“I think people have lost the dimensions of the bigger world outside of themselves, and all they see are the dimensions of the smaller world that they believe in. With Eddington, I wanted to make a film that was about what happens when all these people who are living in different realities start to knock against each other—and a new logic comes out of that.”
-Ari Aster, episode 422 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
“Eddington is a film about a bunch of people who know that something is wrong,” says writer-director Ari Aster. “It’s just that nobody can agree on what that thing is.”
Aster joins this week to unpack his controversial, COVID-era western: his time back home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, writing through lockdown (9:30), the works of Robert Altman (18:00) and Oliver Stone (19:15) that served as sources of inspiration, and how Beau Is Afraid (5:54) cleared the path to Eddington. Aster also shares his early adventures in moviegoing: including Brian De Palma’s Carrie (22:10), Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (23:45), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (23:47), and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (24:50).
On the back-half, we talk about how he found his voice in film school (30:28), his divisive AFI senior thesis film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (31:16), the seven years, post-college, that it took to break through with Hereditary (34:18), followed by his breakdown on Midsommar (38:30), and his ‘novelistic’ approach to screenwriting (40:30). To close, we read from Paul Schrader’s infamous Facebook post (45:48) on how AI will change moviemaking (46:05) and a Nietzsche quote that Ari says helps explain this moment in American life (52:45).
Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at mail@talkeasypod.com.
Watch this conversation on YouTube:
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Show-notes:
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- See Eddington in theaters.
- Watch Beau Is Afraid, Midsommar, and Hereditary.
- Read Paul Schrader’s infamous AI Facebook post.
- For more talks, hear Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Richard Linklater.
- Order your Talk Easy mug in cream and navy or our vinyl record with Fran Lebowitz.
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Illustrations by Krishna Shenoi. Reference photograph by Sarah Schneider.
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