After making Midsommar, Hereditary and Beau is Afraid, Ari Aster set his sights on the COVID-19 pandemic as his latest horror subject.
Eddington, which Aster wrote and directed, is set in Eddington, New Mexico in May 2020, as a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) faces off against the mayor (Pedro Pascal) over political and social issues that arise amid the pandemic.
Of his desire to explore a time period that many would like to forget, Aster told The Hollywood Reporter at the film‘s L.A. premiere on Thursday, “It was like paradigm shifting and terrible and I like to make movies about terrible things. So it just felt like the next stop.”
The filmmaker also explained that because he wrote the film during the pandemic, he didn’t approach it so much as looking back now several years later, noting, “If anything, it’s kind of anti-nostalgia. I do think we’re still living in it. I don’t think we’ve metabolized what happened during lockdown and I think we’re still living out what that thing is. I’ve never made a film that changes day-to-day in the way that this one does, just based on whatever the headlines are of that day. It’s meant to be about right now.”
Emma Stone, Austin Butler and Luke Grimes co-star in the project, which explores broad ideas of American history, racial disharmony, political standoffs, protest movements and disinformation all under the umbrella of a modern Western.
Aster said he was drawn to tell the story as a Western because of is “sort of the national genre. It’s about America, it’s about the building of America — forging new societies, borders, law versus lawlessness.”
“It feels like we’re at a moment right now where everything’s kind of collapsing, like this system that has been barely holding for a while is collapsing, and then we’re at the cusp of something new with these massive changes in tech, huge changes in government, and it felt appropriate to make a Western,” he continued. “But a Western that is kind of inflected by modern realism, where they’ve got all these people living in this small town; they kind of function as archetypes, but that’s also because they’re aware of those archetypes, and they’re kind of informed by them, but at the same time, they’re all living in the internet. And the movie is about living in the internet and what that means and how a result of that is that they’re all kind of living in different realities, and we’re kind of unreachable to each other.”
The project also serves as another collaboration between Aster and Phoenix after Beau is Afraid, as the director pointed out that Phoenix and Pascal “have amazing chemistry. Joaquin and Pedro together are surprisingly like a combustible, great pair. They love each other.” And when it came to their casting, it was as simple as “If I can get them, I want them.”
Eddington hits theaters July 18.