Ari Aster Gives Insight On His Reason For Making 'Eddington': "I Wanted To Paint A Picture Of The Society That We're Now Living In" - mxdwn Movies
The film stars Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Austin Butler, and Emma Stone in a small town named Eddington in New Mexico during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Phoenix plays Sheriff Joe Cross, who is bemused at the mask enforcement along with the growing craze of the community. Pascal portrays Ted Garcia, the town’s mayor, who is negotiating a “dubious business deal with big tech to build a data center on the town’s outskirts.” The already tumultuous town is pulled even further apart with other news events, specifically the death of George Floyd and the rise in protest movements after. Aster does not stop there as he incorporates even more politically charged topics, including identity matters, “social media silos, false flag attacks, and the allure of conspiracy theories.”
Online buzz came soon after Eddington premiered at Cannes on May 16th, with critics and commentators from all political backgrounds analyzing where Eddington’s political views actually lie. Aster seemingly spoke to this in a press conference on Saturday, May 17th, stating that he wanted to “paint a picture” to reflect “the society that we’re now living in.” The filmmaker added that he “didn’t want to attach [himself] to one ideology or one story or one belief system, because it’s too narrow.” Aster designed the film “to be ambiguous in certain ways.”
The main reason behind creating this project was that Aster wanted to explore what happens when isolated people living in communities “come into conflict with each other.” Aster explained that he “wanted to try to pull back and just describe and show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore.” The Beau Is Afraid director added that he has felt “over the last 20 years” that the “social force that used to be kind of central to liberal mass democracies” is now being replaced by “this age of hyper-individualism.” For Aster, it felt like Covid was “the moment where that length was finally cut for good.”
Aster was not the only one on the project who commented on the volatile political state of America; Pascal notably gave a response to the discourse of Latin American migrants. The actor described his youth, stating, “My parents are refugees from Chile. I myself was a refugee. We fled a dictatorship. And I was privileged enough to grow up in the US after asylum in Denmark. And if it weren’t for that, I don’t know what would have happened to us. And so I stand by those protections, always.”
A journalist prompted Aster with the question, “If there was ‘nothing left but civil war waiting for America?’” Aster’s answer was clearly not meant to comfort as he responded, “I think we’re on a dangerous road, and I feel like we’re living through an experiment that is going wrong… It’s not going well, and it feels like there’s no way out of it.” Aster concluded his answer by adding, “It’s not working, but it’s clear that nobody’s actually interested in stopping it.”
The Cannes Film Festival will run until this Saturday, May 24th, and Eddington will be released in theaters on July 18th of this year.
