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.
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 have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to
Be the first to comment