Micheal Ward, Joaquin Phoenix and Luke Grimes in Eddington
Ari Aster previously used the horror genre as a lens to examine dysfunctional family dynamics in Hereditary and break-up messiness in Midsommar. He then pivoted to the manic surrealism of Beau is Afraid, which immerses viewers in the title character’s perma-anxious mindset, generated by his mother’s domineering hold on his entire world. In Eddington, Aster pivots again, away from individual psychological portraits towards a more panoramic view of recent political history.
Set in the eponymous fictional New Mexico town during the initial months of COVID, Eddington uses a contested election between its bar-owning neoliberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and conservative sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) as a microcosm of America’s fractured mental state. Amidst lockdown mandates and Black Lives Matter protests, Eddington comes under fire as insidious conspiracy theories are disseminated on social media and the looming threat of data-stealing Big Tech and asymmetrical warfare converge on a town already fueled by deep-seated mistrust. Aster uses his “period” piece to explore the myriad ways our brains have been permanently broken either by social media or partisan dogma and how “ideological powder keg” is our country’s natural state.
With Eddington currently in theaters, I spoke to Aster about shooting entirely on location in New Mexico, working with cinematographer Darius Khondji for the first time and the hazards of dealing with the weather.
Filmmaker: In an interview from 2018, you mentioned that you start with a shot list and scout locations accordingly, often relying on sets if you can’t find appropriate locations. Since Eddington is your first film shot entirely on location, did that impact your established pre-production routine? Did you still make a shot list?
Ari Aster: This is the first film I’ve ever made that had no shooting done on stages, which is another way of saying we didn’t build sets. The sheriff’s office and Ted Garcia’s bar were buildings that had been abandoned and needed fortification, so those felt like sets, especially because in the case of the sheriff’s office, we put up new walls, we got rid of walls. Otherwise we had the spaces we had, and I had to build my shooting plans around those. For something like Hereditary, I had worked out a shot list and the blocking in advance of working with the actors or finding the locations. Because of that, I got fixed on how I needed to shoot the film and what I needed from any given location. We ended up just not finding a house [for Hereditary] that worked, so we had to build the entire thing on a stage. Midsommar I shot in a similar way. I worked out the shot list in advance of even going to Hungary and looking for fields that could function as [the ancestral commune] Hårga.
Going in [to Beau is Afraid], I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to work that way with Joaquin. That was part of the appeal of working with somebody like Joaquin; I wanted to challenge myself, because I was used to working out blocking without the actors. I understood that was a limitation, so I needed a reason to sacrifice that. I probably wouldn’t have just given it up, mostly out of an anxiety over not having a plan, and maybe the pressure of shooting would make it harder to devise one on the spot. But working with Joaquin, I held off on shot listing as long as I could. The truth on Beau [Is Afraid] is that I still did make a shot list in advance, but I never let him sniff that out. And Joaquin is somebody who surprised me by being somebody who really depends on rehearsal and expects to rehearse. I think it’s easy to see what he does and maybe imagine that he’s just a spontaneous, “don’t fence me in” actor. In fact, he’s somebody who really wants to work things out. He just wants to be able to do that uninhibited.
I found that that kind of rehearsal was better for me, and made planning much easier, because once you go in, see the instincts of the actors, where they go, if you’re given to this kind of thinking, you hook up shots while watching. It doesn’t take any work. It’s like, “Oh well, I’m seeing you do this, and the best view of this would be over here,” so it happens instantaneously. That was both a more exciting and easier way of working, and it allows the movie to get away from you. A lot of what Joaquin ended up doing I anticipated, but it was always most exciting when he did something that surprised me, which with Joaquin happens a lot. On Eddington, Joaquin and I already had that rapport, because Beau was a 65-day shoot. We spent a lot of time together, honing whatever our thing was. Now it feels like, whether I’ll be working with Joaquin on the next one or not, my new way of approaching a film.
Filmmaker: I liked that the final chase split the difference between controlled and spontaneous. Can you talk about the staging and development of that sequence? Was the journey from the explosion in the desert through the return home to the shootout in town always in the script?
Aster: Yes, since the writing of the script. But that was another instance of me not shot listing until I had the location, because I understood that if I did too much work in advance—like, he takes a right onto what? The explosion I shot listed in advance, and that dictated how we scouted. That was a particularly hard patch of desert to find. But otherwise, [most of] the stretch you’re talking about begins at his house, then goes down into a valley, up a hill and into the town. I worked the blocking and shooting of that out by walking the area and imagining the scene—on my own first, then I did it with Darius. These scenes are so complicated that I need to have the movie in my head first, so that I can then guide the DP through it, and then an argument or conversation might come out of that. In the case of these action scenes, I think it made sense to Darius, and he had enough on his hands just to figure out how to light that huge, huge area. I think he had two or three condors.
Some things that I really love in the film came out of me just walking this area and then hitting bumps, like, “How is he going to get from this hill down into town?” At first he was going to jump over a little cliff, then the stunt team decided that that cliff wasn’t sturdy enough to hold the stunt equipment safely. I had to come up with a new thing, which is how I got to him falling through the roof of the museum, which is one of my favorite gags in the movie. It came out of something else being denied to me.
I wanted to get to that parking lot at the end because it felt to me like the most cinematic place to have a final showdown. So, if this is my basic trajectory, how do I make this interesting? That’s also how we decided that that building would be the gun shop, because that was a closed-down restaurant that was for sale, and luckily also within eyeshot of the sheriff’s office.
Filmmaker: Could you talk about some of the conversations you had with Darius about the look of the film early on? Was there a certain way you wanted the barren streets of Truth or Consequence to look?
Aster: Darius and talked a lot about movies we loved, especially movies set in the desert. James Wong Howe and Hud was one that we kept talking about for some reason. I love the texture of that film. We talked about [The] Last Picture Show. A lot of the films we were talking about were black-and-white, but we wanted to avoid [that] sort of stylization while having really inky blacks. New Mexico is very bright. The sun is very strong. As we were scouting, we were talking a lot about wanting to reflect that, to be too bright when you’re outside, [to] kind of sting the eyes. We had to remind ourselves of that when we were in the DI— “Let’s push it a little bit more. Let’s make this a little harsher”—and have it not be too gold, [but] have it be a white hot.
We talked a lot—it wasn’t an argument, but a debate about whether we go 2:40 or 1:85. I had only shot in either 1:85, or 2:1, which is an aspect ratio I really like and feel comfortable with, and was excited by the idea of doing 2:40, but there was a claustrophobia to the film that would be supported by a less wide, taller frame. So we ended up deciding, when we were testing lenses, “If we go anamorphic, we’ll go 2:40, and if we go with spherical lenses, we’ll go 1:85.” And that almost decided that we would go 1:85 on the spot, because I really love anamorphic when it’s somebody else’s movie, but it distorts lines. The edges bend. I really like strong lines. I go into a room and the lines tell me what the framing is. I like to think geographically when I’m thinking about composition. So, in the lens tests, I was seeing what the anamorphic was doing. The images were great, but I really did not like the distortion and knew that I wouldn’t be able to totally get rid of it.
Filmmaker: I picked up a different rhythm in this film than in your previous works. You’ve worked with editor Lucian Johnston on each of your four features and I was wondering if you both went into this one wanting a different tempo or pace.
Aster: I shoot with editing in mind. I tend to sequence shots so that one shot leads to the next, and the cuts are designed in camera. So, first we assemble it together, and that tends to be mostly about choosing takes and adhering to the dictates of the shot list. Once it’s together, the work really starts. We start talking about structure, rhythm and pacing, what’s working, what’s not. This was an interesting one because when we first cut it together, it was working in ways that maybe the earlier films hadn’t, but there was a dullness to it. It just needed to be sharper. I don’t know, though. I’m not sure if it’s so much different than the others. In some ways, I feel like I can’t get away from my own internal rhythm. I always walk into something saying “This one’s going to be faster and more metronomic in its pacing,” then I always end up doing something that feels more deliberate than I imagine it will be. But it’s good that you thought that this felt different. I’m not sure if I agree. How did you feel this was different?
Filmmaker: It didn’t feel like the action was so propulsive that one scene was just always leading directly into the next one. There was more space between scenes.
Aster: That might have something to do with the naturalism that I was going for, given that this movie is much more grounded in the real world, despite the fact that it still goes off the rails in the last 30 [minutes], which is something I like. That might have something to do with the fact that I wanted this to feel clumsy in the way that real life is.
Filmmaker: Was there a specific on-set challenge during production that you had to solve on the day?
Aster: I would say making a movie is just a succession of on-set challenges.
Filmmaker: We’re just looking for a story.
Aster: We shot the film during windy season in New Mexico and had a lot of scenes outside in the desert. Some were just windy enough to make it horribly unpleasant, like the dirt track party with all the kids. That seems like a pretty simple scene, but the wind was blowing dirt into our eyes and nose and ears and mouth, and it was just awful. There were a couple nights in the desert while we were shooting the explosion scene that were catastrophically windy. It blew down a condor. We lost a generator. We lost two nights out there shooting almost nothing because of the intensity of the wind, and that wasn’t us sitting in a tent waiting for it to die down. That was us fighting the wind and getting nothing. Those were probably the most stressful nights I’ve had on a set. Our schedule was already incredibly tight, so to lose two nights means that you still have to make up for them, to shoot those two nights at that location, but you’re supposed to be off that location tomorrow. That created huge logistical issues and meant that we lost valuable time at other locations.
Filmmaker: Has weather been a problem on your other films?
Aster: Always, especially when you’re shooting outside. Midsommar had a lot of issues because so much that film is outside. Maybe it’s raining all day; it can’t be raining, so you’re not shooting. There was a lot of that on Eddington because New Mexico is known for its erratic weather. So, the scene is sunny, but then all of a sudden storm clouds rush in for two hours, so you have to stop shooting. By the time those storm clouds are gone, it’s evening, so you have to finish the scene tomorrow, but that means that you have to get out of another scene early. When you’re depending on the weather, the only way to plan for that is to plan for the worst. But when you have a tight schedule, you kind of can’t.
Filmmaker: Would you shoot there again?
Aster: I loved shooting in New Mexico. We had a great crew, and I also know it, because I’m from New Mexico, so I feel at home there. I know the region, I feel that I have insight into it and I would say I felt like I was in my element shooting there.
