Phoenix returns in Eddington as Joe Cross, the sheriff of the titular desert town, whose refusal to wear a mask brings him in direct conflict with local mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), setting in motion a chain of events that’s only going to end one way: badly. Aster calls his fictional small town as “a microcosm” of America, pitching a libertarian lawman against a liberal, progressive politician, who is cutting deals to bring a data-harvesting tech company into the area. “It just felt like the right way to get at a central conflict happening in America.”
Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal, Aster, Joaquin Phoenix and Austin Butler promoting Eddington at the Cannes Film Festival in MayGetty Images
A film that escalates, until a final act that brings to mind First Blood, the debut outing for Sylvester Stallone’s lone wolf Vietnam veteran John Rambo, it’s an abrasive, uncomfortable and yet somehow queasily familiar watch. When I ask Aster about the initial reactions to his script over at A24, the fiery independent studio behind all his movies, he credits executive Noah Sacco, who “understood that it was a narrow bullseye”. Was writing it a way for him to process all the madness that he was observing back in June 2020?
We’re feeling isolated and we’re constantly agitated. I wanted to make a movie that was inflected by a truly modern realism
“It was a means of processing,” he nods, “but I also wanted to make a film about people living in the internet age, an age in which nobody can agree on what is real or what is happening, in which we can’t reach each other, in which we’re living in silos. We’re feeling isolated and we’re constantly agitated. I wanted to make a movie that was inflected by a truly modern realism.”
Part of this modern realism comes through Austin Butler’s character, Vernon Jefferson Peak, a cult leader who propagates wild conspiracy theories online. “He’s sort of a Pied Piper figure,” suggests Aster – a guru who soon bewitches Cross’s ailing, bedridden wife Louise (Emma Stone), who finds her calling through the persuasive Peak. What Eddington does well, aside from satirising white liberal guilt, is conveying just how pernicious the internet, and in particular, social media can be.
“I think that in the Nineties, there was this utopian idea of what the internet could be and might be. And that’s not what happened. Tech and finance took over, and that’s what always happens. And it’s gone really wrong. It feels like an experiment that has proven to be catastrophic, and it feels like we’re in too deep to change it – and that any of the people who could change it have no interest in doing so. It’s easy to feel despair about where we are in this society we live in.”
Hugely ambitious in its scathing portrayal of America as a hot toxic mess, fuelled by online paranoia and gun culture, Aster’s state-of-the-nation howl of anguish is surely a difficult sell. You can imagine A24 banking on the internet-driven appeal of Pascal to draw in the masses. “It was interesting to me to take his popularity on the internet, and maybe kind of weaponise that baggage,” comments Aster. “Because, in this film, he’s a politician, right? So it’s all about selling himself and being public-facing, outward facing, and unlike Ted, Pedro is somebody who is very authentic and he knows who he is. But Ted is somebody who is lost. He doesn’t really know who he is, beyond what he’s selling.”
A scene from Eddington[Missing Credit]
Aster on the setRichard Foreman
Now 39, Aster was born in New York and raised by Jewish creatives. His mother is a visual artist and poet, while his father is a jazz musician, who even opened a jazz club in Chester, meaning Aster spent a period of his upbringing in England. Together, his parents introduced Aster to movies (“they have good taste in films”), an obsession that grew when Aster’s family moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, when he was ten. In the past, he’s described himself as a “fat kid with a stutter” who endured a solitary childhood. The silver screen was his one comfort and shaped him.
A lot of the darkness in my films is because I’m a neurotic guy. My imagination immediately goes to the worst case scenario
“I’ve always had a taste for the macabre and my sense of humour is pretty dark. When I was a kid, I was always drawing and usually dark things. I have a taste for the gothic. I would also say a lot of the darkness in my films comes from the fact that I’m a neurotic guy who is hypochondriacal and my imagination immediately goes to the worst case scenario naturally. So when I’m writing a story, it’s a way of inflicting my craziness on imagining the characters and give myself a break for a little bit.”
Brought up Jewish, Aster isn’t religious. He previously told The JC, “I am a proud Jew, I would say, who doesn’t practise very actively”, but added that “Jewishness is a very big part of may identity”. Elsewhere he has called himself a “neurotic Jew”, a comment he made after revealing that on the Budapest set of Midsommar, he wore knee-high green socks and a netted safari hat, so paranoid was he of being bitten by ticks and contracting Lyme disease (not unreasonable, to be fair). But he is reportedly also fearful of things such as ordering in restaurants and even deciding where to live.
Much of his neuroses fed into Beau is Afraid, a film described as a “Jewish Lord of the Rings”. If comparing Beau’s quest to Frodo’s ring-bearing journey to Mordor might be slightly hyperbolic, it offered a fascinating insight into Aster’s psychology. Was making it a cathartic experience? “Beau was cathartic. And sort of an exorcism of certain things. All the films are cathartic in a way. I mean, I think it’s the writing that’s more cathartic, because once you’re actually making the film, it’s less about living something out than it is about executing something.” And how did his family react to Beau? “Oh, well, you know...they...they like it,” he stutters, somewhat diplomatically. “They like the film."
Whatever Aster does next, fans can get a glimpse of him this autumn, when he appears in Mr. Scorsese, an exhaustive five-part documentary study of Martin Scorsese, director of Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, from film-maker Rebecca Miller. The moment I mention it, he looks fearful. Why? “Oh no, I’m just afraid of my own contribution to it,” he says. “I walked away from that feeling like, ‘Ah! There’s so much I didn’t say.’ I imagine that everybody who contributed to that felt that way, because it’s an incredibly rich career.”
Apparently, the feeling is mutual, with Scorsese a long-time admirer of Aster, calling him “one of the most extraordinary new voices in world cinema” back in 2023. He recently told the New York Times that Eddington “dives right into the side of American life that many people can’t bear to look at or even acknowledge – that no one wants to listen to anyone else. Which is frightening”.
You would think that to have one of the world’s finest film-makers batting for you would stop the neuroses. And it might. For a bit.
Eddington is in cinemas from this Friday
