‘Hereditary’ Director Explains How His New Pedro Pascal Western Reveals the Chilling Consequences of Technology

For his latest feature, acclaimed writer-director Ari Aster explores a modern-day Wild West with what’s being hailed as a contemporary Western, Eddington. The movie reunites the filmmaker with Oscar-winning lead Joaquin Phoenix, who plays disgruntled small-town sheriff Joe Cross, in addition to Academy Award-winner Emma Stone, Emmy Award nominee Pedro Pascal, and Austin Butler.

In the movie, Eddington, New Mexico, is at war with itself as the world around them begins to shift. It’s May 2020, and COVID is upending life as they know it. Not only is Cross also dealing with a jurisdiction dispute with neighboring county police, but their town is also standing in the looming shadow of a massive datacenter with intentions of building in their rural town. All this comes to a head when Cross decides to go head-to-head with Eddington mayor, Ted Garcia (Pascal), who shares a contentious history with Cross and his wife, Louise (Stone).

In an interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, Aster, who took cinema by storm with his original stories Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid, takes us behind the scenes for his writing and editing processes, what it’s like on set with Phoenix, collaborating on scenes together, and how Eddington puts social media under a magnifying glass. Check out the full conversation in the video above, or you can read the transcript below for all this, as well as his TV and movie recs.

Ari Aster Recommends Your Next Binge Watch

He also shares his favorite movie theaters and his favorite IMAX experience.

COLLIDER: I am obsessed with getting more people to see movies in movie theaters, so I’m curious, do you have a favorite movie theater?

ARI ASTER: Well, I live in New York, and I would say that the theaters I go to the most frequently are Metrograph, Film Forum, and I go to Film at Lincoln Center; I really love the Walter Reade. So, I probably go to those three the most often.

Which leads me to my next thing. If you’re going to see a big event film, do you prefer IMAX or Dolby Vision?

ASTER: I love the opportunity to go to either or both. I would say one of the best theater-going experiences I’ve ever had was going to the IMAX on 57th Street and seeing Dunkirk. That was a pretty amazing experience.

Anything Nolan does. I saw pictures of the new IMAX camera that he’s using, which isn’t released yet, which he’s using on The Odyssey. Wait until you see this beast of a camera. It’s crazy. That’s a whole other thing. If someone has never seen your work, what’s the first thing you’d like them to watch and why?

ASTER: Well, Eddington‘s coming out now, and I just made it, so why don’t you start with Eddington?

It’s also a good movie.

ASTER: Thank you. I hope so. I think so.

I was all in on it. What movie or TV show have you recently watched that you would really like to recommend?

ASTER: I’ll give you one of each. There’s a great Albert Serra documentary about bullfighting called Afternoons of Solitude that is just unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. It almost functions as, like, a trance film. It’s totally mesmerizing, and I have not been able to shake it since seeing it. And then Adam Curtis has a new series called Shifty, which he made for the BBC, and I think should be available on YouTube. That’s incredible and totally unique. It sort of functions as, like, a mirror from the past. But if you like Adam Curtis, I think this is one of the best things he’s ever made, and if you don’t know Adam Curtis, it’s a great place to start.

I have not seen either, so thank you for the recommendations.

Writer-Director Ari Aster Shares His Writing Process

And the most challenging sequence to capture so far.

You’ve made a number of films. Which shot or sequence ended up being the one that was really, really hard to pull off?

ASTER: Every film I’ve made has had trials and difficult sequences to achieve. I would say Beau Is Afraid had many of them. One shot that I’m really proud of, that was kind of fun to pull off, was him running across the street to get to the convenience store. It would take a while to go into the technical details of how we pulled it off, but it was fun. There was a lot of teamwork involved.

I know the exact shot you’re talking about, and that shot is insane, just how much is going on.

ASTER: Thanks, man. Thank you.

I’m curious about your writing process. When you sit down to start writing something, are you outlining? Do you know where you’re going? Do you outline first, or do you start writing scenes and then see where it’s going? Can you share a little bit, and maybe use Eddington as an example?

ASTER: I don’t outline, per se. I take a lot of notes, and I guess those function as something of an outline. Then, at a certain point, I do start building the architecture of it. So, I will maybe go into the final draft, and I’ll have my notes with me, and I’ll put the scenes in order as I’ve come up with them. Then from there, I will write those scenes out. So, typically, before I start writing the script, I will have about a 25 to 30-page final draft document that has paragraph-long descriptions of what the scene will be.

Emma Stone and Austin Butler Make the Most of Their Limited Screen Time

“Emma Stone’s character is somebody who is very strategically at a remove from us.”

Sometimes, when actors get cast in a role, the director, especially for a big studio movie, will add to a character, like, “Oh, we cast Patrick Stewart in this supporting role. We need to add more scenes and add more for him to do.” For example, with Austin Butler, do you try to add more scenes when you get a name like that, or do people who are signing on know they have a small part and it’s integral for the movie?

ASTER: No, the script is written, and those are the characters. Sometimes it’s good that not too much is being demanded of that actor because it makes it easier for them to commit. It’s like, “You only need to be here for a week, or for two weeks,” depending on which actor we’re talking about. For instance, Austin Butler and Emma Stone, they do have, I wouldn’t even call them smaller parts, because they’re so pivotal and they’re so important and they’re so central to the film, but Emma Stone’s character is somebody who is very strategically at a remove from us. We’re with Joaquin Phoenix’s character, like he’s our surrogate or the closest thing we have to a surrogate, and he’s somebody who does not understand his wife. He loves her, but he’s very sentimental about his wife. He’s very romantic, which is another way of saying he’s not really looking at the reality of what’s in front of him, and so we have as much access to Emma as he does. That’s a tricky thing to pull off, especially for Em, who’s playing Louise and who needs to make an impression and give us a real sense of her history and her inner life, but from a distance. So, she’s both unknowable, but we also need to create a very strong impression. She and I talked about her being sort of ghostly, kind of functioning as a ghost in the story, and I love what she does here.

I think Austin Butler is incredible. He only showed up for a few days, but he put so much work into this and spent a long time preparing and building this character. Even though he shows up for a small amount of time, it’s meant to hang over the rest of the film. It’s meant to really kind of linger, and I think it does based on what Austin was able to do.

I totally agree. Both of their characters are integral to the plot.

I read a quote by you that I thought was fantastic, and it said, “If I had to boil it down, Eddington is really just about a data center being built.” It really struck me because no matter what the fuck is going on in reality in our world, it’s really about money and corporations that are always going to win.

ASTER: That’s right. Really, in the end, all the stories in Eddington, all those characters, are really just training data. The movie itself is training data. Yeah, the film is about a bunch of people who are warring with each other, and they’re stuck in these ideological battles, but they’re also stuck in these little petty personal battles, and they’re distracted from what’s happening out there with Big Power. In the end, they’re all living in different realities. But I don’t think that that’s the innocent consequence of social media. Social media is a tool. It’s the way that it’s been harnessed. All these people, they don’t see it, but they’re in the same situation, and they’re subject to the same forces.

Trust me, I spoke to Joaquin, and I went off on social media because people just don’t realize that what you’re seeing in the algorithm is being dictated by somebody. Somebody is showing you a stream of information, and based on the stream can determine a lot about how you feel and the way you engage in reality.

ASTER: Yeah. We all know it, but somehow it’s hard to hold onto, despite the fact that it feels so obvious. So, this is my attempt at dramatizing that.

I’ve tried to be off social media as much as I can, but ultimately, when you’re sitting in an airport or you have 10 minutes to kill before a movie starts, you’re on Instagram or you’re doing something and you’re getting your dopamine hit. Anyway, that’s a whole other thing. Another quote I read by you that I loved was, “Eddington is a Western, but the guns are phones.” It’s perfect because this is a modern weapon based on what we just talked about. I don’t know if you wanted to expand on that quote at all.

ASTER: I think it’s better left right there. It’s got a ring to it. [Laughs]

Joaquin Phoenix and Ari Aster Pushed the Ending Even Further on Set

“It’s about finding what the questions are that keep this thing alive and make it live.”

I’m fascinated by the editing process, and I’m curious how this film changed in the editing room in ways you didn’t expect.

ASTER: Well, they all change, but in ways that I now do expect, but it always manifests in surprising ways — I guess I just contradicted myself. Editing is where you shape the film. There’s the first process in the edit, which is where I sit with my editor, Luc Johnston, and we assemble everything. So, we put together our assembly, which takes a couple of months, and then you watch the movie, which has everything in it that you intended to be there, and it is usually a very depressing experience because it just doesn’t have a shape yet, or at least a decisive shape. So, over time, it’s about just chiseling away, removing anything that is even potentially extraneous, and focusing on pacing. That doesn’t mean that it needs to move as fast as possible, it’s just that it needs to have its own kind of internal rhythm. This is a film where the rhythm changes. It kind of begins as a slow burn, and then it slowly accelerates. Then, hopefully, by the end, we’re really chugging.

Did you have a longer cut that you were really happy with, or were you like, “There is no director’s cut?”

ASTER: No, no, I’m happy with this cut. There is no longer cut of this film.

Are you currently writing something? Are you thinking about TV, or are you thinking about another movie? What are you thinking about for the future?

ASTER: I’m thinking about a couple of things. Writing a couple things. I think I know what the next one is, but I’m keeping it open.

I love the ending. Joaquin told me, which I was shocked to learn, that some of that was discovered on the day when you were filming. Can you talk a little bit about that?

ASTER: Well, there’s a gag that happens that was already in the script, but we pushed it a little bit further on set. But that’s not unusual. One thing that’s great about working with Joaquin is he’s somebody who likes to talk a lot and prepare a lot, and go over the script. He’ll have a lot of questions, and it’s never about finding the answer, certainly not before arriving on set. It’s about finding what the questions are that keep this thing alive and make it live. Again, that’s redundant, but if we answer something too early, before we get to the set, it tends to become kind of rote. Something about it dies. It usually doesn’t mean that the writing changes. It’s not about dialogue changes. It’s not even about behavioral changes. It’s just about what is at the heart of the scene that makes it interesting for us and makes it not just a scene.

Eddington is in theaters now.

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