Ari Aster, 38, represents a new generation of filmmakers unafraid to plunge into the darkest corners of human experience. He will receive the Filmmaker on the Edge Award at this year’s Provincetown International Film Festival and appear at town hall in conversation with John Waters on June 14.
Aster writes and directs surreal psychological thrillers. His characters grapple with guilt in families prone to accidents and emotional violence. His films portray a gradual descent into deeper levels of madness. Hereditary (2018), his first feature, is about a family whose secretive grandmother left a dark, supernatural legacy. It won him the Saturn Award for breakout director. Midsommar, released the following year, delved into Swedish folklore in a story about an American couple who go to rural Sweden and are drawn into a violent pagan cult.
Beau Is Afraid (2023), starring Joaquin Phoenix, is a three-hour epic that follows the effort of a paranoid man to get home to his mother, played by Patti Lupone. Beau is made into a shell of himself by the catastrophic events of his life. In one scene, the nude Beau dodges a deranged cop’s bullet in the street only to be stabbed by a serial killer. He survives. One of Aster’s strengths is his ability to make viewers understand the experience of his characters’ paranoia.
During the pandemic, Aster wrote Eddington, his latest film, which debuted at Cannes and will be released in theaters on July 18. He was trying to make sense of what he was seeing and feeling in the worlds of politics, public health, and relationships.
The film, a contemporary Western set in the fictional town of Eddington, N.Mex., is a meditation on our fractured reality. It follows the unraveling of a community when there is a standoff between the sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and the mayor (Pedro Pascal).
“I wanted to treat the characters like particles in some scientific test chamber where they start to bounce against each other, and that creates a new logic,” says Aster. “People fall deeper and deeper into ever firmer convictions and fears and paranoia.”
The film encapsulates Aster’s ideas about the pandemic’s effects. “It was momentous,” he says. “It felt like the last link to the world we once lived in, where there was an agreed-upon foundation of reality that was given to us by people in power, that we all shared even though we might disagree about what was happening.”
For Aster, Covid left us stranded in our individual silos. “We’re still there,” he says. “It’s worse now, but that felt like the advent of it.”
Eddington feels modern in the sense that it’s like “a tapestry, where every character is living in a different world,” says Aster.
The film was shot in Truth or Consequences, N.Mex., a town known for its hot springs. After writing the script, Aster drove around the state meeting with chiefs, mayors, and other public officials. “A lot of the characters in the film are based on facets of people I met,” he says.
Truth or Consequences is a microcosm for Aster. He wanted the characters to represent as many facets of our current culture as possible and give “equal weight to every instrument in the cacophony,” he says. For him, the goal was to somehow reflect the “incoherent miasma” without actually being incoherent.
Aster was working on familiar turf. “New Mexico is home,” he says. He was born in New York, and his family moved to England for a few years, but he spent his adolescence in Santa Fe. His mother is a painter turned poet, and his father is a jazz drummer. Aster graduated from the Santa Fe University of Art and Design in 2008 and earned an M.F.A. in directing from the American Film Institute Conservatory.
Aster plans to continue working with Danish producer Lars Knudsen, with whom he started the production company Square Peg. “It’s hard to find a producer that you mesh with, and I was lucky that he was on my first film,” says Aster. “I trust him completely. I can see myself working with him for the rest of my life.”
What film Aster will make next is a more complicated question. “Right now, I have three films I’m interested in doing,” he says, “which is actually a little paralyzing, because I don’t know which ones to commit to.”
Descending Into Madness
The event: Ari Aster in conversation with John Waters
The time: Saturday, June 14, 4 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St.
The cost: $30 plus fees at tickets.provincetownfilm.org
