Ari Aster had wanted to make a Western for a while.
The director of modern horror classics “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” whose last film was the comedic freak-out “Beau Is Afraid,” grew up in New Mexico and longed to make his “New Mexico movie.” He had even contemplated making a Western his first movie. But it wasn’t until 2020, in the midst of the global pandemic, that Aster began to write what would ultimately become “Eddington,” opening later this month from A24. “That came out of just feeling the waters heating up to a boil and needing an outlet and feeling so overwhelmed by everything,” Aster told TheWrap. “I just wanted to start recording what I was seeing and feeling and make a film that reflected the environment.”
The resulting film follows Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the small town sheriff of Eddington, whose frustrations – surrounding his wife Louise (Emma Stone), who doesn’t want to have a baby with him, and his decaying relationship with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) – reach a breaking point during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are some fairly dramatic twists in “Eddington,” so we’re trying to talk around the movie to some degree. Just know that there is a charismatic religious figure played by Austin Butler and some of the tensest sequences of Aster’s career – which is saying something. It also might be the filmmaker’s most straightforward and entertaining movie yet.
And it’s the temporal setting for the film – the posters read “Hindsight is 2020” and Indiewire film critic David Ehrlich, reviewing the movie out of Cannes, called it “the first truly modern American Western” – that helps make “Eddington” such a singular, powerful experience.
“I don’t think the lockdown was, like, the beginning of anything. I think it was an inflection point. I think something had been happening for a long time, but there was still this tether to the old world we lived in. And I think COVID cut that link forever.” It made perfect sense to set his Western in this scenario because, Aster noted, “the Western is a genre that’s contending with the building of America … I do feel that we are living through the collapse of something and we’re on the cusp of something – with these changes in technology, with what’s happening with these new governments around the world, something new is here that I think is also part of the collapse.”
With “Eddington,” Aster also wanted to make a Western where all of the characters are “very media literate,” so they would have seen all of the same Westerns Aster himself was looking at. “Joe Cross, the character played by Joaquin Phoenix, he would have loved those old Westerns. And I think he sees himself as a sheriff in that tradition,” Aster teased. The character, who is 50, would have also found particular importance in the action movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s. “They’re like a language for him. I think he identifies with those,” Aster said. Towards the end of the movie, when it erupts into violence, Phoenix’s character “gets to live through an action movie from the ‘90s.”
The younger characters in the movie are more in tune with video games and the Internet, which also play into the events of the movie. “It’s a movie where every character is living in a different movie. They’re living in different realities,” Aster said. “The film is about what happens when a bunch of people who are living in different versions of reality, who distrust each other’s version of reality, start colliding with one another.” And collide they do, spectacularly – in a way that only Aster could conjure.
That collision, which climaxes in a truly go-for-broke sequence, combines Aster’s incredible ability to build a suspense set piece with some muscular action filmmaking. Aster said that he loves action movies and always wanted to make one. “It’s fun to imagine the action scenes and then it’s fun to cut them together, but shooting them is a pain in the ass, especially when you have a limited schedule,” he said. Phoenix, who also starred in Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid,” fully embraced the sequence in question. “Joaquin does more of his stunts than might be advisable by a doctor, although I am happy that he’s doing it,” Aster said. The director noted that he loves “a sustained climax.” “I drag it out,” he admitted.
For “Beau,” both Aster and Phoenix talked about the intensity of developing the project together. For “Eddington,” Aster said that the process was similar. “We go over the script a lot, we talk a lot, we rehearse a lot. In this case, while I was writing the script, I went all over New Mexico, going to different towns, meeting with sheriffs of certain counties, meeting with police chiefs, mayors, public officials. And I was trying to get as broad a picture of New Mexico politics as I could,” Aster said.
The filmmaker grew up in Santa Fe and his parents are in Albuquerque now, so he wasn’t as knowledgeable when it came to these small towns, like the fictional Eddington. Visiting them and talking to the people that lived there was hugely important to the process. There was one sheriff that Aster met that he knew Phoenix would be inspired by. He took the actor to this small town where this sheriff lived and worked. “We sat in his car and drove around all day and shadowed him,” Aster said. This man’s wardrobe inspired the costumes that Phoenix wears in the movie. “There were even a couple days where we decided it would be great to have him on set, and we could just ask him questions as they come up. And he did come to set, and it was so useful,” Aster recalled. He said that both he and Phoenix loved interacting with the sheriff. “He was very generous and very smart and had a philosophy and I found that he was very instrumental in making the film live beyond whatever my designs were.”
And while much of the focus is on Phoenix and Pascal’s characters, the town of Eddington is filled with a dozen rich characters that could necessitate their own movie. Sometimes the movie will take a detour, snaking down a path that is entirely new and different and just as compelling. While watching, it’s enough to imagine a longer version of the movie that indulges in some of these side quests, but Aster said this is it. While he admits “with me, there’s always a longer version,” which he said is something he is working on, the “Eddington” arriving in theaters is all there is. “The idea was to pull back as far as I could and give as big a picture of this microcosm as I could without sacrificing coherence or you forgetting to tell a story,” Aster said. “That’s what dictated how many characters I could fit in.” He said that he would have loved something like Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” with a gallery of disparate characters and subplots, but it just didn’t happen. “This is definitely a film that could have and was, at one point, longer,” Aster shared.
But don’t expect a Director’s Cut, like “Midsommar.” “I’m pretty happy with the shape. I think it’s the right shape. This feels pretty much like the definitive cut,” Aster said.
Still – there are details worth puzzling over that you notice on first viewing and even more, we are sure, that will emerge after subsequent visits to “Eddington.” For instance, on Joe’s cluttered bedside table, there’s a copy of Michael Crichton’s 1995 novel “The Lost World,” the sequel to “Jurassic Park.” We couldn’t help but wonder why? Especially since “Eddington” is opening alongside another new entry in the “Jurassic Park” franchise, Universal’s “Jurassic World Rebirth.”
“That just sounds like a great retreat. That’s just a pure escape,” Aster joked. “Joe just wanted to get away.” It’s true. On a dinosaur-filled island, there aren’t any chilly wives or nagging mothers-in-law or mask mandates or uptight mayors. It is an escape, far away from Eddington.
“Eddington” opens in theaters on July 18.
