Skip to playerSkip to main content
  • 6 months ago
Since the premiere of Ari Aster’s Eddington at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, the word I’ve constantly heard/seen to describe it is “divisive.” It’s a dark comedy set during the summer of 2020 – a time period that has a lot of baggage for all of us – and it examines the moment in our recent history via the lens of a small town in New Mexico. It’s conflict-filled subject matter that has inflamed strong opinions… and that means that it is doing what its writer/director intended it to do.

When I sat down with Aster and actors Luke Grimes and Micheal Ward for an interview during the Los Angeles press day for the feature, I made note of the “divisive” response, and I asked the filmmaker about how he factors audience reaction into his work and how he expects his movies to play with movie-goers. He explained that there are certain stages involved when he is constructing a screenplay – but the first time he digs into a story, he is writing purely what he wants to write.
Transcript
00:00Well, I try to not get caught up and worry about how something is going to land while I'm writing.
00:08I try to just not restrain anything.
00:12And then once it's on paper, it's kind of a matter of keeping my nerve
00:19and maybe being smart enough to know what maybe should be plucked.
00:23And so, yeah, I don't know.
00:25But we knew it was going to be divisive.
00:29It's about polarization.
00:32It's about division.
00:35And we tried to pull back as far as we could to have it be about the environment, right,
00:43where everybody is kind of, in one way or another, missing part of the picture, right?
00:54I mean, nobody's acting in bad faith.
00:57Nobody is evil in this movie.
00:59They're just all people acting on their own perspective.
01:03And, yeah.
01:04Everybody in the movie cares about the world.
01:06Every character cares about the world, knows that something's wrong,
01:10has a feeling that something's wrong,
01:12but they all just have different pictures of what that is.
01:19They all just don't use that sort of stuff.
01:21So that's right.
01:22Thanks.
01:24I know.
Be the first to comment
Add your comment

Recommended