Ari Aster’s ‘Eddington’ Is a Mirror. Like What You See? - The Big Picture

Summary6 min read

The Big Picture

Episode: Ari Aster’s ‘Eddington’ Is a Mirror. Like What You See?
Release Date: July 18, 2025
Host/Authors: Sean Fennessy & Amanda Dobbins
Guests: Adam Neyman, Ari Aster

1. Introduction

The episode kicks off with Sean Fennessy and Amanda Dobbins welcoming listeners to The Big Picture, where they delve into the latest in cinema, featuring reviews, top lists, and insightful discussions with industry colleagues.

2. Festival Buzz and New Releases

Sean and Amanda begin by discussing recent developments in the film festival circuit. They highlight the trailer release for Luca Guadagnino’s "After the Hunt," noting its star-studded cast including Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield.

Sean (02:27): “It's a campus sexual assault slash cancel culture drama, seemingly. Is this a commercial enterprise?”

They also touch upon Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film, "Cloud," set to premiere in the US, emphasizing Kurosawa’s reputation as a master filmmaker known for his bleak narratives.

Amanda (03:29): “It feels like a good fit for that festival as well. A kind of talky drama about sensitive issues in our modern times.”

3. Deep Dive: Ari Aster’s ‘Eddington’

The core of the episode centers around Ari Aster’s fourth feature, "Eddington." Sean provides an overview of the film, highlighting its ensemble cast featuring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, and others. He praises cinematographer Darius Khondji for his exceptional work, likening him to legendary cinematographers like David Fincher and Christopher Nolan.

Sean (08:09): “This is an A24 movie. The story is as follows. During the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly May 2020, a standoff between a small town sheriff and mayor sparks a powder keg as neighbors are pitted against neighbors in Eddington, New Mexico.”

Amanda shares her initial impressions, describing "Eddington" as the funniest movie she’s seen in 2025, while still acknowledging its dark and effective humor.

Amanda (09:08): “This is definitely the funniest movie that I have seen in 2025. And the way that it uses humor says a lot about Ari Aster's worldview and my worldview and the state of the world that we're in.”

4. Interview Segment: Ari Aster

Ari Aster joins the conversation, marking his fifth appearance on the podcast. The discussion explores Aster’s transition from horror to a more socially charged narrative in "Eddington."

Amanda (10:00): “Can I ask you something about this interview?”

Aster elaborates on the film’s themes, emphasizing its lack of opportunism and its deep social commentary. He draws parallels to classic Westerns and modern conspiracy thrillers, explaining how "Eddington" serves as a mirror to contemporary societal tensions.

Ari Aster (16:51): “It's smart, even if it's played for laughs. It's intelligent.”

He discusses the challenges of portraying a town divided by political and social conflicts, emphasizing the film's focus on the American experience and the erosion of empathy in modern society.

Ari Aster (19:51): “It's also just so consistent with what all of his other movies are about, which is just like buried histories inside of families and then what manifests out of those buried histories.”

5. Thematic Exploration: Division and Empathy

Sean, Amanda, and Ari dissect the film’s portrayal of community division, emphasizing how characters grapple with their personal traumas amidst societal chaos.

Sean (22:29): “Again, smart, I think, also when you keep showing these moments of panic in our society, that always reveals something underneath the surface of how people really are.”

They discuss pivotal scenes, such as the confrontation with the homeless character Lodge and the depiction of Antifa, analyzing how these elements serve as metaphors for broader societal issues.

Amanda (27:23): “Speaking of crisis actors, like, how of the homeless guy at the beginning, he's the first shot of the movie walking along a street highway demarcation, which is very significant in terms of a movie about slipping over boundaries and sides.”

6. Filmmaking Techniques and Stylistic Choices

The conversation shifts to the technical aspects of "Eddington." Sean praises the film’s visual storytelling, particularly the use of negative space and the strategic placement of characters within frames.

Ari Aster (21:05): “Like, I think when he's recording one of his videos, I think it's where he announces his mayoral campaign. He uses the iPhone by isolating the iPhone in the middle of the frame.”

Amanda highlights the film’s blend of genres, likening its humor to that of Albert Brooks and Larry David, which adds a layer of cringing comedy to the narrative.

Amanda (31:53): “The funniest moment in the movie to me by far is when the young white kid, Brian, is sitting at his dinner table...”

7. Reception and Market Performance

Sean and Amanda discuss the film’s reception, noting its divisive nature and challenges in marketing a film that blends intense political commentary with dark humor.

Sean (55:48): “It's a very good point. I mean, dealing with the present has created some of the best movies of all time.”

They compare "Eddington" to Luca Guadagnino’s "Civil War," analyzing how both films navigate politically charged narratives within the A24 framework.

Amanda (59:26): “It was about how nobody knew what was happening, especially the people in power who are kind of scrambling to hold on to their power.”

8. Spotlight on Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s ‘Cloud’

The episode transitions to discussing Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new film, "Cloud," with Adam Neyman providing a passionate endorsement. He describes Kurosawa as one of the greatest living filmmakers, lauding his ability to evoke fear without traditional horror elements.

Adam Neyman (67:35): “I think he's a brilliant filmmaker. And Cloud, which is being hailed as a return to form, which is silly because it's not like his form has ever abandoned him.”

Neyman recommends Kurosawa’s film "Tokyo Sonata" to listeners, praising its ambiguous and haunting narrative style.

Adam (86:35): “I just hope people go see Cloud, because, again, it's cool that it got an American release.”

9. Closing Remarks and Future Episodes

Sean and Amanda wrap up the episode by teasing upcoming content, including a screening in Chicago and future discussions on ambitious projects like Adam’s production company, Squarepeg.

Amanda (119:47): “We are going to go to a Cubs game. I want to go to the Art Institute. I've never been to Chicago. This is my first time.”

Sean (120:05): “Can we talk about Joaquin in that context for a minute?...”

They express excitement for future episodes and encourage listeners to stay tuned for more in-depth film analyses and conversations with influential filmmakers.

Notable Quotes

Sean Fennessy (09:08): “I think to me, it's very effective.”
Amanda Dobbins (31:53): “...it's just, like, ridiculous. And its willingness to kind of poke fun at it while also, I think, trying to reveal, like, a genuine pain and anxiety is an amazing magic trick.”
Ari Aster (19:51): “It's about something that is us and not a me movie.”
Adam Neyman (67:35): “He is one of the great filmmakers, thinkers working right now just like you are.”

Conclusion

In this episode, Sean and Amanda provide a comprehensive exploration of Ari Aster’s "Eddington," delving into its complex themes of societal division and personal trauma. Their insightful interview with Aster offers viewers a deeper understanding of the filmmaker’s intentions and the movie’s place within contemporary cinema. Additionally, the spotlight on Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s "Cloud" underscores the podcast’s commitment to highlighting visionary directors shaping the film industry today.

Note: Advertisements, introductions, and other non-content segments have been excluded to maintain focus on the substantive discussions.

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Transcript320 lines

[00:00]
Sean Fennessy
This episode of the Big Picture is presented by Starbucks. We are big Starbucks Frappuccino fans over here. So when we heard about the new Strato Frappuccino blended beverage, we had to try it. It's a crave worthy iced blended beverage topped with cold foam, making for delicious layers of flavor.
[00:15]
Amanda Dobbins
I love how Starbucks leans into the seasons, especially summer. From vibrant refreshers to cold blended beverages, there's always something exciting to sip on.
[00:24]
Sean Fennessy
Available now for a limited time only, your Strato Frappuccino blended beverage is ready, Starbucks. I'm Sean Fennessy.
[00:41]
Amanda Dobbins
I'm Amanda Dobbins and this is the.
[00:42]
Sean Fennessy
Big Picture, a conversation show about Eddington. Adam Neyman joins us today to break down Ari Aster's fourth feature film. It's a powder keg that we're gonna try to defuse as well as shine a light on Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a Japanese master who's hilariously bleak. New film Cloud finally opens in the US this week. Later in this episode, Ari Aster is back on the show. This is his fifth time on the podcast for his fourth feature film. He's come by for every movie. He is, I think, one of the signature filmmakers of the run of this podcast.
[01:11]
Amanda Dobbins
Can I ask you something about this interview?
[01:13]
Sean Fennessy
Certainly.
[01:14]
Amanda Dobbins
You were recording it when news broke that Aaron Sorkin would be remaking the Social Network or making part two. About Jan6. Did you ask Ari about this life during your interview?
[01:27]
Sean Fennessy
No, I turn notifications off when I'm conducting an interview.
[01:31]
Amanda Dobbins
You were. I knew that you were unable to respond to my hysterical text messages because you were with Ari Aster. But also it's a little Eddington coded that news.
[01:40]
Sean Fennessy
It certainly is. We talked about things that informed the decision maybe to enact Jan6 and also to enact a film about it. Ari, of course, one of my favorite guests on the show, somebody I've got to know a little bit over the years and I always learn something about what he's trying to do. After the interview, I mentioned him. Like I try to ask semi dumb questions so that you can elucidate what you were actually thinking. And he was like, no, no dumb questions. But he was, he was lying to me. I was, I was asking dumb questions. So hopefully people will flow with that. I hope you will flow with it. Before we get into this, this big new divisive movie this week, we have a little bit of news. So one, the trailer for after the Hunt, the new Luca Guadagnino movie hit this week.
[02:21]
Amanda Dobbins
Seen it.
[02:22]
Sean Fennessy
We had seen it in April and we were excited about the movie. We talked about the movie, we bid.
[02:26]
Amanda Dobbins
It up pretty high.
[02:27]
Sean Fennessy
Acquired the film in an auction. So this movie comes out October 10th and then it goes wide on the 17th.
[02:35]
Amanda Dobbins
Okay.
[02:36]
Sean Fennessy
It's a campus sexual assault slash cancel culture drama, seemingly. Is this a commercial enterprise?
[02:47]
Amanda Dobbins
It does star Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield and Iowa Dibbery. So three people who have their fans have their fan bases.
[02:57]
Sean Fennessy
They do.
[02:57]
Amanda Dobbins
Are they aligned? I'm not really sure. It's directed by Luca Guadagnino, who is commercial to me.
[03:03]
Sean Fennessy
Yes.
[03:03]
Amanda Dobbins
And Challengers was not. Not successful.
[03:07]
Sean Fennessy
I think it was a hit.
[03:07]
Amanda Dobbins
Yeah. So people are aware. It brought people into the tent. Welcome. Thank you so much. You know, I don't think it's going to beat Superman.
[03:17]
Sean Fennessy
No, certainly not. It is arriving in a very kind of busy and interesting first couple of weeks of October. We tend to get a lot of good movies to break down on this show. That means it's almost certainly going to be a fall festival premiere.
[03:29]
Amanda Dobbins
Yeah.
[03:30]
Sean Fennessy
Feels like Venice.
[03:31]
Amanda Dobbins
Sure does. Challengers was slated for the opening night of the Venice film festival in 2023 and then did not premiere because of the actor strike, because you couldn't get Zendaya there. But you know, Luca. Luca likes a. Likes some glitz, some glamour.
[03:48]
Sean Fennessy
He does.
[03:49]
Amanda Dobbins
And I think Julia Roberts on the red carpet in Venice is certainly. Let's. Let's put it this way. I'll be mad. I'll be mad if it's not there.
[03:57]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah.
[03:58]
Amanda Dobbins
And I think this. This and J. Kelly are the only ones where I would consider, like changing my flight, you know, to stay longer.
[04:06]
Sean Fennessy
To see those films.
[04:07]
Amanda Dobbins
Exactly.
[04:08]
Sean Fennessy
Well, interesting. So I would say next week on our Fantastic Four episode, we will know the slate of Venice films. We can break it down then. I think it's likely that this one will be at Venice and probably at Telluride too, if I had to guess. It feels like a good fit for that festival as well. A kind of talky drama about sensitive issues in our modern times. We did get some news about some Toronto International world premieres, which we can float to Adam when he pops on too, because he, of course, will be there because he lives in Toronto. But some movies that are world premiering there include Roofman, the Dirk Seine France movie that. Did you get it or you got it in the auction?
[04:43]
Amanda Dobbins
I think I did, yes. Because I stand with Kiki in all things.
[04:47]
Sean Fennessy
The Lost Bus, which is a new movie starring Matthew McConaughey, directed by Paul Greengrass, made by Apple, which is based in part, if it's not the Paradise Fires, it is the Los Angeles fires some years ago and a terrifying story of someone trying to escape that circumstance. Greengrass, I don't think has made a movie since News of the World. So it's been almost five years since he put a movie out.
[05:13]
Amanda Dobbins
That's a deep pandemic cut.
[05:14]
Sean Fennessy
It was, I think, a pretty good movie that is a little bit forgotten because of when it was released into the world. Now there's a movie called Rental Family. I made a proclamation, I think, during our auction episode about how Searchlight didn't have an Oscar contender. I neglected to mention Rental Family. That I think is actually Searchlight's big Oscar contender. It's directed by Hikari and it stars Brendan Fraser. And this has a apparent reportedly strong crowd pleaser y vibes maybe coming for that audience prize. We shall see. And then wake up dead man. The third Knives out film world premiere at tiff.
[05:44]
Amanda Dobbins
Glass Onion was also a TIFF premiere.
[05:45]
Sean Fennessy
It was Knives out is a very tiff coded series. And Hamnet, directed by Chloe Zhao, which I got in the auction, is going to have its Canadian premiere.
[05:56]
Amanda Dobbins
Right.
[05:58]
Sean Fennessy
So that means.
[05:59]
Amanda Dobbins
So if it were not at Telluride, they would say North American premiere. But because they have to specify it's definitely a Telluride. Do you think? I don't know whether it'll be Venice. It's. That seems like she's so deeply Telluride.
[06:15]
Sean Fennessy
Coated European tale though.
[06:17]
Amanda Dobbins
Sure. Well, not anymore.
[06:19]
Sean Fennessy
Yes.
[06:19]
Amanda Dobbins
You know Chloe.
[06:20]
Sean Fennessy
I've seen Chloe at Telluride before. I think it's likely to be a Telluride kind of a movie. So. So I think it'll be there. It'll clearly be a tiff as well. More TIFF stuff to come. We can get into that as we start talking more about the festival. Sort of like where each festival sits in the hierarchy and what kind of movies make sense there.
[06:40]
Adam Neyman
Now you can watch the hottest movies and series with Hulu on Disney. With Hulu, say yes, Chef to a new season of FX is the Bear. And don't miss Marvel Television's action packed new series Ironheart on Disney. All of these and more now streaming with Hulu on Disney with a bundle. Subscription terms apply. Visit disneyplus.comhulu for details.
[07:02]
Sean Fennessy
Speaking of Toronto, let's bring in our Canadian correspondent to talk about a deeply American movie. Adam Naiman is here. Hi, Adam.
[07:09]
Ari Aster
Hey, guys. How you doing?
[07:10]
Amanda Dobbins
We're wonderful. I'm glad to see you.
[07:13]
Ari Aster
I'm glad to see you too. I heard you Guys, I kept hearing the word Toronto. I was paying attention to something else, but I heard, like, Toronto five times while you guys were talking.
[07:20]
Sean Fennessy
It was your song.
[07:22]
Ari Aster
Yeah. We do have a film festival here, apparently.
[07:24]
Amanda Dobbins
You excited for Roofman?
[07:26]
Ari Aster
I can't wait. You know, there was Roofman, there was Pool Man. You know, a movie that. A movie that no one has forgotten.
[07:33]
Amanda Dobbins
Sure.
[07:33]
Ari Aster
Remember Pool Man?
[07:34]
Sean Fennessy
Sure, yeah.
[07:35]
Amanda Dobbins
Chris Pine with lots of facial hair.
[07:38]
Sean Fennessy
That didn't go well.
[07:40]
Ari Aster
You know, the period, Right. When all these festivals are kind of jockeying for premieres. Always very interesting when you're sort of someone here on the ground. I heard Sean say something like, tiff coated for knives out. I will just. Without saying anything, I'm like, that is exactly correct. So I heard you guys talking a little bit about Venice. I would like to see some Venice coded movies. I would like to not see some Netflix murder mysteries, but I'll probably see both because there's just so many movies at our festival.
[08:09]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah, well, I mean, you will be back for sure after Tiff concludes, which I'm excited for. We've got you here for. For some. Some thorny ones, some sticky wickets that I'm really excited to talk about. So. Eddington is the fourth film by Ari. As I mentioned, it stars Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O', Connell, Michael Ward, Clifton Collins Jr. It's shot for the first time in an Aster movie by Darius Kanji, one of the great living cinematographers. You may recall his work in movies such as Se7en. Our researcher here has suggested he may be the best living director of photography who has not won an Academy Award. An interesting idea we can explore in this episode. Music by Daniel Pemberton and Bobby Krillick. This is an A24 movie. The story is as follows. During the COVID 19 pandemic, roughly May 2020, a standoff between a small town sheriff and mayor sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico. Amanda, I'll start with you. What did you think of the movie Eddington?
[09:08]
Amanda Dobbins
Well, you mentioned that this is a divisive movie and it premiered at Cannes to honestly, just like, not very nice reviews. But I don't wanna speak for everyone. I don't know if this podcast is gonna be that divisive. I am pro. I don't know if I get it, but I think that I, quote, get it. And this is definitely the funniest movie that I have seen in 2025. And the way that it uses humor Says a lot about, I think, Ari Aster's worldview and my worldview and the state of the world that we're in. But I think, to me, it's very effective.
[09:49]
Sean Fennessy
Adam, what about you? You've had an interesting relationship to Ari's.
[09:53]
Ari Aster
Filmography over the years, in that I've had mixed feelings. You've had mixed, mixed feelings. But I also think the films, by their nature, are kind of self divided. You know, whether people like to divide them along the lines of, you know, are they funny or are they insincere, or is he mean spirited or is this sort of the subject. And I'm always impressed formally, and I'm always left a little bit, again, mixed feelings. I like this one. And one of the reasons I like it actually is because it's very much an Ari Aster movie. People talked about it as a kind of a detour. You know, he's moving away from horror, he's taking on reality. It's. It's social commentary to its very core. This is about the same thing as other movies are about, which doesn't mean it's not a social media movie or a Covid movie, but I mean, it's a movie about, you know, like, family and the anxiety of inheritance and things that people take from their parents. I said in the piece I did for Ringer, you could call it hereditary. And it's not like a joke. I think that's pretty deeply sort of encoded in it. I also think we have a tendency now, or there's a tendency in film culture for filmmakers to show their influences or tweet syllabuses of movies that they think are in their movie. And I think that with Ari Aster.
[11:05]
Sean Fennessy
Leave that to me. That's my job, Adam.
[11:08]
Ari Aster
Well, you didn't. You didn't make the movie or provide the syllabus. Filmmaker did that. But this idea of kind of showing your work and that comes from an honest place because I think these are cinephilic filmmakers. They want to place themselves in a tradition. I really like Ari Aster's taste because it's closer to my own, close to my own. And when I've talked to him about certain filmmakers in depth, we have a lot of the same feelings. That's different than how a filmmaker synthesizes and like sublimate those influences. They. This is the movie where I hear his own voice the most, not for the first time, but I think he kind of comes through loud and clear here. And even though the influences are worth talking about, whether it's the Cohen's or John Ford or John Sales. There's kind of less noise, if that makes sense. And I think that not being a horror movie is kind of what. What helps that come through. Clearly. It's like you're dealing with a different genre framework and I think the filmmaker comes through pretty, pretty clear.
[12:00]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah. I am starting to think that this is my favorite of his four films, or at least I feel it's his most assured. I think it will be his least, maybe his second least satisfactory for general audiences. Beau Is Afraid was not widely seen and many people did not enjoy the experience of watching that movie. It's interesting how you're saying that this is. It feels like an expression of himself because it also feels like the first movie he's ever made that is not just about a personal worldview, but as representing it's an us and not a me movie. And it's hard to make an US movie. Whether or not he's actually representing every point of view, I think that's obviously impossible. But it's a movie that seems more interested in problems at large instead of problems of the self. Like, I find the first three movies are very psychological, internal movies. This movie has that. Yeah, we do get Joe Cross, the sheriff character played by Joaquin Phoenixes internal struggles on his face.
[12:59]
Amanda Dobbins
And he's a classic Aster character in a lot of ways, which is someone who is beaten down by the circumstances and the world around them. And then kind of driven. Spoiler alert. Insane.
[13:13]
Sean Fennessy
Quite insane. Yes.
[13:14]
Adam Neyman
Or.
[13:14]
Amanda Dobbins
Or maybe the insanity is revealed, you know, like how much of that is. The Joe Cross character is interesting and how he's positioned in the movie is purposeful and interesting and we can talk about it. But yeah, I agree, there are. There are more people in the frame, I guess.
[13:30]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah, it's a tableau. It's not a singularly focused movie. It's. It's meant to be representative of this entire town. And this entire town is obviously representative of the American experience.
[13:40]
Ari Aster
Well, I want to give a shout out to a really great programmer and a critic and a friend, Adam Piron, who wrote something about this film from Ken, where he. I mean, his piece speaks for itself. But he's like Aster's kind of from New Mexico. Not kind of. He is. And Adam knows something of the place too. And it's like when you deal with this kind of cartoony and it is kind of like an editorial cartoon of a movie. It is stylized and it's cartoonified in places. But he says that none of that should undermine that. This is a well observed film. This is not an opportunistic movie where he's like, well this is the American Midwest or the mid South. And so I can kind of do rednecks or I can do misguided liberals. Like what if the local Black Lives Matter chapter, you know, is all white people? Like that's where some of the real antipathy toward the movie it can came from was the idea that this is somehow opportunistic. That cause Aster has a blank check, he's now like you know, taking cheap shots. This is where he's from. Or he spent a lot of time there. And Adam Piran wrote about how for him and his experience of that place and the way that, let's say different subgroups interact, different racial enclaves, different levels of class, different kinds of conservatism. He said he thought it told no lies, you know, which doesn't mean that it's necessarily a realistic movie. But I think it drills down to some pretty realistic things. Particularly the way that the Phoenix character and his campaign, which is supposed to be this idea of punching up against these kind of mask mandates, this like sparmy virtue signaling guy. It doesn't come from a bad faith place at first. Right. But as soon as. What's one of the lines in the movie I really like where someone's like, this isn't denial, it's denial of denial where someone sort of says at one point like I am listening to you, shut up. You know that it's like it's not enough to sort of just have your viewpoint. Your viewpoint is dependent on the complete denial and also just the complete vilification of all other viewpoints. And the idea that Joe Cross might be coming from like a kind of okay place when he starts this. The movie plays havoc with that idea, I think. So I don't find them to be cheap shots. I find it to be sociologically pretty smart. Even if it is in a cartoon register.
[15:47]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah. When we talked, he mentioned not only that he's from New Mexico, but that he went back to New Mexico and interviewed sheriffs and interviewed townspeople in communities like Eddington and interviewed folks at the Pueblos there like that he just talked to people about how they were feeling and how they felt during this period of time. Which this is obviously not an act of journalism. It's a hugely heightened genre movie.
[16:08]
Amanda Dobbins
Right.
[16:08]
Sean Fennessy
But the idea that it's like dishonest or opportunistic, I find. I find that to be a strange accusation.
[16:14]
Amanda Dobbins
I mean it's it is provocative.
[16:16]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah.
[16:16]
Amanda Dobbins
And it's also certainly bleak. Like it's. It's not like he go when and did all of these interviews to produce like an empathetic portrait, although portrait of a community going through change and like, you know, our. Our community makes us stronger or whatever. Like this. It's hell. Like he uses all of that to build, as you said, like a very heightened, nightmarish take on the world that we are currently living in. But just because it's uncomfortable and unflattering doesn't mean that it's, like, unearned.
[16:52]
Sean Fennessy
I agree. And I think it's an interesting. There's a structural decision here that even though it's based in a real world, it's very much about a time in which a lot of life was lived through screens. Like the relationship between the screens in the movie and the idea of watching a movie on a screen is this very snake eating its tail idea. So it's like, how comfortable are we with watching what's happening in the world? Recalls how uncomfortable it was to be watching the world unfold during 2020. It's a very sophisticated idea that he's kind of baked into the movie. I do understand why it makes people unhappy to be back in this time. I don't understand the criticism that it's too soon to go back to this time. That doesn't. I'm not sure that it's ever too soon to, like, try to portray a genuine feeling. And I think that this is a movie born of really genuine feelings.
[17:41]
Ari Aster
Well, you try and talk about it diplomatically, but also there's not a lot of diplomacy when it comes to Aster. Like, people aren't normal about his movies. And there's an interesting conversation about why, which is because it seems like from the very beginning he's had a lot of hype. It's partially the distributor that he works for, which a couple of people have heard of and have opinions about. And the kind of acclaim his movies have gotten. And the feeling that this is like a young filmmaker who just kind of came and like, makes movies with impunity. Right. And that the industry has bent to accommodate directors like this. So for people who consider themselves really deep core horror fans or filmmakers who see other filmmakers getting less light on them, like, they find this annoying. And then they also sort of think, well, there's like a bit of a flop sweat here. It's like, well, you. You're this famous name filmmaker, so now you have to get political to kind of feel like you've Earned it. I just sort of re reiterate that for me, where this movie started coming together. I mean, I enjoyed it the whole time and in a way it is pleasurable. It's a very nasty kind of pleasure. You know, he's always been good at that and he's got really real showman instincts. But I just started. It came together for me where I thought this is just the kind of movie he makes. The things that are uncomfortable about it again, about these, like the parental relationship or the step parental relationship. Like, I love that Phoenix's character, you know, it's the pandemic. So as a plot point, his mother in law is living with them, played by Deirdre o', Connell, him and his wife Emma Stone. She's like doing like Pizzagate printouts and leaving them on the table. But he also has to eat breakfast under this picture of his father in law who used to be a sheriff. And it's like a shrine to this guy who was cut down sort of prematurely. And he's googling YouTube videos on how to like ask your partner if you want to have a kid. And none of that is culture war stuff or memes. It's like a very uncomfortable family unit that you see as a source of reality vulnerability and that, that's like where the brain worms start to start to sort of come in. Because people are living with trauma and bad stuff in their past and everything they read about protests and Covid becomes like an outlet for them to channel that stuff. I don't find that to be cheap, shoddy social commentary at all. It's smart, even if it's played for laughs. It's, it's. It's intelligent.
[19:52]
Sean Fennessy
It's also just so consistent with what all of his other movies are about, which is just like buried histories inside of families. And then what manifests out of those buried histories. It's funny. I don't think I noticed this the first time, but I'm fairly certain that the voice that you hear delivering the kind of numerology podcast when Joe Cross returns enters his home for the first time in the film is Ari's voice, you know, where he's sort of like explaining that on the 56th, it's the 56th birthday of Tom Hanks, who is the first celebrity to contract Covid. And then 56 is the number when you dissect it. And this idea of like questing for answers inside of illusory ideas because everything is so confusing and frustrating all the time, especially if you have unmanaged or unlocated pain in your life, which is kind of what all of these characters are experiencing, a version of that.
[20:39]
Amanda Dobbins
They're all. They all have something in their real lives that they cannot deal with, related to their family. And then they explore some sort of nether world or other, you know, social structure that entraps and ultimately, like, screws them up even further. But, like, to a character, to a movie, this one just happens to be the Internet during 2020.
[21:03]
Ari Aster
Well, he. And he does such wonderful things visually with that.
[21:05]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah.
[21:06]
Ari Aster
Like, I think it's when Joe is recording one of his videos. I think it's where he announces his mayoral campaign. He uses the iPhone by, like, isolating the iPhone in the middle of the frame, which is already a narrow aspect ratio. And there's just all this empty space of. I think it's his dashboard or something. That's just like, here is a guy in his kind of little echo chamber. And then you cut to his wife watching the announcement, and she's. Emma Stone is represented in this second shaft that's kind of right next to his, visually, a screen and a screen, and then all the negative space on either side of them. I mean, no one communicates. And you almost feel like it's a cliche when you say that. But he's so smart about showing that tension between too much communication and absolutely no exchange. Because it's also funny at the beginning of the film where people say, there's no Covid in Eddington. And, like, they're probably right, because geographically, it is so isolated, but it's also just the middle of America because of the Internet. So you start seeing the George Floyd protests going on in the background, which is very loaded material for any filmmaker to deal with, for a white filmmaker to deal with. You see the protests going on. And what I took from that is just this idea that something's happening somewhere else. It's connected. It's like, well, this needs to happen here now, too, or, this is happening here now, too. We actually don't have distance or difference from the rest of the country. We are the middle of America. And how that empowers people to act or compels people to act. And the way that that spirals is.
[22:30]
Sean Fennessy
Again, smart, I think, also when you keep showing these moments of panic in our society, that always reveals, like, something underneath the surface of how people. About the way that people really are. So in this case, you mentioned the idea of genre, Adam. This movie has multiple genres. It's pitched as a western, as a modern Western, where it seems like the loyal and noble sheriff would be the hero, would be the white hat, and the wealth backed politician would be the villain who's kind of controlling the town. But then within five minutes he's kind of completely subverted that. And it's unclear if anyone here is really the significant figure. And something, especially seeing this movie a second time, that really jumped out to me as critical to understanding the story and understanding why I think this is not an opportunistic movie at all, is the way that both of those characters engage with Lodge, who is this homeless man who is clearly mentally unwell in some way. He's the first character we see in the movie, the first character we hear from. He is sort of like rambling and kind of coming apart throughout the film. We very rarely can logically understand what he's trying to say. But he is causing a disturbance at the bar that it seems like Ted Garcia owns where he's conducting a city council meeting at the height of COVID And they call Joe Cross, the sheriff, to come handle this disturbance after he's had an encounter with the Pueblo police officers. And the way that both men talk about and engage with this character, Lodge kind of unlocked the movie for me in a big way. He also becomes a kind of deus ex machina figure in the story in terms of what happens to Lodge. But no one is listening to him, no one is actually trying to help him. Mayor Ted Garcia, the Pedro Pascal character, is basically saying that this guy needs to be detained, that he's aggressive and there's something wrong with him, which is just an obvious code for we don't know how to deal with the homeless situation, the unhoused problem in our community. And we just want to just scuttle these people away so we don't have to deal with it. And Joe Cross's response to this issue is just to physically engage him and drag him to the ground to try to get him to exit the bar. This is fascinating in part because of what happens to Joe Cross because he does this. I won't spoil it yet, but we can get into spoilers shortly. And it just reveals that both of these characters, who are both men of power in this community, just have no empathy whatsoever for the experience. That doesn't mean that there like is a better solution to the problem that they were having. But the way that they talked about the issue, in particular the way that that scene is written, two men between glass trying to solve a problem, even though they have personal animus between them, as I said, completely made me Understand what he was going for, which is like, we just lost the ability to feel for other people completely. And like, a big part of what happened during that isolation, when we were literally between glass, between each other, is we yelled at each other about our problems and we never got a sense of how to solve them. I don't think Ari's trying to solve any problems, but he's at least locating something that I think is at least like, on the verge of a personal sympathy. On the verge of. It would be a lot better if we were approaching these things less from a place of our own panic and frustration and more thinking about other people. I don't think the movie is attempting to be Pollyanna in any way, but that's right under the surface. And then the Lodge character becomes critically important to the story as time goes on. But he's someone who no one ever really genuinely attempts to interact with. That includes the young white protesters. That includes Joe Cross. That includes Ted Garcia. That includes anybody that he encounters in the community.
[26:01]
Amanda Dobbins
I mean, there is a scene where the. The young white protesters are kneeling to reenact the. The amount of time from the. The George Floyd video. And he is like, put in between them. And they are. They are, while like, showing some sort of protest or empathy for one American figure, are also like, screaming like, get away. I don't have any money to him. Like, right in front of their face, which, you know, is on the nose, but is also. And the large character shows up film in, like, in those moments. He's kind of always there. He and then Officer Jimenez, who are the one is. Is one of the p. P. BLO Investigators. He shows up at the movie and then he keeps showing up throughout the. The investigation and is just. Is kind of the only person who knows what's going on and. And. And is just often just standing there being like, what are you talking about? Like. But there. There he is a character who still is grounded to reality, in reality. And his relationship to Eddington as, you know, officer for the Pueblo. And then ultimately what happens to him is also. Well, you know, it's of a piece with the movie, but it's not like he doesn't save the day either. He doesn't solve things.
[27:24]
Sean Fennessy
No good deed on Unjustified.
[27:26]
Ari Aster
There's so much stuff about jurisdiction and territory and political authority versus community authority versus whose story is being told, whose land it is. This really links it to a lot of Westerns, like a revisionist Western like John Sayles, Lone Star, which isn't going to be the first thing that people mention with this movie. But I think it's a structural twin of Lone Star. Ari, if you're listening, I'm sure you watch Lone Star when you're making this movie, and it's a high compliment. Right. It's just sales comes at it from a kind of left liberal perspective. And I think Eddington's politics are considerably slipperier. And that's why I think, even though I don't think the movie is opportunistic, I think it uses bad faith kind of as a weapon. It's not just about the bad faith of that period. It's kind of weaponizing that bad faith because, again, we want to tread lightly with spoilers. And you're right, the Lodge character is extremely important as a symbol because I think the movie is instrumentalizing that character symbolically to show the way the community sees him or doesn't see him. But there's a structural trick hidden in this movie. I don't think it's that subtle. But if people miss it, the way that people might read this movie, I'm not saying maybe people who are going to write 2,000 words on it, but people who are going to tweet on it. There is a really bad faith way to misread this movie when it comes to the idea of protest and antifa and, you know, anti police. Anti police violence. I thought it's quite daring what he did with that, because that's the part of the film that is just begging for people to be mad instead of seeing what it's really actually saying.
[28:58]
Sean Fennessy
We do need to at some point discuss it in depth maybe a little bit later in this conversation, because it was the thing that I think both Amanda and I, the second time we went to go see it kind of popped and we're like, let's explore the intention. How much of this is a joke and not. And you know, I think you're right that obviously it has shades of a revisionist Western, but it's also very clearly a conspiracy thriller. It very quickly becomes a movie about paranoia and violence.
[29:21]
Ari Aster
He's a conspiracy filmmaker.
[29:23]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah.
[29:23]
Ari Aster
And they are always hiding in plain sight. Like people's issues with Midsommar is like, oh, come on, we know they're bad. It's like, yes, we do know they're bad. From the second you, you, you, you show up. I mean, in Hereditary, you see the cultists in the first scene at the, at the funeral. And in Beau is afraid, he kind of suspects his mother's messing with him. And it's like that's all that's happening. I mean in some ways the joke is that there's no conspiracy behind the conspiracy. It's just very obviously what it is. So you mentioned Lodge, the homeless guy at the beginning. He's the first shot of the movie walking along a street highway demarcation, which is very significant in terms of a movie about slipping over boundaries and sides. The second shot of the movie is like this AI data center or a power plant that's going to be put down possibly where they want to build this AI center. The whole movie is under the shadow of big tech. So it is not a surprise when that is the conspiracy that's in plain sight throughout the movie. And he's also not choosing his targets badly in terms of what the root of all of the these problems are. It's not just a social media movie, it's an AI movie. And if you pay attention to his interviews, that's what he seems to want to talk about because I think he knows how encoded that is into the world of Eddington. Even if it's not the obvious subject, this incredible reliance on AI and technology that I think is really the main, one of the main subjects here.
[30:45]
Sean Fennessy
It's amazing. You said this is the funniest movie of the year. And that's the other thing that is fascinating about it is that it is a true blue black comedy. I mean there are many laugh out loud moments. Some of that laughing is from absurdity at the absolute insanity on screen or the. There's a lot of self owning, you know, people are constantly saying things in this movie that are like what you know, and that includes the people that you would perceive to be like good guys. And there are really bad, very few good guys in this movie. But it is, it does have that hint of like I felt a little bit of like Albert Brooks and even a little bit of like Larry David. There's a kind of cringing quality to hearing, you know the. I think one of the reasons why this movie has pissed a lot of people off is because there's a lot of time spent on well meaning young protesters and kind of what they. What happened to a certain class of young especially white kid during this time and the way that they're. But the funniest moment in the movie to me by far is when the young white kid, I believe his name is his name Michael or Brian? Brian.
[31:53]
Amanda Dobbins
Brian.
[31:53]
Sean Fennessy
We'll come back to Brian Brian is sitting at his dinner table and it's like a, it's a smash cut.
[31:57]
Ari Aster
Shot.
[31:58]
Sean Fennessy
It's like, we haven't spent any time in this kid's home. We don't know anything about it. We smash cut to him lecturing his own parents about his whiteness and how his whiteness needs to be dimmed and stepped down, and we need to eliminate it from our culture. And there's a long beat, and his dad says, what the fuck are you talking about? Are you fucking R word? You're white. And when he delivers this, it's in a dining room and behind him is an artillery rack full of guns. And it's like. It is a very broad comic move. Like, it's not subtle. It's. It's, you know, ridiculous. But everything that is happening in this community at that time, and frankly, in our world at that time, yeah, seemed kind of ridiculous. And its willingness to kind of poke fun at it while also, I think trying to reveal, like, a genuine pain and anxiety is an amazing magic Crick. Like, not a lot of filmmakers can kind of balance those tones. And I know for some people, they. They'll disagree that the tone doesn't quite hit. But I laughed a lot, Especially the first time I watched it. I was laughing a lot.
[32:54]
Amanda Dobbins
Yeah, I think I was laughing more. I thought it was genuinely funny, but it was being funny in terms of what it reveals or locates about very recent history that we all lived through and were confused and addled like the people in this movie in our own ways at the time. I mean, I hope not fully like anyone in this movie, but. So when you were talking about how there are some complaints about how it's.
[33:22]
Sean Fennessy
This is.
[33:22]
Amanda Dobbins
It's too soon, and do we really want to Watch Covid or 2020 or any of this stuff? I honestly felt a little bit that way. When I heard the logline of this movie announced, I was like, I don't really want to live through Covid again, I'm good. But I found this, if not cathartic, then at least revealing in terms of, like, the humor is. And the bleakness of the humor. And the humor, basically, as thesis statement of this movie, is what got me along on the train ride of being like, okay, I accept. And the way you're looking through this, because it was, in addition to being tragic and horrific, completely absurd. You know, it was just an absolute horror movie of a time that we lived in, not in the traditional formal jump, scare sense, but in the vibes. And, you know, in that sense, to me, that's a funny movie, but to me, a horror movie as well.
[34:20]
Ari Aster
Well, talk about Moving goalposts. When we talk about filmmakers, right? There's a lot of discourse a couple of years ago prompted by Paul Schrader, where he's like, I don't like phones in movies and young filmmakers don't want to make movies about the present, which is not wrong. And we've talked even on this podcast about how sometimes the best, brightest, most lavishly subsidized American filmmakers have a thing for period pieces. This is all under the shadow of Tarantino and revisionist nostalgia and all. So here's a filmmaker who's doing two of these things. He is dealing with the present a couple of years removed. And again, the issue of AI or, I don't know, the issue of incredible paranoia about elite pedophilia rings. Good thing. That's not important at the moment. You know, certainly that's old news in terms of Eddington, but. So he's dealing with the present tense and he is finding a visually novel way to use social media and texting and personal technology in a way that social media serves rather than stymies the narrative. Is it inherently great that he's doing these things? No. And if it doesn't work for you, then that's fine. But I say, here's a youngish filmmaker dealing with the present. Here's a youngish filmmaker who's using social media kind of as texture and as subject. So then when I just see the reflexive kind of, yeah, you know, I remember four years ago too, I'm like, yeah, well, that's not a film review. You know, there can be a negative review to be written of this movie or an ambivalent one. In fact, I think that give it the kind of filmmaker Aster is. If people aren't ambivalent, he's kind of doing something wrong. This is not a crowd pleasing filmmaker. That's kind of to his benefit. There's a lot of filmmakers who can make stuff that make people feel nice. And that kindness is the new punk or whatever nonsense. Like, you know, what are you referring to? Nothing, Nothing. Not referring to anything.
[36:03]
Sean Fennessy
Kindness, not punk, Adam.
[36:05]
Ari Aster
Certainly not that completely non cynical, non opportunistic filmmaker and movie. But in terms of, in terms of Eddington, of course it's going to get mixed responses. If it didn't, it wouldn't work. But I do think that when people get mad at this idea that filmmakers are fleeing from the present and then someone actually tries to deal with it, they're like, well, but not that way.
[36:28]
Sean Fennessy
It's a very good point. I mean, dealing with the present has created some of the best movies of all time. In fact, it's actually often fascinating. Not always successful, but fascinating when a filmmaker tries to represent something in a recent past. Like all the President's Men was made less than five years after the events of Watergate. You know, the Big Short, Margin Call, Those films were within five or six years of the financial crisis. Apocalypse now was made basically concurrent to Vietnam.
[36:52]
Amanda Dobbins
One of these is not like the other. With all respect to Margin Call, which I love, but.
[36:55]
Sean Fennessy
No, but I mean, these are all, like, relevant films in the last 50 years. You know, obviously Apocalypse now and all the President's Men are forever movies. But Margin Call is a good movie. You know, the Big Short is a good movie, or at least an interesting film to look at. So that alone, for that to be disqualifying, I find absurd. Whether or not it's successful is a completely different question. You know, the other unusual and interesting choice in this movie is the way that Aster uses stardom, which is not really like a tool that he has applied before to portraying some of these archetypes of angst in our culture. I think a lot of people will walk away from this movie and say, like, there was not enough Emma Stone. I wanted more of this because the movie's being sold on this kind of rogues gallery cast where Joaquin is back after his collaboration with Beau. But Pedro Pascal, who is among the biggest names in Hollywood this summer. Stone and Austin Butler. Austin Butler, especially a rising young star whose stardom, I think is expertly deployed in this movie. He's not in very much of this movie, but his kind of like locked gaze, you know, slithery charm, is weaponized so smartly. And Emma Stone, who often is playing these deeply charismatic and empathetic people, is really like a woman in crisis in this movie. A very, like, Bergman esque female character. And that's gonna, like, upset people, you know, that's. They're gonna feel like they're being poked a little bit or they're purposefully being, like, shown a piece of steak and then throwing it in the garbage. And maybe that is like pure provocation. But I thought it was just a smart sort of strategic use of certain actors.
[38:43]
Amanda Dobbins
Can we talk about Joaquin in that context for a minute? Because I. The second time I saw it, I was going back and forth between, is this using Joaquin? And, I mean, he's. He's a great actor, but is it using his innate movie star appeal, like, smartly? Because you're supposed to be drawn to Joe Cross. Despite literally everything in this whole movie, or is it working against what's going on here? Because Joaquin is Joaquin. I am on record as finding Joaquin magnetic, magnetic, even in the Joker. But. And I, you know, I think it's smart. I he Joaquin makes more sense to me as Beau, and Beau is afraid. And I think that is maybe. And that is more of like, a character study of a movie. And I think. I guess I expect, like, you know, loser Mama's Boys from Ari Aster at this point. So it's not that I think he's miscasting this. I just. I realized that I spent a lot of time thinking about, like, this is Joaquin Phoenix playing Joe Cross, and how is he playing him and the choices that he's making. And I don't know whether that is intentional or whether that is just, you know, the hazard of working with movies.
[40:00]
Sean Fennessy
I thought you wrote very smartly about this. What do you think, Adam?
[40:04]
Ari Aster
I think Phoenix, and I don't know if it's a byproduct of working with one or two or three filmmakers, but it's like DiCaprio and Phoenix. They're generationally kind of equivalent. Daniel Day Lewis is older than those people, and I'm not just saying that, you know, it goes through the gateway of a Tarantino or an Anderson or Scorsese. But this is kind of how film culture works in America now. Phoenix can never just show up in a movie. He could never do to die for again. And I don't just mean because he's too big a name. There's all kinds of big stars who are able to do supporting parts. He is like an actor as event. He's the whole movie. Daniel Day Lewis will never show up in a movie as a guy who's meeting the main character at Starbucks, right? Like, he's too spectacular. All you can do with him now is play Abraham Lincoln, and then he has to retire, you know, and DiCaprio is like that, too. So Phoenix is a guy where the whole movie has to be an event. Her or the master or Joker. I like in this film how it uses that, which is he's kind of the whole movie, and the movie is filtered through him, and there's not a ton there. He's paralyzed by indecision and anxiety. He doesn't have a strong force of personality. There is never a point where the movie decides Joe Cross is a commanding orator or where he really has, like, people in the palm of his hand. He tries and fails. It's hard. We don't want to keep, like, tiptoeing around spoilers, but let's just say there is a point in the movie that is designed with all of Aster's showmanship in mind to break faith with the character of Joe Cross. But you are still stuck with him as the protagonist. And Phoenix's performance, to me, really locks in. Once you realize that that is the.
[41:37]
Sean Fennessy
Deal, we don't have to talk around. Let's spoil the movie because there's a lot of events in the movie that I don't think people who haven't seen it won't want to hear. We've given it a good 40 minutes here.
[41:47]
Ari Aster
I also want to talk about Stone, but we can talk about her later. But we'll talk about this.
[41:52]
Sean Fennessy
What is the event for you that unlocks Joe Cross?
[41:57]
Ari Aster
Well, it's two moments, and you kind of alluded to it earlier too, so I think we're in deep spoiler territory now. So you talk about Lodge, the unhoused character who at the beginning of the movie is already a proposal. You know, he's already being filmed with cell phones at the beginning to sort of show that Phoenix is doing his job. And then that backfires. When you talked about self owning, there's a lot of self owning through, like, going on video. And then it's like, actually, that's not how people see this at all.
[42:21]
Sean Fennessy
Who can relate to that?
[42:22]
Adam Neyman
Yes.
[42:23]
Sean Fennessy
Self ownage by going to video. Sheesh.
[42:25]
Ari Aster
I mean, I mean, back to back, Joe basically kills the weakest person in this community and then the strongest one. And he does. So I think the first time it is more impulsive, which has to do with the weapon he uses and the proximity and the distance. And the second time, deeply calculated, you know, at a distance, with a sniper rifle, he takes down the mayor or the incumbent, Ted Garcia, and then waits long enough to take to shoot the mayor's son. Which is the moment at which I'm like, oh, this is hugely what this movie is about. This is clearly impotent character and he's worried he's not going to have a kid, so might as well kill this teenage boy, you know, two. Which I think is really awful. After Joe does those two things, you are with him. And it's a cliche to say that that's Hitchcocky and like, it's not just a guilty protagonist is inherently Hitchcocky. And it's like, oh, there's no release valve. Now, this character, whatever we thought of his motives or whatever we thought of his reasons for doing this, they have now manifested in like Cold Blooded Murder. And the tension in the movie now is, I guess he's going to cover it up. And yet still. And maybe you guys want to talk about it, we still have an extent to which Joe is, if not sympathetic, at the mercy of larger forces, which is where the second half of the movie is really fascinating to me.
[43:40]
Sean Fennessy
I think that's the right read of the movie, which is that the movie insists on putting you in the driver's seat with a deeply struggling person who has no idea how to communicate that. And his breaking point is tremendously violent, but it doesn't leave him. It does not escape to a more sympathetic space. It keeps you close to him. And even at the end of the movie, we watch him go through a tremendously violent trauma, and then the movie doesn't end. We see him in the aftermath of the tremendously violent trauma. And the movie is constantly provoking you to say, do you have any empathy for this experience or any sympathy for this experience through these characters? Because all of these things that this guy has done, which are all manifested of being unable to communicate and basically live freely in the world in the way that he wants to lead him to the worst things in the world. And yet, even if he had expressed himself as clearly and as cleanly as he wanted to, even if he was able to have a kid with his wife, even if his wife had not experienced tremendous trauma which then kind of ruined her life, if none of those things happened, you still might be at the whims of more powerful forces that are literally flying above you and enacting great violence and struggles. And that is where the movie gets into a very interesting question of is this movie nihilistic? Is this movie a warning? Is it satire? Is it verite? It starts to kind of blur up these kind of these words that we lean on, on the show to kind of define what we think something is. And part of the reason why I think it's such a special movie is it doesn't force you to. It doesn't demand that you understand exactly what it's saying. It's more saying that there is chaos in this life. We are subject to the forces of chaos all the time. We talked about melancholia in 25 for 25. Kind of a similar vibe to me. Very different kinds of movies.
[45:31]
Amanda Dobbins
Yeah, and. Well, also, like a very, very funny movie, just in the sense of everything is so fucked up that the only way to process it is to make jokes about it. Yes, but, like, really dark jokes, I think. Well, so there There are two plot points that I want to talk about here that you, that we've alluded to. Number one is of course Antifa. Antifa ex machina. And then number two is actually like the final, well the almost final, the second to last shot or series of shots in the movie which are not of Joe though he really, he gets an incredible send off in bed with two other people. But then after, after watching young Mr. Lincoln and cry. I mean it's. This movie's so sadistic but like in the right way. And then the second to last shot is a TikTok video on its side of the third most important character in the film, who is Brian, the aforementioned guy who's going to defeat his whiteness until he winds up in Florida as like you know, a MAGA kid with a new home.
[46:56]
Sean Fennessy
A re radicalized young Republican celebrating the.
[46:59]
Amanda Dobbins
First anniversary of the Eddington terrorist attacks. Because once again antifa showed up. Let's we gotta start with antifa though.
[47:09]
Sean Fennessy
Okay.
[47:09]
Amanda Dobbins
Because this is what I said to you when I went to see the movie. And we have been very positive about this movie. I really like this movie. It is two and a half hours long and it does about two hours in find itself to like a very long like raid and violent standoff between Joe Cross and several antifa terrorists who have just flown in on their private jet. And just structurally I did find my mind wandering both times, which is just a little bit about pacing and how much you're trying to crowd in. But so then maybe to Adam's earlier point, maybe I missed the key that unlocks antifa as the great. As the piece that solves this puzzle. So I was hoping that you could go back for me on that one.
[48:08]
Ari Aster
Well, you said it yourself. Which is the private plane. Sure.
[48:10]
Amanda Dobbins
Okay.
[48:11]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah. They're crisis actors.
[48:13]
Ari Aster
They're crisis actors. And it's funny because we had last year in Alex Garland's Civil War, we had a reference to the Antifa massacre. And I just like to think Eddington is the sequel to that. But it puts it in quotes while poking you through the screen to be like not a thing.
[48:30]
Amanda Dobbins
Right, right.
[48:31]
Ari Aster
Where as Eddington becomes the center of this culture war. Because the joke is that first, the first half of the movie they're seeing America on their screens and then the second half of the movie everyone's screens are going to turn to tuned to Eddington. Right. That this becomes a place where these people are converging in a way. I mean critics jobs aren't to re edit movies ever. But I'M like, I would love the private jet bit taken out because I still think you could read what is going on. Just the level of, like, militarization and why they would be trying to take Joe out of the picture at that point and the spectacle of what they're doing and really force people to think through what's actually going on here.
[49:13]
Sean Fennessy
Well, we see. We first see it. When we see it, Joe is looking at his phone and he sees the footage of the. The antifa attack in Portland. And that because of even just the angle from which we see that video instantaneously, I was like, this is a crisis actor situation. I felt like I understood exactly what he was trying to do. And the private plane is a little bit gilding the lily, particularly the hand over the globe on the private plane. You know, that symbol that is on the tail of the plane, which is very funny. But it takes a movie that at times is playing things very straight. It's absurd feeling, but doesn't feel fantastical. And it's a majorly fantastical or seemingly fantastical element.
[49:56]
Ari Aster
That's Aster's cultists showing up.
[49:58]
Amanda Dobbins
Yes.
[49:59]
Ari Aster
You know, in Hereditary, it's naked old people in Midsommar, it's, you know, an ABBA cover band. And here it's, you know, these heavily militarized whatever. Which is where you do get that incredible. Cause, I mean, the end of the film becomes. And this is gonna be interesting when we talk about Cloud in a couple of minutes. It becomes like first person shooter aesthetics almost. With Phoenix is kind of back to the wall. And the way that it's filmed is interesting. He just keeps looking around him. It's sort of that idea.
[50:25]
Sean Fennessy
There's that moment right before the final moment of violence when the camera is spinning around and we're seeing his perspective. And then they get this kind of quasar light effect, you know, Steven Spielberg style, that is just like. To me, I was like, this is a magical experience of formal filmmaking. Like, very rarely do movies look and feel this good. The movie I cited to you, I know you'll appreciate this is. I was like, this is kind of in RoboCop territory, where you're just like, so immersed in an absurd world that you get. So it's hard for me as an older man to get excited by a sequence like that. But that was very, very special and unusual, but also meaningful to the story. I'm sorry to interrupt you.
[51:01]
Ari Aster
No, no, not at all. Because what he's doing is. It's a mix of first person shooter and this Deeply militarized, like, you know, Call of Duty mentality you kind of have in American life, which is kind of aspirational and kind of. But it's also a Western. I mean, it's a shootout on Main Street. And just in case you don't get it, he has just crashed through the ceiling and run through the sort of Native American History museum, which is hugely mobilized in the movie in terms of symbols of the American west and again, whose territory or town or legacy is kind of being fought over. I mean, he's staging the end of a Western and the end of an action movie and the end of a video game. And then, yeah, in that final coda, you have the thing that he is most terrified of, which is paralysis hereditary, is all about waking up into a body that's not yours. At the end of Midsommar, you get a his and hers version of that, both with Florence Pugh and what's his name, Jack Raynor, kind of stuck as a witness to what's happened to them. Beau is afraid, takes that and makes it horrible at the end because there's a whole audience kind of watching you. So that idea that all Joe can do is, like, watch TV and look at screenshots at the end of the movie, he's kind of where he started. It's just the physical paralysis has been literally. Amanda, I'm so glad you mentioned young Mr. Lincoln, because that's the thing that's going to bother some cinephiles so much, is they're going to feel that this is a bastardization of John Ford and that he's like stealing valor from John Ford to do this. I don't think that he's a 40 in filmmaker, but, I mean, that bit really hits. And I'm glad it was young Mr. Lincoln, not man who Shot Liberty Valance, because other movies have done balance. The young Mr. Lincoln thing is.
[52:39]
Sean Fennessy
Well, it's perfect because it's a. You know, that's a movie about decency and honesty in the face of the violent Hordes. And Deirdre OConnell's character, she's also wonderful in this movie, Emma Stone's mother's character. The idea that they are representing the same ideals is the kind of delusion that powers people through these stages of life, through these experiences. You know, that's a very neatly communicated idea if you've seen young Mr. Lincoln. And if you haven't, then maybe you should go watch it. It's really funny that Ari Aster keeps making these movies that demand this level of Interrogation. And that ultimately so many of them are about how like, it's so terrifying to be seen and to be understood. And then he like makes the movie and then millions of people see them and he keeps doing interviews and people keep asking him about all those feelings. Like he's in this kind of deathless cycle of self examination that just feels very dangerous. I applaud him for putting himself out there, but it just seems kind of crazy to me.
[53:38]
Ari Aster
Yeah, I mean, the horror. The horror of being perceived. I think that's true. And I think that what we haven't really touched on. And you know, you guys are an industry podcast as well, so it's. I wonder what you guys think about this. I wonder how this will do. Not in the echo chamber of social media or you kind of know what critics are going to give a good or bad reviews without putting too fine a point on it. Like, battle lines are drawn about this filmmaker, which I think is interesting. But I mean, Beau is afraid was. Was a talking point in some ways because it's like, oh, that's what a blank check movie looks like. You know, I feel like the check in this one is blanker. I mean, this has got to at least be comparable in terms of, you know, in. In terms of. Cause I haven't seen this movie promoted much. Like, I'm not trying to open a can of worms when I say this, but like, it's a hard movie to market and a hard movie to open wide. And I wonder how you guys think or how it's tracking and sort of how it's going to do. Because this is the kind of movie people say no one makes anymore. And then when people make them the talkie points where they don't make them anymore, well, someone just did. So, you know, how's it going to do?
[54:41]
Sean Fennessy
I don't. I don't think it's going to make a lot of money, if that's the question. I think it's obviously tracking for somewhere in the neighborhood of like $5 million this weekend, which is not great. His movies are fairly modest. They're bigger on the higher end for a mini studio, like a 24. But I think it's a hard movie to market and also an easy movie to market. The hard part is Covid, because there are a lot of people who just do not want to go back to that and think about that time. But you might have said the same thing about Vietnam. But then you see the images from Apocalypse now and you think, like, this is thrilling filmmaking and there is A lot of thrilling filmmaking and frankly violent filmmaking in this movie that is excitable for audiences. But a lot of it happens in ways that you cannot show or market before you see the movie and would give away, I think, significant aspects of the story. So it's a typical conundrum in like, how do you sell a movie that's really ultimately a thriller with huge western inflection, but then also try to appeal to the A24, like this is a movie about right now kind of energy that they want to have.
[55:49]
Ari Aster
What's the highest grossing A24 movie of all time? I think this is very significant to talking about Eddington. Civil War, that made the most Civil War came out a year ago, which is sort of a thriller and sort of a genre movie. It's an idea movie. It's about America's contested territory. It also has an antifa massacre in it. And not a movie that I would have thought would be a blockbuster. And it didn't make like, you know, Avatar money, but that's their biggest hit. And I really wonder what the real difference is between those movies. And I'm not going to use this as an excuse to say I know what the difference between these movies is, because as a critic, I definitely have my opinions. But I wouldn't have thought Civil War was a slam dunk either. But in a way, the war movie part of it, and the promise of some kind of heavy artillery and violence on the trailers, even for the A24 audience, which I don't think considers themselves to be, you know, hard. Right. It still got people into the theater. And with this one, I think the idea that it's somehow polarizing or both sidesing or God forbid, a left liberal satire, this is not boding hugely well in the. In the marketplace for it. I think that comparison is interesting because it's the same studio.
[56:58]
Amanda Dobbins
Yeah.
[56:58]
Ari Aster
And they're kind of similar movies.
[57:00]
Amanda Dobbins
Well, some of it. I do also think that that to a certain audience and it's a smaller audience, but Ari Aster is a brand name. And so I think on the one hand there are a lot of people who will also defend Beau is afraid who will go seek this out because it's Ari. And then there are people who saw Hereditary and have been mad ever since at every single Ari Aster movie because it's, you know, you're not chopping someone's head off halfway, even though sort of you are.
[57:31]
Sean Fennessy
There's head trauma in all four of his movies, and it is unmistakable.
[57:35]
Amanda Dobbins
But it's. But it is not their understanding of like a classic horror movie.
[57:40]
Sean Fennessy
He's using genre as a mode, as a tool. He's not like sitting deep in the screen, gem style, Sony programmer, horror movie style. I think. I think BO is a lot more impenetrable than this movie.
[57:54]
Amanda Dobbins
Agree.
[57:54]
Sean Fennessy
BO is 3 hours. It was stylistically really audacious animated sequence. This sort of like unreality of Beau's experience. This movie is way more grounded, way more approachable, and it does have this kind of bravura, third act, violent sequence. It does not have battle sequences. Civil War could put in its trailer a dozen army men shooting at a building, you know, and that appeals in a different way.
[58:18]
Amanda Dobbins
Once again, we live in hell, but in a different way.
[58:20]
Sean Fennessy
I mean, it's just something that people want at the movies. It's. And it is something that they've always wanted at the movies. Going all the way back to all quiet on the Western front. It's just something that people are. Is appealing to people. So to me, they are a little bit different. Civil War is a more expensive movie to make. I think they marketed that movie very well. There was also something inherently experiential about going to see Civil War Loud in imax. I believe that was the first time they secured the kind of like wide Imax experience for a 24. So there were some other things that were working in its favor. I think it's also a movie that played a little bit better overseas because it was about America and how stupid America could be. And that was appealing in some ways. And also, I don't think Civil War, both sides things per se, but there was an interpretable aspect of both sides ing this movie. Kind of no one's good. If you're far right and you go see this movie and you see what Joe Cross does, you're not gonna be like, yeah, great. You're gonna be like, why am I being indicted? And if you're far left and you see these young white protesters basically being lampooned, you're gonna be annoyed. You're gonna be mad. Far left critics of this movie don't like it.
[59:27]
Amanda Dobbins
Right. And then you're also asked for the first half, to Adam's point, to sort of to empathize with Joe Cross and for the second half to sit with him after he's done all of these things that, well, he's done. Like in. In the first half, he's asking questions and saying things that are not, like, appropriate according to, like, a leftist mindset. And. But you're like, oh, maybe like, maybe. Maybe he's not so wrong. And then. And then he, like, kills several people psychotically and covers it up, and you're like, oh, now I'm in a boat with this guy for. For, like, a very, very long time. And then crisis actors, like, named as antifa, show up.
[60:08]
Sean Fennessy
We forgot to mention the Ted Garcia campaign advertisement. And virtue signaling, which is another, like, incredible aspect of this movie that, again, like, I think, reveals a narcissism and an insincerity in a lot of the characters. And sometimes the most sincere characters in the movie are those with bad values. So we don't want to hear their values. But those who portend, you know, who tend to suggest good values communicate them in such a cringy and dishonest way that there's really no safe landing place for anybody's political, social feeling in the movie.
[60:43]
Amanda Dobbins
Speaking of insincerity, the Katy Perry firework needle drop. Once again, Ari Aster is the king of music pop songs to, you know, unlock everything. That's awesome.
[60:53]
Sean Fennessy
There's, like, a hundred things in this movie like that where I was like, that's funny. Like, that's a good idea.
[60:57]
Ari Aster
What I was going to say about Pascal is I think that in some ways, I'm going to try and frame this nicely. He's so overexposed at the moment. He's just so stretched. He's in so many things. And there's also so much, like, parasocial interest in him and Internet interest, which, by the way, I like. I tend to enjoy his interviews more than, like, literally any performances. But here, that overexposed quality works because it does suggest a guy who is kind of stretching himself thin. And I think, Sean, what you guys were both saying about the use of movie stars in this movie, it's very smart because using them in these small, little. These small, little blips, they retain a sense of mystery or ambiguity. So I just want to say about Emma Stone, you know, because she's also a producer on a lot of stuff recently, too, and she seemed to have cultivated this little corner of the sandbox with some weird kids. You know, she's worked with Ari Aster, Nathan Fielder on the Curse. That performance in the Curse, which is also set in New Mexico and which is hugely thematically side by side with Eddington. In fact, if I'm going to double bill it with anything made in the last couple of years, it's Eddington and the Curse. That performance in the Curse, one of the best things I've seen in years. That is a Tour de force of, like, misplaced charisma and narcissism. And this character who needs to be seen. And to see her completely invert that in this movie. Not just the lack of screen time, but someone who does not want to be looked at, someone who does not want to be heard, someone who does not want to be listened to for fear of what she might say if someone pays attention to her. And the way that the movie uses her. She's one of the first things we see in the movie. I mean, her picture is on his dash cam for the entire film. And again, bit of a spoiler. Formally, she's the last thing Jo sees and she's off in her own version of Midsommar. It's like he's turned the TV on. It's like, oh, cool, a cult where everyone's getting pregnant. She's used really well and it's a high compliment. She reminded me of Sissy Spacek and Carrie, except she doesn't get to go crazy. But it's like she was playing Carrie and her mother at the same time. Or between. Between her and Deirdre o'. Connell. There was a lot of Carrie in what, the two of them?
[63:00]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah, she's doing this equation for sure.
[63:02]
Ari Aster
Piper Lori in this equation. So again, Aster showing his influences, but, like, they're good influences. And I think the fact that Stone can sublimate that incredible charisma she has because she's one of the most electric movie stars on the planet to play a character who, like, you, barely recognize when she's there. There's actually an important plot point in this movie that hinges on her being misrecognized briefly for someone else. When he's in his house and he thinks he sees his wife and it's the mother in law.
[63:27]
Sean Fennessy
Like, classic Stone Tomorrow horror movie sequence.
[63:30]
Ari Aster
Yeah, classic. But for a movie star like her to make herself that indistinct is impressive. I think that when she's in the right role, she's amazing.
[63:39]
Sean Fennessy
As you know, she is my goat.
[63:40]
Amanda Dobbins
Yeah, she's truly great. She's great and she has cool taste and she's just doing cool stuff all.
[63:47]
Sean Fennessy
Of the time, using her power for good. A very rare, creative, hugely successful person just making really interesting art on a consistent basis.
[63:56]
Ari Aster
Awards.
[63:56]
Sean Fennessy
I don't think this movie's gonna win any awards. I think in a greater world it would at least be explored as a potentiality because there's very good performances in this movie. It looks beautiful. As I said, Kanji is amazing and Ari is what in theory we're asking for, right? Writer, director with strong vision making original movies. That's the whole ball game. This message is brought to you by Apple Pay. No matter where you're going this summer, odds are you'll need to pay for a few things like a rideshare, a souvenir or dinner at that spot on your bucket list. Instead of digging for your wallet every time, just use Apple Pay. It's accepted anywhere you see the contactless symbol and all it takes is a tap with iPhone or Apple Watch. The best part is you'll still earn the card rewards, points and cash back you love. Easy setup now, easier travels later with Apple Pay Terms Apply this episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. When you release a movie, the first thing you want to do is make sure people know about it. And even more importantly, you want to make sure that people who like the genre know it's out. Because horror fans are more likely to go see new horror movies. Disney fans will go see new Disney movies. Rom com fans will go see new rom com movies Targeting the right audience is key when it comes to marketing. If you're selling expensive new kitchen appliances, you probably want to sell to people who actually like to cook, not people who rely on food delivery services for every meal. And that's the tricky part. Making sure your message is gets to the right people. You have to use the right tools. If you're in B2B marketing, that means using LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has a network of over 130 million decision makers and the targeting tools to make sure you're connecting with the right ones. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority, skills or company revenue. So you can stop wasting your time and budget on the wrong people. LinkedIn will even give you a hundred dollar credit on your next campaign so you can try it yourself. Just go to LinkedIn.com thebigpicture that's LinkedIn.com thebigpicture Terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads. This episode is brought to you by Pretty Litter. Keeping your house clean when you've got a cat is no easy feat. But with Pretty Litter, you don't have to choose between a fresh house and a healthy cat. This litter is practically magic. It's low dust, controls odors and lasts up to a whole month. But the best part is it monitors your cat's health every time they use the box. Plus, Pretty Litter ships free right to your door. So no heavy bags to carry and no last minute pet store runs right now, save 20% on your first order and get a free cat toy at pretty litter.com bigpicture that's prettylitter.com bigpicture to save 20% on your first order AND get a free cat toy. Prettylitter.com bigpicture Pretty litter cannot detect every feline health issue or prevent or diagnose diseases. A diagnosis can only come from a licensed veterinarian. Terms and conditions apply. See site for details. Speaking of writer directors making original movies with strong visions, let's talk about Kiyoshi Kurosawa. So we did talk a bit about Chime last year at our mid period, which was a short film that Kurosawa kind of sort of released. I think I watched it sort of legally. Never got proper wide distribution here. He's been making movies for over 30 years.
[67:07]
Ari Aster
If sight and Sound does a list of the greatest NFTs ever made, I vote, I vote, I vote for Chan.
[67:13]
Sean Fennessy
I'm sure that list will grow longer and longer as time goes by.
[67:16]
Ari Aster
Longer and longer. Yeah.
[67:17]
Sean Fennessy
This new movie is called Cloud. It is his 27th movie. I will not claim I have seen more than five. I think I've seen five or six, maybe six of his movies. We talked about this a little bit off mic last time I saw you, Adam, and why don't you tell us why Kiyoshi Kurosawa matters to you and to the listeners of this show.
[67:36]
Ari Aster
Well, you know, I think we try and keep a lid on hyperbole over here at the Ringer. You know, we never, never say that things are.
[67:42]
Sean Fennessy
What do you suggest?
[67:44]
Ari Aster
No, I mean for me this is One of the 10 greatest living filmmakers, you know, and he's older than I think people think he is because he really came to international prominence almost in the second half of his career, I mean in the late 90s because of cure and Pulse, which are movies that I'm pretty sure through cr, Criterion Channel are somewhat familiar to the listenership of this show. This is a guy who made a lot of films, at least eight, nine, ten, a dozen films just pumping them out within the studio system. And you called, you used this phrase earlier for a different kind of movie, like kind of programmers, you know, like comedies. He made a couple of pink films, you know, genre pieces. A director working on assignment. And the short version is he just learned how to make movies very efficiently. Like I think he just imbibed and just ingested the process of working on a set and coming in under budget. And then you have this second half of his career where it just turns out Also, whether he writes his own scripts or not. But when he writes his own script, he's this visionary poet of light and shadow. And he is on par with anybody you want to put in that category of genre masters. I've spoken to him a couple of times, which have been among the great pleasures of my professional life, because I think he's a genius. He's the world's biggest John Carpenter fan. He was moved during the shooting of Cloud. He told me when there was a shot of two people walking and he's like, that was a bit like a shot in a John Carpenter movie. And I was very overwhelmed. Like, this is awesome. I mean, he loves John Carpenter. He loves David Cronenberg. He's spoken about Jacques Tourneur. That's the level we're talking about here. Because of what he does with his frames. He does not have to make a horror movie to make his frames scary. I know Ari is a Kurosawa fan. When he makes a horror movie and he wants to scare you, he's as good at it as anybody I have ever seen. But even when he shoots a domestic drama like Tokyo Sonata or a period piece like Daguerreotype, he has a way of putting space on screen where you are looking at the wall, you are looking at the window. You are having layers peeled away. People are opening doors, they're opening closets, they're peeling back curtains. And you feel like the frame could kind of reveal anything to you. That's the thing about Chime when I watched it last year, is you're looking at nothing and you're terrified, you know? So I think he's a brilliant filmmaker. And Cloud, which is being hailed as a return to form, which is silly because it's not like his form has ever abandoned him. This is the biggest release he's gotten for. In the States, I think, ever for a film with Sideshow, putting it out. I mean, I can talk more about it, but what did you guys think? I wanted to talk about Cloud. I wanted you guys to watch it. Or you're going to watch it anyway.
[70:19]
Sean Fennessy
You haven't seen it?
[70:20]
Amanda Dobbins
No, I haven't gotten to see. I'm going to. I'm going to see it this weekend. But.
[70:24]
Sean Fennessy
My joke to you was that this is Heat for Dumb Fucks, which I stand by. I think it's a perfect match in discussion with this movie because it is also a movie about life through screens and the consequences thereof. That is the whole idea of the movie. It's a movie about a young kind of Internet Reseller, counterfeiter type who is constantly building a business by identifying rare goods and reselling them at exorbitant rates. And this leads to him quitting his day job and moving out into the country with his girlfriend and building his business up and not quite realizing the way that his business will come back on him. And the movie starts out as this kind. To me, what felt like a very Kurosawa esque, unnerving thriller that even maybe I thought could have had some sort of supernatural turn at some point.
[71:24]
Ari Aster
Oh, totally.
[71:24]
Sean Fennessy
It feels like Pulse too, where you're. When you're watching Pulse, you're like, is this actually a horror movie through the first 10 minutes, or is it just a movie about paranoid people? And then it becomes like a very violent and pretty funny movie of like, it's like Three Stooges with guns at times. And I really liked it quite a bit. What did you think?
[71:44]
Ari Aster
Yeah, I shout out to. I wrote about this film for not, not, not for you guys, but for the New Republic. So my editor there, Lorraine Catamartori, was working through my piece. She pointed out that Retell, which is his screen name for this reselling business, I was writing about it like a kind of rodent name. She's like, that's also another word for honey badger, which is pretty funny given the way he conducts himself online. Like, this is a guy who's just proud of the fact that he has no ethics. He doesn't care what he's selling. He's happy to sort of raise and lower and screw with prices. He's like a middleman who's. Who's cutting out the other middlemen, you know, like, he's ruthless and he really deserves everything that's coming to him. But then the movie is also about, like, well, what would it look like if all the rage of the Internet kind of became literalized? And the kind of like group chats you have where you're like angry at someone together, you want to dock someone. Like, what if that just climbed out of the computer? And the result is it kind of looks like a Park Chan Wook movie that's even funnier. It's like those Park Chan Wook Lady Vengeance, Mr. Vengeance movies, but, like, torqued like 20% more towards being funny when there's. Because people just keep coming out of the woodwork to try and hunt this guy down. And it's hilarious.
[72:51]
Sean Fennessy
The guy in the mask is incredible.
[72:54]
Ari Aster
The guy in the mask is incredible. When you say it's a heat for dumb fucks, I mean it's also kind of like Fargo in Japan at one point, where it's just, you know, like, wandering around. Yeah, wandering around this kind of frozen forest. And then, you know, he keeps shifting the genre. He told me that he wanted this movie to have it. He, again, he's such a modest filmmaker. The ratio of mastery to modesty is, like. Often you talk to filmmakers, they know how good they are, you know, and you talk to Kyoshi Kurosawa, and he's like, that's interesting. I didn't know that about my own films. And whether that's sincere or not, it's very charming. He said he wanted this to have movie logic. He said something interesting. He said, americans are good at movie logic. Eddington's an example of that, too, where it's not just movie logic, but, like I said, the character succumbs to movie logic. He said, I want this to feel like it could happen because you're watching a movie. Like, realism is out the window. Which is why, even though things that happen in Cloud are ridiculous, I didn't doubt any of it. And that really takes on a pretty apocalyptic cast here. I want to be careful because I don't want to spoil the movie for Amanda. But, like, if people have seen some of the more apocalyptic Kurosawa movies like Charisma and Pulse, or even a movie like Bright Future, which is just about releasing jellyfish into the sewers, but you kind of watch it at the end and you're like, is the world to end now? Like, what? What is going on? He finds a way to lower this veil of suggestion over what's happening, where it's kind of not funny anymore by the end, or it's funny in a deeply bleak way. The last scenes of Eddington and Cloud talk to each other, I think, and huge shout out to the secondary character in Cloud. He's my favorite character in any movie this year. His, like, henchman who comes to work for him when he moves his business out to the country. Just this, like, local high school dropout who just, like, will happily kick the shit out of people for him and just do whatever he's told. And you're sort of like, yeah, you need those people, don't you? You know, if the worst people in the world have the loyalty of those kinds of people, there is no telling the level of damage that can sort of be done. Which is, I think, where Cloud goes at the end. I'm trying to not spoil it because of, you know, Amanda's in the room.
[74:57]
Sean Fennessy
But, like, I mean, that Is that that.
[74:59]
Ari Aster
That late conversation is the funniest, scariest, most politicized bit. It's so great.
[75:06]
Sean Fennessy
We did not really talk about Michael Ward's character in Eddington, but he has something in common. He's a little bit less of a trickster, Loki type figure than the one in Cloud, but this unfailing loyalty to a bad person, to a person who's breaking the rules and even breaking the law and doesn't totally realize the consequences of his actions and the way that those people can be pawns or can control situations. You mentioned that final moment in Eddington of seeing Emma Stone's character. And we also didn't mention one of the last things you see is Michael still with a sniper rifle, practicing, staying ready, traumatized by the experience that he's had falling into everyone else's web. And there are other characters in Cloud who experience similar fates, who become kind of ensnared in Retell's schemes and suffer grisly fates. It's crazy that they're coming out on the same day because they have a lot in common and two very uncompromising directors. So for people who are listening at home, Cure is in the Criterion Collection. Pulse is probably the most well known of his movies, aside from the Cure boom that happened in the last 10 years, where everyone kind of discovered that movie because Pulse was remade in America in a horror movie starring Kristen Bell. The original Pulse is extraordinary to me. It is like, it is one of the horror movies of the century. Like, it's excellent film, but as I said, I've only seen a couple of other of his movies. So what would you recommend for people at home, for Amanda, for any of us?
[76:40]
Ari Aster
I'll recommend. And then I'll look forward to, like, some photo of this standard DVD showing up on your social media feed. Sean, you should watch Tokyo Sonata from 2008, which is not a horror film. It's actually a movie that is so in conversation with, like, I don't know, the Lorraine Conte film Timeout or, you know, these films kind of about economic collapse. It's about a family. Let's just say that the dad loses his job, but he keeps going to work. And where he's actually going is unknown. And no one in the family is talking to or listening to each other. No one knows who is where during the day. And it all sort of builds towards this younger son wanting to play piano. And a lot of people have written him at the ending of Tokyo Sonata as one of Kurosawa's great films. And this isn't a plot spoiler. I mean, the plot of the film is strange and unpredictable, and the arcs of the characters are things you sort of can't intuit when you start watching it. But there's a piano recital at the end of that movie. I just looked at it again the other night because I wanted to watch that scene. It's one of the most uncanny things I've ever seen in a movie. And it's just simply the camera observing this kid playing Clair de Lune while these people watch. And how we are supposed to feel about it is never told. And I think that's something that Kurosawa is incredibly good at, which is we are so used to. I mean, Eddington, in a way, is very nudgy movie, in a good way. That's very American. Kurosawa has an ability to show you things. You are not given any idea how you're supposed to feel about it, but you feel something. And that ambivalence and that ambiguity is a rare thing. So if people are interested in him as a horror filmmaker and they want to see how he could conjure that same scariness without having a single horror element, I think Tokyo Sonata is, like, if not his best movie, it's right up there. I just hope people go see Cloud, because, again, it's cool that it got an American release. It was hard to see his movies theatrically for the last 15 or 20 years. They don't come out, even though he's very respected. So I hope if people are listening to this, they'll go see it wherever it's opening.
[78:36]
Sean Fennessy
A hearty recommendation. Thank you, Adam. So good to see you.
[78:40]
Ari Aster
Good to see you guys, too.
[78:40]
Sean Fennessy
Let's go to my conversation now with Ari Aster. Ari Aster, back on the show. Very excited to talk with you. I've just seen your movie, and I really liked it. I have a million questions. Here's the first question. Do you remember the day you started writing the movie?
[78:59]
Adam Neyman
I don't remember the day, but I remember the month. It was early June 2020.
[79:07]
Sean Fennessy
What had you most recently consumed when you started writing? Do you remember? Were you watching the news? Were you looking at your phone?
[79:16]
Adam Neyman
I was really on Twitter. I wasn't posting much on Twitter.
[79:22]
Sean Fennessy
Although.
[79:22]
Adam Neyman
I might have been retweeting, but, yeah, Twitter was the space that I was living in, and. And this is sort of the movie that Twitter built.
[79:36]
Sean Fennessy
True. Twitter is not. It's not the same as it was specifically in 2020.
[79:41]
Adam Neyman
No, it's gotten earlier. I didn't think it could get worse, but it's a lot worse.
[79:48]
Sean Fennessy
It's very different. The chaos that I'm sure you were feeling at that time, but stuck in your house, presumably in June of 2020, spurred you to make something about what was actually happening in the world, which feels very different from your three previous films. So maybe you can talk me a little bit through the desire to show us our world. Literally, in some ways, yeah.
[80:16]
Adam Neyman
I mean, in some ways it's different. It's always. I mean, it's all world building in one way or another, and they're all personal. But, yes, this is after something like Beau is afraid. This is a big pivot in that it is very much grounded in this world. And I wanted to make a movie about what it feels like to live in a world where nobody agrees on what is happening. And so that was the impetus, and it really just came out of wanting to make something that was kind of inflected by, like, a modern realism, which I've seen some of. But I. But there's something I've been wanting to see, and I think this was my attempt at doing that. And I'm a genre filmmaker, and so, you know, and I'm somebody who, you know, I grew up in New Mexico. I've always wanted to make a film about the Southwest, but New Mexico in particular. And so it kind of naturally became a Western.
[81:51]
Sean Fennessy
So I wanted to ask you about New Mexico specifically, not just why you said it there, but kind of what is the character of the state? What are the aspects of growing up there that stuck with you that you wanted to try to recreate and made it the right setting for this kind of a story?
[82:06]
Adam Neyman
Well, I grew up in Santa Fe, and. And my family lives in Albuquerque now, and they have for about 20 years. But it's a place that I didn't love when I was there, when I was growing up. I was born in New York, and I didn't like living in the desert in isolation. And it is a very specific place with a very specific history, and it's a fraught place politically. So I wrote a draft of this very quickly in June just to kind of get everything down on paper. And then I made Beau Was Afraid. And then while I was editing Beau was Afraid, I went back to the script, polished it, and then I came back to New Mexico and I drove all across the state, and I went to different small towns to talk to sheriffs, police chiefs, mayors, public officials. I went to Pueblos, and I was just trying to get as broad a picture of the state and its political climate as possible, you know, and it's a very interesting place. You know, it's a blue state, but the small towns are mostly red.
[83:39]
Ari Aster
And.
[83:42]
Adam Neyman
There was, at the time a lot of animosity.
[83:49]
Sean Fennessy
The governessness that we see in the film at that time. Yeah, yeah.
[83:53]
Adam Neyman
And the governor was like a figure of controversy. And it was really, really useful to meet all those people. And there are a lot of characters in the film that are modeled on different people that I met, especially Joaquin Phoenix's character. There was a sheriff that I met in a small town. I won't say his name just to protect his anonymity, but who knows? Maybe he'd like me to say his name. And he was sort of in this ideological war with the mayor of his. I mean, of a town in the county that he was sheriff of. And I introduced him to Joaquin. Joaquin loved him. And, you know, his wardrobe is identical, basically.
[84:50]
Sean Fennessy
Let me ask you what might seem like a pedantic question, but you'll hear filmmakers say, like, I went and I interviewed people who were in this world. How do you. How are you meeting local mayors in New Mexico and sheriffs? Like, who is the go between? Do you have a vast network of contacts that can show you the inside of this world?
[85:09]
Adam Neyman
No, you know, it's pretty simple. I mean, I. I had an assistant who was helping me, but, you know, I'm making a Hollywood movie, and you're living in a small town.
[85:19]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah.
[85:19]
Adam Neyman
And you're available.
[85:21]
Sean Fennessy
You were welcomed into those worlds. People were comfortable telling you about their lives and the work that they do.
[85:28]
Adam Neyman
And they were not only willing, but they were, like, eager to talk about what was bothering them, and it was really, really useful. And at the time, you know, Biden was president, it was a Democratic governor, and it was very interesting to go to talk to these people who were on the right who were very, very upset about what was happening. And I found a lot of them, like, really, really sympathetic. And that was interesting. And that found its way into the film, you know, where I didn't. I don't know. I didn't want to make an ideological screed, like, that's too narrow. I didn't want to be just, like, making another film where I'm, you know, where it's only going to reach the choir that it's preaching to. You know, that's just not. I wanted to make a film about the environment, and I wanted to do it without judging anybody. And that was the project, really.
[86:36]
Sean Fennessy
That's one of My big takeaways from it is at times when you're watching it, you feel like everyone is guilty. And at times when you're watching it, you feel like everyone is innocent and stuck in this kind of quagmire that we find ourselves in. But that's hard to sell to the world. I mean, even to your actors. When you're showing them the script, do they have questions where. Like, where do you stand on these things? Or do they just feel like this recognizes a moment in our history and we need to represent it somehow?
[87:01]
Adam Neyman
Well, no. I mean, they knew where I stood because we all kind of stood in the same place. But, no, there wasn't a lot of. There wasn't that much talk like that. It was mostly just about how do we. In some ways, it was about how do we keep from falling into the same trap as, you know, so many. Of so much. Not just so many films, but just so much media where it's just like, again, it was about the environment. I wanted to make a film about the landscape and about what it feels like to live in a world where nobody agrees on what's happening and everybody distrusts everybody else. And, you know, I mean, first, I think you just have to kind of agree that everybody in this world cares about the world, you know, and that's where kind of we started with everybody, with every character in the film. And, you know, and the idea was I wanted to pull back as far as I could to include as many instruments in the cacophony as possible without sacrificing coherence and, you know, without neglecting to tell a story. I would have. I would have had more characters if I could have, you know, that in one way or another represented, I mean, honestly, like a different corner of the Internet, because that's really where we're all living. We're all living in the Internet right now. We have been for a while. And Covid, you know, feels to me like it wasn't the beginning of anything, but it was an inflection point. And it. And it feels to me like the moment at which that last link to whatever that old world was was permanently severed. And I don't think any of us have really metabolized what happened in 2020, because I think we're still living through it. We're still in the process of. Of what is happening.
[89:21]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah, it was the accelerant, for sure. You called yourself a genre filmmaker, which I think is an interesting way to define yourself. The genres in this movie that I recognized were obviously a Western, which you mentioned, I guess conspiracy thriller, for lack of a better term. And political drama, which is an interesting flavor through your lens too. Were you overt in thinking about the ways to use the tropes of those kinds of stories to apply them to what we were living through at that time?
[89:57]
Adam Neyman
You know, I think it's just, I just know. I don't know. Genre is like a language that I think we're all kind of fluent in, you know, and so I wasn't thinking about any specific films. There's no like, you know, I'm not like nodding to anything, but I am aware of, of the tropes. And I think in particular this is a film about people who are also all fluent and all that stuff. Like Joaquin Phoenix's character, Joe Cross, you know, the sheriff of Sevilla County. He has watched all those old westerns and he's a very sentimental guy, which in some ways means that he's not actually looking at his own life. Right. He's very romantic, but I think he's informed by those, those, you know, by movies like High Noon or, you know, My Darling Clementine or, you know, these, you know, he has this very romantic notion of what he's doing, of where, of the West.
[90:56]
Sean Fennessy
You know, he's the moral protector in his mind.
[90:59]
Adam Neyman
Yeah, moral protector, man of action. Like, you know, a man of integrity. He loves his wife, cares about his community and you know, that, that gives him a lot of armor and it allows him to kind of not see himself. And you know, he's like a 50 year old man. He would have grown up with the action movies of the 80s and the 90s. And at the end of the movie he gets to live through one. Right. I mean, he's shooting at Phantoms, but he's in an action movie. And then you have a kid who's younger than him and he gets to live through it and he's. And there's that kind of that video game language kind of comes in. It's like it should be inflected by almost like this, like Call of Duty. You know, I wanted the film to kind of incorporate a lot of that language, those different languages. And all of these characters are kind of living in different movies in their heads.
[92:03]
Sean Fennessy
Is that because the media that they're consuming is informing the way that they see the world, but we don't all consume the same things anymore. And so like, were you thinking that schematically?
[92:15]
Adam Neyman
Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're all being pumped full of different things and they totally distrust anybody who's receiving anything different. And so I wanted the film to be kind of, you know, I wanted to make a very empathic film, but I wanted it to be empathic in multiple different directions, including directions that are directly oppositional. Right. And so it's. And yeah, I definitely do see the film as like a conspiracy thriller, but it's also. It's about people who are kind of like, living in their own little conspiracy thriller. Like, you know, I thought a lot about, like, that movie jfk, which I love. And it feels like we're living in a world of like, you know, everybody's a Jim Garrison.
[93:09]
Sean Fennessy
Yes. Our own little assassination plot that we're trying to unpack.
[93:12]
Adam Neyman
Yeah, And I love that film too, for just. I think it taps into the fever of conspiracy thinking and, like, the mania of it in a very special way. You know, it's a. A controversial film because it's kind of a hodgepodge of different conspiracies and it's been discredited far and wide. But for me, that's not what makes it a valuable film. It really, really taps into this spirit of distrust in a really infectious, possessed way.
[93:42]
Sean Fennessy
There's kind of like a counter feeling in the movie too, though, that is about this sense of being left out of something, being left out of a movement, not understanding the rhetoric of a certain way of thinking about the world, too, that I thought was really smart and acute and like the young male character who sort of joins the Black Lives Matter movement, the protest movement, and the film that I have not seen that rendered really at all in a smart way in media, but it felt very bang on and memorable in recent history. And that is actually kind of the opposite of what you're describing. With these kind of individual conspiracies, there's this sense that something is happening and you are not a part of it. And so you are almost like outcast from your community because you aren't joining. And those two things being in conflict I thought was really interesting or because.
[94:30]
Adam Neyman
You'Re not doing it in the right way. And so there is this moral coercion there. And they're right. And some of them really. They're right. But. But some of them are. Are. But they're. But they're also inadvertently alienating people that they could be reaching.
[94:47]
Sean Fennessy
And.
[94:47]
Adam Neyman
And so, you know, a lot of those kids, you know, really do feel the things that. Well, it's sincere. It's. It's more sincere for other. For some than for others. And, you know, with. With the kid you're talking about, you know, he's looking for a community, you know, that's really what he's doing. And. And in the end, he doesn't have the fortitude that some of these other kids do.
[95:16]
Sean Fennessy
The hardest I've laughed in a movie this year is him explaining the movement to his father. Sitting behind a rack of guns is like, that's the best image. That was really good. The other thing that I noticed is it felt like. And tell me if I'm wrong about this, that the actual filmmaking style, the technique was just a little bit different than what you'd done before. I know you're working with. With Darius Kanji, but it felt like a lot of handheld. A lot of perspectival movement with the camera where. As opposed to. I think of your movies, and I think of, like, big, wide shot, body falling off the mountain. You know what I mean? The violent action is in full view. And this felt like it was really in your face. And every time we're moving through the store with Joe, we're right on top of his shoulder. He's right in Pedro Pascal's face. Did you feel like you were shifting the style of filmmaking you were doing at all? Trying new things?
[96:06]
Adam Neyman
Not really. I mean, it's funny you say a lot of handheld because I'm racking my brain to think of where there's handheld. I know that there's. Where is there? Handheld? It's. I kick into handheld on almost all the films, but I try to be very strategic about it. Like in Midsommar, it's when they're all kind of crying together and kind of the film is kind of. It's been kind of tilted off axis. Right. And then Beau is afraid. I think we only did handheld for the scene where the girl drinks the paint. And then I know we did handheld at some point here, but I'm freaking.
[96:47]
Sean Fennessy
No handheld at the end, in the kind of final dramatic sequence that's really, really.
[96:54]
Adam Neyman
But it's great that it feels that way. Cause we want it to feel alive, you know, but no, that's all. It's all like crane stuff or camera on.
[97:02]
Sean Fennessy
Interesting. It just feels a little bit more chaotic, I would say.
[97:06]
Adam Neyman
Good. Well, you know, it should. I mean, it's.
[97:08]
Sean Fennessy
Or even during the protest sequence, when everyone's sort of in each other's face at that moment where you feel like you've been thrust inside of a storm.
[97:17]
Adam Neyman
Yeah.
[97:19]
Sean Fennessy
That also just felt different.
[97:21]
Ari Aster
Oh, good.
[97:21]
Sean Fennessy
Felt more.
[97:23]
Adam Neyman
Well, that's great.
[97:23]
Sean Fennessy
Upsetting in a way.
[97:24]
Adam Neyman
Yeah. Well, you know, I think if anything, I didn't. I mean, this was my first time working with Darius, and I love him so much. And obviously, you know, I get a kick out of the fact that I was. That I just made a film with Darius Khondji. He's, you know, a legend. Yeah, he's one of the greatest to ever do it. And he's. And I was really surprised by what a. What a sweet, like, lovely, open man he was. We became really close, and I found him, especially for somebody who's older, he's really just. He wants to be taken somewhere. He's not in any way stuck in his ways. He's somebody who was excited to work with me on my terms, and I was really eager to learn whatever I could from him. But I just found that it was a really easy, fun collaboration. And it didn't feel much different from what I was doing before with Pavel. It was a very, very similar dynamic. And, yeah, I would say, I think. I think the way we shot the film is not that different from how I tend to shoot. If anything, it was just the limitations on world creation where we wanted this thing to feel very real and be rooted in New Mexico. And that was its own fun challenge because I'm from New Mexico and I know the state so well, and there was so much I wanted to. To pack into the film. But, yeah, it was a textural thing. I just wanted it to have. Wanted it to be. Just get rid of the artifice as much as I could. Even though the film does kind of get gripped by its own paranoia and kind of go off the radar.
[99:40]
Sean Fennessy
Touches the absurd. Yeah, for sure. So I described it to a friend as Chayefsky with a machine gun. And I don't know, I'm curious how you actually see the world. I really like Chayefsky's writing, and I find that you get to the conclusion of a lot of his best work, and it's usually that there is something very sour and broken in people because of the circumstances of society and kind of what we've all built together. And 2020 felt like that felt very Chayefsky. And I got to the end of this movie and I'm still kind of turning over in my head, like, does Ari think that we are all fucked? Or that maybe there is a little tinge of hope? Do you consider yourself a hopeful person?
[100:25]
Adam Neyman
Well, so Chayefsky, I love, and I would say the one thing about Chayefsky, he's the greatest monologue writer, like the last, whatever century. But I do find his work to be sometimes a little like, sermonizing, very much like to a fault. I think network falls into that. I think the hospital falls into that. Where finally the point of the movie.
[100:55]
Sean Fennessy
Yes, he puts a thesis in the.
[100:57]
Adam Neyman
Movie and that's where he loses me. And sometimes it's not political, sometimes it's in Marty, which I love as well. And so that's something I did not want to do here. But I, I, but I mean, I, I love those films. But, you know, there's a, there's an element of Howard Beale in Paddy Chayefsky. I wrote this film in like a state of anxiety and worry and fear. And I feel like that's a where, place, place that most of us are living in now. You know, I feel totally powerless. And everything feels like impossibly corrupt and just compromised. And it feels like we're living out this experiment that has obviously failed and nobody at the levers has any interest in slowing it down. In fact, it just keeps accelerating. So for me, it's like. But I do wonder, what would an olive branch look like, right? And can there be some solidarity in just pulling back and collectively seeing the insanity of this moment? And I don't know. We're all kind of unreachable to each other. And I, I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that we need to re. Engage with each other somehow. And, you know, I don't know. I have a lot of hope, but I have very little confidence.
[102:53]
Sean Fennessy
Do you? I don't think that's what this movie is going to do. I don't think it's going to be an olive branch. But it's interesting to have that desire and for you to express that by making a movie like this. Because there's a part of me that at the end of this movie, I was like, there is no hope. That this is all an absurd game that we're stuck inside of and we're probably going to lose. On the other hand, people do escape the pain in the movie in interesting and unique ways. I was trying to. As we were sort of like three quarters of the way through the movie, I was like, is everyone going to die in this film? Is this that kind of movie? And that's not quite what happens in the storytelling. But I'm not sure. What do you think that a movie like this can do? Like, should it alert people to this system that we're stuck in this moment in time, this irretrievable feeling? Should it just be an exercise for you like an exorcism for you to get the feeling across. How do you think about what it means to put it in the world?
[103:57]
Adam Neyman
I was trying to make a film that felt like that time to me and that feels like this country. And what I know is that when I see something reflected back to me, that kind of in any way just confirms what I'm feeling, or it just makes me feel less alone, right? And I feel like there's this, like, big retreat happening. Like we're retreating into the past, retreating into nostalgia or even into our trauma, right? And here we are. Like, we're at this unprecedented moment. We're at the cusp of something. We're in the collapse of something, but we're on the cusp of something. Something new is coming as well. And I am afraid and I don't know where we're going. And I want to see work that is reflecting that. So that's what I'm trying to do is I'm just trying to make a film about this moment in whatever way. Like, with the limited vantage point that I have, you know, I. I'm just trying to, you know, talk about it. But. And I think, you know, the film also is like, sort of just like a narrative experiment of just like, okay, I'm going to create all these. I'm going to have all these different characters who are living in different corners, different realities. And when they start bumping up against each other, like, what comes out of that, you know, like, what is the logic that comes out of that. That grips all of them? And, you know, I'm doing it as a dark comedy western because that also gives me a sort of freedom to, like, to spin out of where we are and, you know, use my imagination. But I. But, you know, in the end. And I also, you know, the movie is not like. It's not like vegetables. Like, I want the film to be fun and exciting and surprising and, you know, it's a movie, you know, So I hope I'm not sounding too lofty in any of this, because I'm not, you know.
[106:25]
Sean Fennessy
No, I don't think so at all. I mean, I think it is. I thought it was very funny, but it is. You will be asking people to put themselves back into a time that many people don't want to spend time with. With too. Did you. Did you find yourself thinking about that? Do you worry about that with making a commercial art form like you do?
[106:43]
Adam Neyman
Well, you know, in some ways, I'm going back to that time, and I'm. It's not like really a. It's not a kitchen sink drama, you know, in some ways, I'm going back to that time and I'm sticking like dynamite in it and I'm blowing it up, you know, so there's almost an aspect of, like, revenge in it.
[107:00]
Sean Fennessy
I know what you mean. Tell me about how you're feeling about your career. I think I've talked to you about after every movie.
[107:07]
Adam Neyman
Yeah, every film.
[107:09]
Sean Fennessy
And I noticed something interesting. The first two films are about grieving women, and then the next two films are about these wounded avatars of masculinity.
[107:22]
Adam Neyman
Yeah. Interesting.
[107:23]
Sean Fennessy
I don't know. What's that? How did you get there?
[107:27]
Adam Neyman
I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. There's no strategy, so it's hard to talk about it. Just sort of, you know, it's like they felt like the right surrogates for those films.
[107:44]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah. This one obviously couldn't have been part of some grand plan because it is such a reflection of the times. But, like, I'm sure I've asked you this before when we've talked about, like, is there a certain kind of genre that you've ever wanted to make? I don't remember if you'd ever said, yeah, I'd like to make a western one day. And then a western found you. But are you thinking at this point, okay, I've done a film like this. I've done a film like this. I'd like to try to do something that takes place in this world or in this kind of tone.
[108:09]
Adam Neyman
You know, I've got sort of like a sequel I've been cooking up for Eddington. Wow. I've got a horror movie that I'm interested in doing. There's a sci fi film. It's sort of an adaptation that I'm thinking about.
[108:29]
Ari Aster
So.
[108:29]
Sean Fennessy
Yes, you have sort of a roadmap.
[108:33]
Adam Neyman
Well, not a roadmap. I've got ideas, and if anything, I'm trying to determine what the right thing is next.
[108:41]
Sean Fennessy
What about Square Peg? I've been closely following what you're choosing to produce, which I think is all really interesting, especially the next couple things that you and I don't know how much you are an active participant in those projects, but I love the last Christopher Borgley movie. I'm very excited about the new one.
[109:02]
Adam Neyman
He's great.
[109:04]
Sean Fennessy
I know you guys are on Yorgos's new movie in some way.
[109:08]
Adam Neyman
Yeah. Begonia.
[109:09]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah. What part is that taking up in your creative life now? What are you hoping to do with Squarepeg?
[109:17]
Adam Neyman
I mean, I'M like that. That's Lars Knudsen and I, and we've got a couple other producers we work with. Emily Hildner is a producer that's at Square Peg, who we love. And I don't know, I see it as sort of just like a little, I don't know, like a clubhouse. It's. It's great to be able to not get totally swallowed up by your own films and be able to work with other people and help them, if you can help them. And a lot of these filmmakers are people that I grew up loving. We're working with Don Herzfeld and we're working with Guy Madden and Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson.
[110:09]
Sean Fennessy
Are you making a Don Herzfeld movie?
[110:11]
Adam Neyman
Well, yeah, it seems to be moving. I really. I'm excited about it. It's a brilliant script. It's one of the best scripts I've ever read, period.
[110:23]
Sean Fennessy
Done in the Don Herzfeld, the I'm doing it all myself way.
[110:30]
Adam Neyman
I don't want to say too much.
[110:32]
Sean Fennessy
I'm such a big fan of this.
[110:33]
Adam Neyman
But I will say it's going to be amazing. And, yeah, I mean, there's so many other filmmakers, and we're just lucky. We're working with Lance Oppenheim. We're working with. Yeah, it's been great.
[111:00]
Sean Fennessy
Can you give me an example of something that you do as a producer on a project like that? Because I think people hear that and they're like, oh, yeah, that's a name attached to something. But maybe don't understand the nuts and bolts of how you might participate.
[111:12]
Adam Neyman
Well, on some, I'm more passive than on others. And I think sometimes it's just as simple as me sending the script around and writing letters to actors or to studios urging them to pay attention to it. I haven't been on the ground for any of these films, so I've been, if anything, just like a supporter and a champion. And, yeah, if any. You know, I would say that on my first film, without getting into it, I had a very bad experience with a film with somebody, and it was horrible.
[112:08]
Ari Aster
And.
[112:11]
Adam Neyman
It made the process of finishing the film, like, utterly joyless. I mean, that's. That's to say that that's an understatement. It was torture. And I really. I really liked the idea when Lars, my producer, came to me with the idea of starting a production company. I really liked the idea of being a place where we would just kind of protect filmmakers. And if we get behind them, it's because we want them to have Autonomy and make their film. Like, I'm not going into the cut and imposing my will. If anything, I'm trying to protect them from that if I can, but, you know, it's just. It's hard. It's hard out there.
[113:04]
Sean Fennessy
I've always been amazed by how you've been able to retain that for yourself, because you don't make movies that have traditional narrative expectation. I'll say. You know, you're always kind of upending where we think we're going, but you have pretty consistently, it seems like, been able to make the movies that you want to make.
[113:23]
Adam Neyman
Yeah, I've been really lucky. You know, I've been lucky that I haven't had to really compromise the films. The argument in post is always about length. That's it. And just because I make big, long, unwieldy movies, I like a novel.
[113:46]
Sean Fennessy
This one's shorter than the last one.
[113:48]
Adam Neyman
This one's a lot shorter than the last one. It's. And I think this one's pretty tight. It was a long process getting it to its final shape.
[114:02]
Sean Fennessy
Is there a lot that was conceived or even written that didn't make it into the movie?
[114:07]
Adam Neyman
Oh, yeah.
[114:08]
Sean Fennessy
Other strands and ideas that just didn't fit.
[114:10]
Adam Neyman
Characters, stories. I mean, and there are just a lot of scenes on the cutting room floor, but. But it's all shaping. That's all normal. Actually, there aren't that many scenes on the cutting room floor on this one, to be honest. It's mostly just. It's just been. It's just, you know, been made more efficient.
[114:35]
Sean Fennessy
So just saving it for the sequel trims. I get it.
[114:39]
Adam Neyman
Yeah. Well, the sequel, we'll see. It's not really a sequel. It's. But there are returning characters.
[114:47]
Sean Fennessy
Okay. Do you see your movies as all happening in the same universe? A Tarantinoesque imagination?
[114:54]
Adam Neyman
No, but they're all. I have my sense of humor, and I like. I notice things like, oh, I like to take a head off. You know, that's not going anywhere.
[115:11]
Sean Fennessy
You do like to take a head.
[115:12]
Adam Neyman
Off, which also feels like the more I think about it, the more that really does actually feel like a relevant image right now is an exploding head. Yeah, I feel like. And that's definitely. I think.
[115:28]
Sean Fennessy
There'S more than one headshot in this new movie.
[115:30]
Adam Neyman
Oh, yeah.
[115:31]
Sean Fennessy
Multiple headshots.
[115:32]
Adam Neyman
And really every character's head is exploding in this movie.
[115:35]
Sean Fennessy
Yeah. Ari, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen? Your cinephile.
[115:44]
Adam Neyman
Last great thing I'VE seen. I just watched Adam Curtis's Shifty. Yeah, it's fucking amazing.
[115:52]
Sean Fennessy
I saw it too. So can you explain it a little bit for the audience? You don't have to explain what Adam does, but just this one in particular.
[116:00]
Adam Neyman
Well, it's. It's comprised of archival footage from basically the end of 1970s to the very end of the 20th century in England. And it functions kind of as like a mirror from the past where you just see, like, you see where we are in what was happening then. There's a lot of Thatcher and a lot of. It's really about how nobody knew what was happening, especially the people in power who are kind of scrambling to hold on to their power. But it had left them. And in some ways they had forfeited it. Right. Like that. The politicians had forfeited their power. And it's really tech and finance that was taking everything over, which of course is where we are now. And Adam Curtis is just. He's a very sardonic commentator. Usually you have his voice.
[117:13]
Sean Fennessy
I was going to ask you about this. How do you feel not having his narration in the movie?
[117:17]
Adam Neyman
Well, the last one traumazone didn't have, didn't have anything.
[117:20]
Sean Fennessy
Same thing as sort of like a five hour, expansive, nationally located analysis of the end of the century.
[117:28]
Adam Neyman
Yeah. And also just strictly comprised of archival footage. And he's just an amazing editor and a really great storyteller. And the connections he makes just by putting one video up against another, the connections are just kind of brilliant and provocative and exciting. And he's very funny and he's. Traumazone didn't have any of the things that he likes to do. Like, it had no music, it had none of that commentary.
[118:01]
Sean Fennessy
I watched it in a festival setting and it was kind of punishing, like in a good way. But it was because it was not what I was expecting. But Shifty, I think, sets you. If you've seen Trauma Zone, Shifty, you're like ready for Shifty.
[118:11]
Adam Neyman
Yeah. And Shifty feels to me very much like. I mean, I wouldn't say for me, probably my favorite is can't get yout Out Of My Head. But this is like a close second. And you still have his voice. It just shows up in text. But that also feels perfect. Cause that's sort of. That's a language that the Internet has kind of. Especially Instagram, you know, where you're just. Everything has captions now, even when there's sound, you know, and so. And I don't know, he's using the language of the moment to tell these stories. And there's something very haunting and eerie and ghostly about what he's doing here. I loved Shifty. Everybody should watch it.
[118:55]
Sean Fennessy
It would be an interesting kind of. I don't know if it would be an appetizer because it's five hours long, but something to start with before going to your movie because they're in conversation with each other in some ways.
[119:07]
Adam Neyman
Absolutely. Yeah. He's one of the great. One of the great filmmakers, thinkers working right now just like you are.
[119:17]
Sean Fennessy
Thanks for doing the show.
[119:18]
Adam Neyman
No, thank you. Good to see you. Thank you.
[119:25]
Sean Fennessy
Thank you to Ari Aster. Thanks to our producer Jack Sanders for his work on this episode. We will see some of you live in Chicago. We are Screening our number 14 entry in the 25 for 25 series, followed immediately by our conversation on the show for non Chicago listeners. We'll see you next week with a draft recorded live in Chicago. Are you excited? How are you feeling?
[119:46]
Amanda Dobbins
I'm really excited. I got a pack, so.
[119:48]
Sean Fennessy
I got a pack.
[119:49]
Amanda Dobbins
Yeah.
[119:49]
Sean Fennessy
What are we doing in Chicago? What else are we doing?
[119:51]
Amanda Dobbins
We are going to go to a Cubs game.
[119:52]
Sean Fennessy
Going to a Cubs game.
[119:53]
Amanda Dobbins
I want to go to the Art Institute. I've never been to Chicago. This is my first time.
[119:56]
Sean Fennessy
Oh, that's right.
[119:57]
Amanda Dobbins
And I'm getting some tips about where to get deep dish and stuff. I do anything else. Like. Like send us some. Send us some recs.
[120:03]
Sean Fennessy
I could go use a restaurant recommendation.
[120:05]
Amanda Dobbins
Okay. When are we going? That's a different combo. Yeah. Because we kind of have events. But that's okay. We'll work it out.
[120:13]
Sean Fennessy
Should we cancel the events? Just go to dinner. Okay. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon. Sa.