Director Ari Aster Explains His COVID-Era Western “Eddington”

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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We all remember the spring and summer of 2020, whether we like it or not. There was the COVID pandemic and all its losses, and a reckoning with racial violence that led to some of the biggest protests in our history, and there was also one of the most contentious presidential election races in our time.
So some might prefer to forget that period, and yet it turns out to be bottomless material for a filmmaker named Ari Aster. In the horror movies Hereditary and Midsommar and the more iconoclastic Bo is Afraid, Aster is relentless about putting his characters and his audience in a state of anxiety.
Cringe doesn't begin to describe it. Esther's latest film is Eddington, which is set in a fictional Southwestern community, a place roiled by COVID and conspiracy theories.
So maybe I just talked to your video. Ask where all your deputies went.
Okay, well, why not just ask your governor about her little catch-and-release policy, okay?

Because if it wasn't for that,

maybe I could hold on to my deputies

and the people we arrest.

I know, I know one of them was fired for excessive force

and another one was forced to quit

by a YouTube First Amendment auditor.

Okay, yes, that is the same auditor

that drove away your works.

Your undersheriv died of a fentanyl over time.

From the handling fentanyl.

And your captain and your chief deputy took jobs in Rio Rancho. That was devastating.
Eddington stars Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone. And it's like a hand grenade tossed into the traditional summer movie season.
It is unapologetically political, but the satire doesn't spare either side of the aisle. Our producer Adam Howard sat down with Ari Aster, who wrote and directed Eddington.
I think one of the things I'm impressed by is just your willingness to sort of take a big swing and do something contemporary. A lot of the big blockbusters you see nowadays could take place in any time, any universe.

Even a movie I really admired, like Sinners, it speaks to modern politics, but from the vantage point of a period film. Why do you think more filmmakers aren't more willing to sort of touch the hot stove of the here and now? Well, I think it's really hard to talk about the moment because nobody really understands what's happening.
And, you know, it's hard to make a film about COVID because we haven't metabolized any of that. I mean, I don't feel we've metabolized how seismic that was, but we're also still living through it.
We're still in it. And I do think that a big part of the culture right now is looking to the past.
And there's a lot of nostalgia. And there's a lot of talk about trauma.
But it's all about looking back while we're ignoring the present. And we're not even talking about the future.
Because I don't think we believe in it. But I think that has a lot to do with the fact that the people leading us don't believe in the future.
I've been asked you know to describe what the film

is about

in more But I think that has a lot to do with the fact that the people leading us don't believe in the future. I've been asked, you know, to describe what the film is about in one sentence.
And my answer to that was it's about a hyperscale data center being built just outside of a small town. And the film begins with the promise of a data center being built that is tied to AI.
And not to give away too much a spoiler but we end on that there's a way of looking at all the stories in the movie eddington right as training data the movie eddington is training data for whatever this thing is that's coming which you know uh i didn't ask for right right i don't know if you did no no um so all of your movies have a sense of humor but i think it's fair to say that eddington is your funniest and when i went to see the movie i had an experience i don't think i've ever had before where at the beginning of the movie and this is not spoiling anything there's a title announcing when the film takes place that it's may of 2020 and that immediately got a huge laugh from the audience I was in. And I was like, oh, that's really cool that we're all kind of collectively acknowledging that sort of gut punch of like, yep, I remember that and I'm ready.
You know, buckle up. Was your approach always going to be satirical? Yeah, well, yes, it was always going to be satire, but I also wanted it to be inscrutable.

You know, I wanted whatever my position is in all of this to be maybe veiled for as long as I could. I think at the end of the film, it becomes pretty clear where I stand.
but I wanted to make a film that was kind of pulling back

and describing the structure of reality at the moment, which is that nobody can agree on what is real. Right.
My understanding is that some version of this script has existed for some time. Is that right? Well, I had written a sort of contemporary Western that was set in New Mexico.
I'm from New Mexico a long time ago, long before I made Hereditary, right after I left school. I wasn't able to get it made and I lost interest in it.
And then in late May, early June In 2020, I found myself in New Mexico near family, and I wanted to get down on paper what was in the air. Everything had kind of reached a boiling point.
The fever of 2020 lockdown had kind of reached its highest pitch, and I wasn't sure what was going to happen, you know, whether it was going to explode, whether it was going to boil over. I was writing it in a state of anxiety and dread, which I think is that's sort of the prevailing mood of not just the moment, but for like the last 10 years.
The framework of a contemporary Western suddenly felt really appropriate for this. And so I kind of went back to the structure of that old script, but everything else was, you know, kind of written from scratch.
When I was watching it, I guess because you're juggling so many interesting characters, I was sort of thinking a little bit about the work of Robert Altman a little bit. And then when it was over, the movie that came to mind for me was Do the Right Thing, because it's just so many incredibly fully realized, funny, lived-in characters.
Like, the world is very recognizable, but there is this sort of ratcheting tension. I wonder what you make of that comp.
And then also, if sort of similar to that film, you sort of were very intentionally trying to do something topical and get in people's faces a little bit with this movie.

Yeah. Well, when you mentioned Altman, I'm sure you're maybe referring to Nashville.
100%. Which is one of my favorite films.
Mine too. And I think one of the great films about America as like a circus.
It's been hard work, but every time we get into a fix, let's think of what our children face in 2-0-8-7-6. It's up to us to pave the way with our blood and sweat and tears, for we must be doing something right to last 200 years.
So certainly that film was on my mind, but Do the Right Thing, you know, is just one of the great works of art. Hey, hey, sir, how come you got the Brothers Upon a Wall here? You want Brothers on a Wall? Get your own place, you can do what you want.
And I will say that it was a reference for me early on when I was giving the script to people.

But this is my pizzeria. American Italians on a wall only.

Yeah, that might be fine, Sal, but you own this. Rarely do I see any American Italians eating in here.
All I see is black folks. So since we spend much money here, we do have some sex.

But, you know, the tongue is slightly in the cheek there, especially because it's set in a town with very few black people, in a state with very few black people. Right, right.
So just to go back to your earlier point about sort of the differing perceptions of reality right now, one of the most unsettling things about the moment we're in is what people are willing to believe in. You got QAnon and replacement theory.
The president of the United States is sharing memes that his predecessor might be a double. And the conversation we're having right now, of course, is happening amidst a time where the Jeffrey Epstein story has sort of resurged into the public consciousness.
So I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how you feel about conspiracy theory culture and why it's such a center of this particular film. Right.
And with, yeah, with the Epstein stuff, you know, the snake is now starting to eat its own tail. Yeah, it really scares me that all these things have come into the mainstream, including Nazism.
It's really alarming. And I wanted to make a film where kind of everybody is in a way a conspiracy theorist.
You were asking about references or films that might be on my mind, and one was JFK, which I think is a really interesting film because it's kind of a rat king

of different conspiracy theories

that don't have a lot to do with each other.

Some of them contradict others.

And so it's been like widely discredited.

But I find the film to be really,

not only fascinating,

but important for the way that it captures

the fever and the mania of conspiracy thinking. Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the Mafia keeps them guessing like some kind of parlor game prevents them from asking the most important question, why? Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited? Who has the power to cover it up? Who? And I feel like all of us in America now, we're kind of living in that atmosphere, the atmosphere of JFK.
We're all the only ones who see what's actually happening. I feel that Eddington is a film about a bunch of people who really care about the world and they all know that something's wrong.
They just, nobody can agree on what that thing is. And they're all looking at the world through these strange windows that are distorted and they distrust anything that falls outside of their bubble of certainty.
So it's a film about what happens when these people living in different realities start bumping against each other. You said you wrote this in a sort of state of anxiety and fear.
Do you feel more fearful now since the creation of this film, this whole process, or is there anything you're feeling optimistic about, or do you feel like we're actually going downhill? That feeling of dread has only grown more intense for me. It feels like we are on a very dangerous path.
And it feels like, to me, at the very end of this path is a brick wall. But we're only accelerating.
And if there's anything maybe hopeful in the film, it's that it is a period piece. And so maybe there's some opportunity in seeing the way we were, and maybe that can give us some clearer picture of where we are, right? And the path that we're on.
I mean, the film is also a Western, and it's a genre film, and it's meant to be fun. Well, in spite of that, I don't need to tell you, we live in a very politically polarized moment.
Yeah. And I imagine there's going to be, whether you want want it to or not people are going to sort of latch on to whatever they want to take politically from this film so yeah there'll be people who feel like it's too one-sided and there'll be others who will say it's not one-sided enough have you steeled yourself for that discourse and are you sort of comfortable wading into that stuff yeah i mean look i also made this film uh in 2024 before the election right and i've never made a film that kind of changes day to day so much but i'm definitely aware of the critics of the film and i and and i feel like you know most of them come at the film for not taking enough of a stance or not being partisan enough.
But that's not what the film is about. And to me, that would have been way too narrow.
The film is about the environment. And if I did make a partisan film, that would have only reached the choir that it was preaching to.
And that just, I don't even see the point in it at this point. I'm most concerned right now with the fact that we're all kind of unreachable to each other.
But just going back to COVID, COVID is this thing that, to your point, we've just so assiduously avoided reckoning with a million people died. You would never know it sometimes.
It's something that I think people are consciously trying to avoid. So how do you make that the center of a movie and get people to buy tickets on a summer day and say, you could go see Superman, but come watch this movie to revisit a very painful chapter in American history? Well, I mean, we all went through it.
And I don't know. I'm personally desperate for art that at least attempts to grapple with whatever the hell is going on right now.
So if anything, I just made the movie that I kind of wanted to see. But COVID, I think, was a really huge inflection point.

I don't think it was the advent of anything.

I think we had been living in something for a long time.

But it was the moment at which I think the last, whatever that old world was, was cut.

Ari Aster, speaking with the Radio Hours, Adam Howard.

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A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story.

But right now, you probably need more.

On Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes.

Because no one story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning.

Listen now to the Up First podcast from NPR. Beyond COVID, this movie delves into the George Floyd protests and the sort of movement around that.
I happen to be a Black American. And for me, and I think a lot of other Black Americans, that period was very fraught because there was sort of a sense that we're having conversations that are good to have, but the lack of actual tangible progress during and after.
And now we're kind of living in the midst of a backlash to a lot of that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your perspective on that whole moment.
I was amazed at the power and momentum of that movement. I haven't seen anything like it since, and I hadn't seen anything like it in so long.
And I think one of the things that allowed that to happen was the fact that people's public lives had kind of shut down completely. But the film is doing something kind of tricky, which is that we're largely tied to the perspective of like a conservative white sheriff who's got- Played by Joaquin Phoenix.
Played by Joaquin Phoenix, who is something of a libertarian. And so we are receiving the news of George Floyd's murder with him.
Through his eyes. Yeah, through his eyes.
And he's getting the spin that he's getting. Meanwhile, he's living in a tiny town in New Mexico that has very few black people.
He works with a black person. But this is all very abstract to him.
And even the kids who are being activated in town, it's abstract to them. And some of them are much more sincere in their efforts.
And some are just looking for community. And this is a bandwagon that they're jumping on.
And so, again, the challenge here was for me to pull back as far as I could and just give us broad a picture of the landscape at that moment as possible. I'm curious why you thought the Southwest was sort of an ideal setting for this particular story.
And how did you use your own experience growing up there to sort of infuse the film with some authenticity? Well, you know, it's the region that I know best. And I've always wanted to make a film set in New Mexico.
New Mexico is already a really interesting microcosm for the country.

It's a blue state,

but most of the small towns are red.

And, you know,

there's a long history

of racial resentment

and there are just

so many cultures

that never really intersect

or they do only in the most...

Superficial ways.

Superficial ways.

And I was especially aware of that when I was a little kid, just in school.

And it felt exciting to me to make an ensemble film in New Mexico where you're covering as many bases as you can and kind of including as many voices in the cacophony as possible without

neglecting to, you know, tell a coherent story. This is your second collaboration with Joaquin

Phoenix in a row. I'd love to hear more about what your working relationship with him is like,

what makes him such a unique actor for this kind of project. Yeah, well, Joaquin and I worked

together once on Bo is Afraid, and that was a really good experience. I think we both

Thank you. this kind of project? Yeah, well, Joaquin and I worked together once on Bo is Afraid, and that was a really good experience.
I think we both have a lot in common. We're both kind of nuts, and we're very neurotic, and we are serious about what we're doing.
And he's somebody who really likes to talk through things a lot. And I have found that that is a really useful process for me, just going over the script, and he'll have a lot of questions, and the purpose is never to answer those questions I've learned, but rather to find what the more activating questions are and find a way to preserve those and keep those going so that on the day of shooting, those are still alive.
Whenever anything becomes wrote or like figured out for him, it's dead. And this was an interesting process because his character, Joe Cross, was kind of inspired by somebody I had met in New Mexico.
When I was rewriting the script, when I was polishing it, I flew back out to New Mexico. I drove around the state.
I went to different counties and talked to different sheriffs. I went to small towns, talked to mayors, police chiefs, public officials.
I went to Pueblos, just trying to get as broad a picture of the state. And I met a few really interesting people.
One of them was this sheriff of a vast county, but very small population. And I flew out there again with Joaquin because I wanted him to meet him.
And we drove around with the sheriff for a couple days. And Joaquin's wardrobe in the film, his look, his stance was, you know, kind of modeled on this guy.
What was it about him that was so striking to you? It's kind of ineffable. It's hard to say.
I mean, he was a big personality. He is a 70-year-old or so man who used to be a cop in Albuquerque, but it was too violent for him.
And so he came out to this county and ran for a sheriff. He had a feud, a long-running feud with the mayor of the biggest town in his county.
Which is similar to a plot point in the film, yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. With Joaquin and Pedro Pascal's character.
Is he aware that this character is going to be somewhat loosely inspired by him? He even showed up to consult on a few days. So he saw that Joaquin was dressed like him.
How did he feel about that? I think he was thrilled. Has he seen the finished movie yet? Not yet, but I'm curious to hear what he thinks.
Do you read reviews of your films or do you sort of tune that stuff out? Every time I promise I'm not going to, and then I relent. No, I find that it can be really harmful, so there's always a point at which I have to stop.
But, you know, you spend so long making a film and then you want to know how it's being received. I tend to get the temperature.
And, you know, there are filmmakers who claim to not look at that stuff at all. And I think that's probably bullshit.
I can't imagine not even peaking. One of the reasons I wanted to ask is that, as I'm sure you know, some of the reviews have sort of alluded to this movie being polarizing or divisive, and that being potentially your intent.

Well, the film is about polarization, and the reception has been polarized, but that feels natural to me.

And it's not like I set out to do that.

Like, yeah, with this one, I'm going to make something really divisive.

But while we were in the edit, my editor, Luke Johnston, and I would, you know, say, yeah, this is going to – it would usually be at points in the film where we'd be like, okay, yeah, this is where we're going to – Lose people? Potentially. But to me, excising all those things would have made the film just nothing.
Yeah. You know? And so you got to listen to the movie and do what's right for the movie.
I mean, the worst thing that could happen for a movie like this is meh. Or everybody loves it.
Or, yeah, I mean, even everybody loves it, something would be wrong. And I don't know how that would even be possible anymore in this landscape.

But it honestly, it feels right. My concern is that I don't know how much of a hunger people have anymore for anything controversial or challenging.

So, you know, what I want is for people to go out and see it.

I do hope that the film is funny.

And it's a Western. I hope it's rousing.
You know, it becomes I do hope that the film is funny and it's a Western.

I hope it's rousing.

It becomes an action film by the end.

Kind of an absurd one.

I hope that there can be

some sort of bizarre solidarity

in sitting in a theater

with a bunch of people

and recognizing the insanity of the moment

and just the fact that we're all kind of struggling

on the wrong end of puppet strings

and, you know, that our neighbor is not our real enemy.

Thank you so much for coming in

and for having this conversation with me.

It's been great to talk to you.

Thank you for having me.

Director Ari Aster, speaking with the Radio Hour's Adam Howard. His new film Eddington is

opening in theaters nationwide, and you can read Justin Chang and Richard Brody on the movies at

newyorker.com, and you can always subscribe to the magazine there as well, newyorker.com.

I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us this week.

See you next time. with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul.
This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard,

David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell,

Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer.

With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May,

David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund. from AT&T Business.
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