020, which is when the film is set. And it’s also the moment where I think the fever reached its highest pitch and I just felt there’s something in the air right now. I haven’t felt this before and I want to get it on paper. I didn’t know where we were going. It felt like everything had kind of come to a boiling point and I wasn’t sure if it was going to boil over, if it was going to explode. I didn’t know how long the lockdown would last. It felt like it could last for years. And so I just started writing down all these ideas, these impressions and I wanted to make a film that basically pulled back and described what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is happening. And that was the launching point.
RM: Two words came to mind when I watched your film, and the first one was pettiness. For a lot of the characters, their motivations come from these personal places causing them to spiral based on past relationships that build into something larger and vicious. Was that the goal, start the conflict of the film, from a smaller, relatable, emotional level and then broaden out the scope of the themes from there?
AA: Well, that’s right. It’s about a bunch of people who live in a small town and they all know each other and they all have histories and they’re all living in different realities. They’re all kind of living on the internet. And they all have ways of using history to sort of shore up whatever those beliefs are. And they’ve all kind of gotten to a point where they’ve lost the bigger dimensions of the world around them and they only see the smaller dimensions of what they believe and they distrust anything that falls out of their own specific bubble of certainty.
And so I guess it was important to sort of complicate the relationship between the personal and the political for all these people. And all these people are also very paranoid. And it was very important to me that the film also gradually become paranoid and that the film be increasingly gripped by the world view of these characters. Specifically the character of Joe Cross, the Sheriff, played by Joaquin Phoenix.
RM: The other word was perception and how we perceive ourselves in our best moments, in our worst moments. Perception can become obsession, which is where the online component of the film lies. Could you talk about incorporating online paranoia and personal perception into your film? A lot of filmmakers are scared of using the iPhone and modern technology in this, but you’re using it here as a mirror into the characters, how misinformation, fear, cultish behaviors can result in everything going wrong within just a click. It must’ve been a deep research process to nail that aspect.
AA: I wanted to make a film that was inflected by a modern realism, which is to say a film that doesn’t treat the screens as background, but that finds a way to foreground them and underscore them. In fact, every scene there was kind of a challenge. I had a Post-it in my room that reminded me to remember the phones. How can you incorporate as many screens as possible into any given scene? And yeah, I think the human capacity for adaptation is really amazing. And what begins as strange kind of quickly becomes normalized and something that’s very obvious. Once it becomes ambient, it kind of disappears. But we’re living in a really, really weird time and it’s been weird for a long time and it’s becoming much weirder very quickly right now. So yeah, that was part of the project, making sure that the strangeness of this phenomenon was kind of present.
RM: The real enemy though is the one that’s lingering in the background of Eddington. The characters start losing touch with the fact that there’s this company, these special interests, these other dangerous entities surrounding them. The creation of this data center and the company that wants it made aren’t political; they aren’t to the left or the right. They’ll get made whichever way they need to. Could you talk about portraying that political gray area within your film, creating a Rorschach test for the audience to examine the film through their personal, political perspective to see the larger picture and issues that face America’s present and future?
AA: Yeah. Well some people have been, I think, annoyed by the film not taking enough of a stance politically, but that felt too narrow to me. The film is about the environment and I didn’t want to make a partisan film that would only reach the choir that it was preaching to.
And I wanted to make a film in which every character cares about the world. They just don’t agree on what is happening. And to go back to the data center you mentioned, I mean if you asked me to say in one sentence what the film is about, I would tell you it’s about a data center being built outside of a small town. And of course that’s peripheral in the film, but in the end, all of these characters, all of these stories are really just data to be passed through this giant wooden wheel to be churned into…
RM: Into the system that is our country?
AA: Exactly. And so the film is about a bunch of people navigating a crisis, but while that’s happening, there’s another crisis that’s kind of building up over here to the side that hasn’t arrived yet, but it’s arriving now.
RM: It’s all about empathy, wouldn’t you say? Because as the film plays out, the audience might not agree with someone like Joe’s (Joaquin Phoenix) philosophy or politics, but it’s about connecting with him as a small cog in a larger machine.
AA: Yeah, I wanted to make a film that was very empathic, but in some cases it’s empathetic in oppositional directions. If I see one major problem right now, if I had to point to one problem, I’d say that it’s that we have become completely unreachable to each other. And I think maybe there’s something hopeful just in the fact that it is a period piece and that maybe there’s a way of looking back and seeing how absurd things were then, to then see where we are now and the path that we’re on. It feels like we’re headed straight towards a brick wall. The question is, is there any way to get off this path where we are just absolutely fortressed off from each other.
RM: Do you think there is?
AA: Do I think there is? I think there needs to be a serious reckoning with where we are. And I think that a lot of the people leading us don’t believe in the future. And we’re all kind of on the wrong end of these puppet strings, but we’ve all been kind of turned against each other. We’ve been very successfully divided against each other and we’re all atomized and it’s all fragmented. And if we don’t find a way to reengage with each other, it’s going to continue to get worse.
RM: This cast you assembled here is fantastic. Obviously working with Joaquin, you worked with him on Beau Is Afraid, but you’re also working with Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal, Micheal Ward, Austin Butler. What were some of the conversations like in terms of taking their experiences from the pandemic, the political world that they’re around and incorporating them in those characters? Was there impute those conversations that change the original incarnations of the characters from the script?
AA: I was very lucky to get this cast. All these actors are just wonderful. Joaquin and I had worked together on Beau Is Afraid and we already had kind of a rapport and a working method. And I think he’s amazing and I love what he does here. Emma Stone is just the greatest, such a wonderful person and a great actress. And I would say the same for Dee Dee O’Connell, who I saw on stage in New York in a play called Dana H., and I’ve wanted to work with her since then. She’s amazing. Same goes for Luke Grimes, Micheal Ward, Austin Butler, Clifton Collins, Jr. They’re all just incredible actors and wonderful people. So I was very, very lucky to work with them.
And more than using their experiences in COVID, I did a lot of research driving around New Mexico, which is where I’m from, going to different small towns, talking to sheriffs, mayors. Well, sheriffs of certain counties, police chiefs in certain towns, going to Pueblos and talking to people there and just trying to get as broad a picture of the political climate as possible. And a lot of the characters in the film are modeled on some of these people I met and a lot of these actors spent a lot of time with those people.
And with a film like this, it’s important that it kind of gets away from me at a certain point. So it’s not just me moving around action figures and that these people actually are rooted in reality and in this specific reality of New Mexico.
RM: They are all great. Lastly, I wanted to ask you about the state of modern satire, commentary in film. It’s very rare that we get to see them nowadays set in a modern setting. Many of your fellow contemporary directors don’t seem to be interested in making films set within our time, with many set in the past. Why do you think this is the trend? Is it easier to look to the past for answers?
AA: Well, I see everywhere in the culture, the trend of looking to the past, something I think a lot of this has to do with the system we live in where we’re on the internet and the system is based on feedback. So it’s all about regurgitating things. And I think I see two very major trends right now. One is nostalgic, one is looking back. I think you see it in music. You even see it in these special theatrical engagements. Everybody’s getting excited in a new way about 70 millimeter releases. The things that maybe were once niche are now very mainstream.
And then there’s also a trend towards clinging to nostalgia and trauma. And there’s very little talk about that. That track is very scary and potentially catastrophic. And so it’s hard to look at the moment and it’s hard to look ahead because there isn’t a lot of optimism about the future. And I think when that happens, you kind of retreat to the past. There’s a quote from Nietzsche about living in an age over-saturated with history. And I think we’re living in that age right now where there’s just too much history and there’s enough that we can kind of use any part of it to shore up what we believe in and discard the rest.
Eddington will be released by A24 in theaters on July 18.
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