Ari Aster: interview with the director of Eddington

With a super cast (Sheriff Joaquin Phoenix vs Mayor Pedro Pascal. Plus Emma Stone and Austin Butler) and the geographical nothingness (the desert…), takes us back to May 2020, of the pandemic and the onset of madness. Women and men on the verge of a nervous breakdown… Read our review here Eddington.

Intervista ad Ari Aster, regsita in Eddington

You presented yours as a film in which each character is missing a part of the big picture. But, just like in reality, don’t you think it’s the people who don’t want to have an overall vision?

The more they feed preconceptions of people, the more they feel connected to them. I don’t think any of us want to have a partial view, but I think it’s very easy to forget that that’s what we have. For this reason I wanted to take a step back and distance myself from the subject as much as possible, to present as broad a picture as possible. They are in the film people who are unable to communicate with each other, nor to see the point of view of others. As in reality. The challenge was to take the inconsistent miasma we live in and derive as coherent a story as possible.

Make a film about today? Never been so difficult

Clinging to your ideas offers a reassuring shelter, don’t you think?

I think there is very little that is reassuring in the general panorama at the moment. But yes, simplifying things is always useful. Being able to put them in a box and put them aside allows you to live more easily. I find that the confusion and desperation of modern life derive precisely from this inability to communicate and from the fact that the system is so irremediably compromised. We need to create something different, our own reality in which we can live. This is why it is so difficult to make a film about this historical moment, because it is very difficult to observe it without getting depressed. We need a recipe, an answer, but I think it is very rare that we are able to really see the problem. There are a million problems, but the one that towers over all the others is the one related to the system in which we live. It seems impossible to imagine an alternative because so much has been invested in it, but it is a system that is not benefiting any of us.

Talk about politics, don’t make a political film

This film is a new stage in your exploration of genres: what’s next? Or will he return to horror?

I don’t know what my fans expect from me. If I thought about it and reasoned like that I would be paralyzed. I never think “now I’ll make a film like this”. I start with a topic, or a character or image that interests meand I follow him. Only then do I decide what the best path is or what the best means is to express what I want. In the case of Beau is scaredwhat I was looking for was a tone, a nightmarish comic book world that was however tied to existential themes. I was actually just trying to manage a laugh. With this film, however, I wanted to do something about the USA and the state of American politics and culture. A film that talked about politics, rather than a political film. I felt that if I made a film about right and wrong, even though I have very clear positions, it would be too limited. It would have been scarier than not being able to understand each other. There are people in my life who have very different political views than me, and I know they are not bad people. And they know I’m not a bad person. But we can’t understand each other, and this is heartbreaking. And that’s what I wanted to talk about, and I think I’ve found the best way to do it.

Eddington vs. One battle after another

Eddington came out a short distance from One battle after another by Paul Thomas Anderson: You both feel the need to talk about America today…

I saw Paul’s film and I think it’s great, but it’s a very different film from Eddington. I think yours is a very good film prophetic. It’s interesting to think that he worked on it for 20 years, but if it had only come out two years ago it wouldn’t have been as powerful. I would say that his is a more optimistic film and aims to offer a sort of recipe for the moment we live in. Eddington instead it is more diagnostic, and points the finger at the problem, to which I don’t think there is an answer at the moment. As I was saying, I fear that it is impossible to imagine a way out of the current situation. One battle after another It’s a truly exciting and also moving action film: Eddington it leaves you in a more unstable condition.

And it tells of a clash in which we face each other with all types of weapons, including social media, cell phones and discussions. Which are the most dangerous?

They are all very different weapons, but in my opinion being so divided between us is a consequence of social media. They were born as an instrument of cohesion, but they were used to divide us. My film highlights how distant we have become from each other, how we are constantly bombarded with certain messages, and how dehumanization has become an increasingly serious problem in recent years. For me the the ongoing technological revolution is particularly dehumanizing. It’s as if we were the objects of a great, increasingly unsuccessful experiment. Obviously it’s a failure for us, and an advantage for others. And in this general confusional stateI am increasingly afraid of real, “traditional” weapons: guns…