Director Ari Aster (‘Eddington’) Has Made an American Western for 2025

“Eddington is a film about a bunch of people who know that something is wrong,” says writer-director Ari Aster. “It’s just that nobody can agree on what that thing is.” Aster joins us this week to unpack his controversial, COVID-era western: his time back home in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he wrote through lockdown (9:30), the works of Robert Altman (18:00) and Oliver Stone (19:15) that served as sources of inspiration, and how Beau Is Afraid (5:54) cleared the path for Eddington. Aster also shares his early adventures in moviegoing: including Brian De Palma’s Carrie (22:10), Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (23:45), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (23:47), and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (24:50). On the back-half, we talk about how he found his voice in film school (30:28), his divisive AFI senior thesis film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (31:16), the seven years, post-college, that it took to break through with Hereditary (34:18), followed by his breakdown on Midsommar (38:30), and his ‘novelistic’ approach to screenwriting (40:30). To close, we read from Paul Schrader’s infamous Facebook post (45:48) on how AI will change moviemaking (46:05) and a Nietzsche quote that Ari says helps explain this moment in American life (52:45). Watch this conversation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc9VjN4SqpA&t=1751s on our new YouTube channel. Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, writer-director Ari Aster. Back in 2018, Ari emerged seemingly fully formed with his directorial debut, Hereditary. On the surface, it reads like your typical horror film: a grieving family led by Toni Collette, increasingly haunted by unspeakable occurrences. But there's nothing typical about Aster's nightmare vision of a domestic breakdown. To see Hereditary is to be unable to unsee images that I still find deeply unsettling. Since then, Ari has continued to take his own anxiety and neuroses and put it onscreen: Midsommar in 2019, followed by Bo is Afraid in 2023.

• 1:24Sam Fragoso?

  Viewed together, these three films, each psychologically dense and disturbed, play like a trilogy Aster didn't realize he was making, or at least that's what he claims: the subconscious mind, hard at work. His latest film, Eddington, is a step in a different direction, though. Set in May of 2020, Eddington revolves around a social and political standoff between a local sheriff and an incumbent mayor of a distressed New Mexico town, reeling from the COVID pandemic. Here's a clip from the trailer of Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, and Emma Stone.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Is that praying?

• 2:15Speaker 02

  How did we get here? And even worse, is it worth it?

• 2:21Speaker 02

  At the cost of being at war with your neighbors?

• 2:26Speaker 02

  That's why I'm running for mayor.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Mayor of Eddington.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Thank you super duper very much.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  I used to think that you were some big deal. But I am a much better human being than you.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Who are you talking to? There's nobody here.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Husband? Sheriff? May it be.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  You want things simple and neat. We are in a fight against evil.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  These are your streets. No, they're your streets to be safe.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  You know how death works? Yeah.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  People are gonna be looking here now.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Keep your own office going, but you're gonna run mine.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  So vote Joe Cross? Take back our community? Hell yeah.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Save our soul.

• 3:36Sam Fragoso?

  That was from the new film Eddington, now playing exclusively in theaters around the country. Aster has called Eddington a modern Western, part High Noon, part Nashville. But it's also a mirror, one that reflects a nation spiraling into hyper-individualism, prone to conspiratorial thinking, where the idea of collective purpose is on the verge of collapse. It sort of plays like Spike Lee's 25th Hour, but for the COVID era. A painfully accurate and incisive account of life in America post-pandemic. Where everyone, from activist to police to horny teenagers,

• 4:18Sam Fragoso?

  are isolated, paranoid, and, most importantly, confused by the onslaught of bad information coming from their screens and local officials. So today, I talked to Ari about how Eddington grew really out of his time back home in Albuquerque during lockdown. We also discussed his early obsession with collecting stills, the movies that left an impression on him as a kid, his early years studying at AFI, the seven-year window in Los Angeles before breaking out with Hereditary, and whether he believes artificial intelligence will pose an existential crisis for the future of filmmaking. This is Ari Aster.

• 5:16Sam Fragoso?

  Ari Aster.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  Hey.

• 5:18Sam Fragoso?

  Welcome to the show.

• 5:19Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 5:20Sam Fragoso?

  Before a movie comes out, we're talking a little before your new film comes out, what is your state of mind? How do you feel?

• 5:28Speaker 05

  It's like waves of feeling.

• 5:30Sam Fragoso?

  OK, so give me the undulations.

• 5:32Speaker 05

  Panic, suddenly I'll feel confident. This film is one that we, we knew it would be divisive. We know it will be. That's kind of, that's in its DNA. And so I'm looking forward to seeing how people engage with it and just hoping, I just want people to go see it.

• 5:54Sam Fragoso?

  As you were making Bo Was Afraid, you said, "In some ways, this film feels like the third of a trilogy I didn't realize I was making. And I needed to stick dynamite into whatever that was and have this really be the end of a road." So like first, what did you feel like needed to be detonated? And then, once that was like sort of torn asunder, what was left for you on the other side?

• 6:21Speaker 05

  You know, I think there's an element of parody there.

• 6:24Sam Fragoso?

  In Bo?

• 6:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think I became conscious of the fact that like I was kind of returning to places I had been before, like, you know, him going up into an attic.

• 6:36Speaker 05

  I think.

• 6:36Sam Fragoso?

  And the viewer, knowing that we've maybe been here before.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And so how do you deflate that? How do you play with that? Also, just, you know, the word trauma is used in connection with my films a lot. And I became conscious of that in a way that I started to want to push it away.

• 6:57Sam Fragoso?

  Conscious in a way that made you uncomfortable? Or you wanted to distance yourself from that feeling?

• 7:02Speaker 05

  No, no, you just don't want to get pigeonholed. You don't want to.

• 7:06Sam Fragoso?

  As a traumatizing filmmaker.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Well, we're all traumatized. And I think increasingly, we, you know, we've become a culture of people that, I don't want to say we cherish our trauma, but it's a very important part of our identity.

• 7:21Sam Fragoso?

  Can I say something?

• 7:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:22Sam Fragoso?

  I do not cherish my trauma.

• 7:27Sam Fragoso?

  What about you? Are you walking around with your trauma in your backpack being like, you can see, like, look at, look at all that I've endured. You don't seem like that.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  No, no, I think I, I think I use filmmaking, art making as like a, a, a means of processing.

• 7:44Sam Fragoso?

  But the Bo film is very funny.

• 7:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a comedy. I mean, it's supposed to be funny.

• 7:49Sam Fragoso?

  Right. So you detonate whatever, whatever kind of self-parodying you were doing, or whatever, whatever kind of relationship you had to a past self, you wanted to detonate, at least filmically, in Bo's afraid.

• 8:03Speaker 05

  I mean, look, I, I could be lofty about it. But I see Bo is afraid in many ways as just like a gag machine. Like, it, I, it really is just me.

• 8:13Sam Fragoso?

  This is Mad Magazine.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  Making myself laugh. Yeah, Mad Magazine, it's got, it's like just loading any given frame with as much information as possible.

• 8:23Sam Fragoso?

  I was disappointed, you know, bringing it to the new film, that you didn't have as many bits about Ray Liotta in this one.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  That's right. There's the airline in Bo's afraid called Air Liotta.

• 8:35Speaker 05

  And then there's, there was, this isn't in the movie, but I, I wanted Nathan Lane's character to have a Karina Karina poster signed by Ray Liotta. I'm missing, there, there are a few other references to Ray Liotta.

• 8:50Sam Fragoso?

  I love that your movies are so dense that even you have forgotten your own Easter eggs in the movie.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  Oh, well, while I'm making them, I'm just constantly, I'm just, I'm just taking notes and burying the art department in, okay, I'm gonna need this sign, I want this, I want this poster, we gotta, we gotta make sure that, you know, that this name ends up on a wall somewhere. But yeah, so I do, I do lose all of them. In, in the case of Eddington, it's a, you know, it's a, a matter of also having a lot of chicken fat, but that film is much more grounded in the real world, whereas Bo is Afraid is a completely invented.

• 9:32Sam Fragoso?

  Eddington is set in May of 2020, around the, the beginning of the pandemic, in this small fictional New Mexico town where conservative sheriff, played by Joaquin Phoenix, has decided to challenge his pro-mask liberal seeming mayor, played by Pedro Pascal, in this upcoming election. So I want to go back to everyone's like favorite time, which is the summer of 2020. And you're in New York City at that time, in your apartment. And then I believe someone in your family gets COVID. What happens next?

• 10:12Speaker 05

  Well, I, I flew back to New Mexico. I, I spent my adolescence in New Mexico, in Santa Fe. So I grew up there, but, and I went to college there, undergrad. Now my parents, my family, live just outside of Albuquerque.

• 10:30Sam Fragoso?

  So when you're back in New Mexico, there for three months, what are you taking in?

• 10:36Speaker 05

  You know, I'm on Twitter, I'm building my own little routine, I, you know, I take a few walks. Albuquerque's kind of feeling like a ghost town.

• 10:46Sam Fragoso?

  And. Were you wearing a mask on these walks?

• 10:49Speaker 05

  Uh, I wasn't wearing a mask on the walks, but I was wearing a mask when I would, you know, go into. Uh, you know, to get coffee or, or, uh, or, or, or take away food. I would wake up, get my coffee, walk to this nearby park, sit on a bench, read for a couple hours.

• 11:06Sam Fragoso?

  Twitter or a book?

• 11:08Speaker 05

  Uh, read a book.

• 11:09Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:10Sam Fragoso?

  That's better.

• 11:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:12Sam Fragoso?

  That sounds therapeutic.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was, it was nice.

• 11:15Sam Fragoso?

  And so in that you start writing when and why?

• 11:19Speaker 05

  It was at the end of May, the beginning of June, that it felt like we'd reached this boiling point and things were about to boil over. You know, none of us knew where we were going, where we were in that trajectory, how much longer we were going to be locked down. And so it was reaching this like fever pitch and I just remember thinking, I, I want to get this down, like what, what, the way this feels.

• 11:48Sam Fragoso?

  And how did it feel to you?

• 11:50Speaker 05

  It felt crazy. I mean, it felt insane, you know? I wrote the first draft of this version of Eddington very quickly because I, I wanted to make sure that at least the first iteration of this was written in the moment. Uh, I just wanted to kind of like capture the, the air. And I guess the project for me was, okay, I want to

• 12:14Speaker 05

  pull back as far as I can to get as broad a picture of what the country is feeling like, but specifically in the Southwest, because that's where I was. Uh, and I'd always wanted to make a film about New Mexico, having grown up there. And, uh, and so the idea was, you know, how far back can I, can I zoom to kind of assume like a, a sort of capacious stance? That wasn't, you know, some like ideological screed or, but that was sort of about the environment. I would have loved to have included more characters. You know, it's an ensemble film. The center of the film is, is Joaquin Phoenix's character, Joe, Joe Cross, the sheriff of Seville County, and Eddington is a town in Seville County.

• 12:58Sam Fragoso?

  Of course, his name is Joe Cross, by the way. It feels exactly right.

• 13:01Speaker 05

  He's carrying a load.

• 13:02Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, the cross the bear.

• 13:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so the idea was I wanted to capture the environment.

• 13:09Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  And so, sort of, one of the tricks of the film is that, you know, you kind of, you, you, you aren't supposed to know what my politics are, especially in the first half. It might even seem that I'm. On the right, because I've fastened myself to the point of view of a character who's on the right.

• 13:28Sam Fragoso?

  The film takes aim at young, white liberal kids posting TikToks about James Baldwin. There's another young kid Googling Angela Davis to impress a girl. And then on the other side, like you said, the protagonist is Joe Cross, who doesn't want to wear a mask in a grocery store because he's asthmatic. And it feels like you're ping ponging back and forth. And I did not sense that it was a liberal or conservative effort. It was more of an effort to set the scene as you saw it.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's, I don't know if the film is apolitical. Maybe it's closer to being omni-political. Right? It's meant to be panoramic. And so, well.

• 14:15Sam Fragoso?

  What?

• 14:16Speaker 05

  No, I'm just trying to find the words. The worry is always just, you know, it's harder and harder to get people into the theater. So you just want to make sure people go.

• 14:24Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 14:25Speaker 05

  You don't want those polarized reactions, which are kind of like according to plan.

• 14:31Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 14:31Speaker 05

  You don't.

• 14:31Sam Fragoso?

  The reason you make a movie is to produce strong feelings, right?

• 14:35Speaker 05

  I like a movie that functions as a line in the sand. That's.

• 14:40Sam Fragoso?

  So long as they show up to the sandbox, I, you know.

• 14:43Speaker 05

  That's, that's, just come, come play.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  We never talked about it.

• 14:48Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  The whole.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Can we just talk? Can we just, can we, just the two of us?

• 14:57Speaker 07

  We are, we are.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  So maybe I just talk to your video. Ask where all your deputies went.

• 15:07Speaker 07

  Okay, well, why not just ask your governor about her little catch and release policy? Okay, because if it wasn't for that, maybe I could hold on to my deputies and the people we arrest.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  I know, I know. One of them was fired for excessive force and another one was forced to quit by a YouTube First Amendment auditor.

• 15:22Speaker 07

  Okay, yes, that is the same auditor that drove away your work.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  Your undersheriff died with a fentanyl overdose.

• 15:28Speaker 07

  From the handling.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Fentanyl. And your captain and your chief deputy took jobs in Rio Ranch.

• 15:34Speaker 07

  That was devastating.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  You can't keep your own office going, but you're going to run mine. Leave your mess here and start a whole new one.

• 15:43Sam Fragoso?

  The panoramic view of politics. I don't think it's possible for you, someone who was born in New York, then goes to England for a few years, moves to Santa Fe at 10. I don't think it's possible for you to not bring your experience and your politics to a movie.

• 16:02Speaker 05

  Right.

• 16:03Sam Fragoso?

  This is not an AI director. So framing it as the politics being panoramic. Are you trying to do that because you think shifting or showing your hand one side or the other would dissuade the opposite side of showing up to the theater?

• 16:19Speaker 05

  No, it just felt too narrow. It feels like something bigger is happening right now.

• 16:23Sam Fragoso?

  What do you think that is?

• 16:24Speaker 05

  We're, we're living in a world now where everybody is living in a different reality.

• 16:29Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 05

  Nobody can agree on what is happening. And I think people have lost the dimensions of the bigger world outside of themselves. And all they see are the dimensions of the smaller world that they believe in. I, I'm absolutely not exempt from that at all. And I wanted to make a film that was about what happens when these people who are living in different realities start to knock against each other.

• 16:55Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 16:55Speaker 05

  And a new logic comes out of that.

• 16:57Sam Fragoso?

  As they inevitably do in life in this moment.

• 17:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, as they're, I think, meant to. I think, you know, a big part of what's happening is that people are being animated and agitated. And they're being given enemies. And those enemies are our neighbors, but I don't think our, our real enemies are not our neighbors. I think my politics end up in the film as sort of an attitude. But it was very important to me to make a film that was very empathetic towards all these people. It's just empathetic in different directions. And some of those directions are oppositional.

• 17:32Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 17:32Speaker 05

  Right? And so I wanted to give kind of like more or less equal weight to every instrument in the cacophony. Or as, as much as I could without sacrificing coherence or, you know, neglecting to tell a story.

• 17:47Sam Fragoso?

  When Hereditary came out, you said that the film belongs on the shelf next to Rosemary's Baby and Don't Look Now.

• 17:55Speaker 05

  Did I say that?

• 17:57Sam Fragoso?

  For Eddington.

• 17:59Speaker 05

  What an asshole. Sorry, go ahead. Me, not, not the, not.

• 18:06Sam Fragoso?

  So if we were to return to the shelf, assholes and all, what would be next to Eddington? Where would you slot it in?

• 18:14Speaker 05

  Well, let's say, let's say, okay, aspirationally, I would love it if this film ended up on a shelf next to Nashville.

• 18:23Sam Fragoso?

  The John Candy character in JFK.

• 18:27Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 18:28Sam Fragoso?

  There's like.

• 18:28Speaker 05

  New Orleans.

• 18:29Sam Fragoso?

  Five of them in this movie.

• 18:32Speaker 05

  Oh, man, what is this?

• 18:34Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 05

  This is not a line, but I ain't no cockadoodle dude. You know, it's like, it's, I, it's so good.

• 18:38Sam Fragoso?

  But that's, that's how he sounds.

• 18:41Speaker 08

  You have any idea what you're getting yourself into, Daddy O? The government's gonna jump all over your head, Jimbo, and go cockadoodle doo. Good day to you, sir.

• 18:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's, he's so great. Licking his fingers at the restaurant.

• 18:55Sam Fragoso?

  Fingers.

• 18:55Speaker 05

  It's so, it's so good.

• 18:56Sam Fragoso?

  He has his sunglasses on. It's amazing. The paranoia of that film is so clearly in Eddington.

• 19:02Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I think that, that's a very unique film in that it captures the fever of conspiracy thinking in a way that I, in a way that I haven't really seen anywhere else. You know, it's.

• 19:15Sam Fragoso?

  Are you as prone to conspiracies as Oliver Stone is?

• 19:19Speaker 05

  You know, I think, I know that something is wrong on some deep level. And that's what draws everybody to conspiracies.

• 19:27Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 19:27Speaker 05

  Is like, there, there's something wrong. I feel it. I know, I, I see it. I just don't, it, something's happening in the shadows. We all know that's true. It's only human to speculate.

• 19:38Sam Fragoso?

  To want answers.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so that film is widely criticized for being like a hot pod, like a hodgepodge of like different conspiracies, some of which contradict each other. But that, that for me is not, you know, the film isn't valuable as like an expose. The film is valuable to me because it captures the mania of it. And I, I do think that we've become a country full of Jim Garrison's.

• 20:02Sam Fragoso?

  The Kevin Costner character?

• 20:04Speaker 05

  Yes. Who in that film is bathed in this heroic light. But, you know, he's somebody who's been. Widely discredited, discredited by whom? You know, but, but, but I.

• 20:16Sam Fragoso?

  But self righteous.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  I mean, the film is like a, a, a.

• 20:20Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, it's a manic exercise. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's a work of mania.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  It's a work of mania, but it's thrilling.

• 20:27Sam Fragoso?

  Amazing. I, the more I watch it, the better it gets. I think where we got into some trouble is that there were people at the time when they saw it. I think this speaks to a larger issue with movie going at the moment. We've become so literal.

• 20:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 20:46Sam Fragoso?

  Like, people watched JFK and they thought, well, that's not what happened, or, well, that's definitely what happened.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, and the film is arguably pretty homophobic, you know, it's, it's, it's definitely, it's, it's a film that is like, you know, kind of, it, it's distinguished by a repulsion.

• 21:03Sam Fragoso?

  But it does seem like it was around that time that people started to look to film for answers. Not because all of a sudden.

• 21:11Speaker 05

  That was happening in the seventies too, for sure.

• 21:13Sam Fragoso?

  It was.

• 21:14Speaker 05

  And in the late sixties.

• 21:16Sam Fragoso?

  Cause the thing is that that film is, is almost designed like a think piece.

• 21:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:21Sam Fragoso?

  Like it's essayistic and persuasive in a think piece vox-like kind of way.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  It's opening the back door, right? It's giving you a picture like this is, you know, it's very, it plays almost, it plays like a biopic, you know, but it's, and, and, and it, of course, in some ways it is, but it's, it's, um, it's amazing that it sustains that fever. Like, it, it really feels like you're in the mind of somebody who is just like meeting these revelations, right?

• 21:51Sam Fragoso?

  You know, they've been up for days.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 21:53Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 05

  And so, very valuable film for that reason.

• 21:57Sam Fragoso?

  So, tell me, like JFK has a bunch of images that have stayed with me, clearly have stayed with you. And I'm thinking back on you as a kid, when you stumble upon Carrie.

• 22:10Sam Fragoso?

  For the first time, the Brian De Palma film. He said that Piper Laurie chasing her with a knife in the house. I spent the next three years projecting those images in my head. It made it hard for me to go to the bathroom or to get water from the kitchen. Tell me, like, when you were a kid and you had this, like, three-ring binder of images that you printed out. One, can you describe, like, what was in the binder? And two, like, what, why do you think you were doing that?

• 22:38Speaker 05

  I don't know. I, you know, for, for several years, I was just really obsessed with horror films.

• 22:44Sam Fragoso?

  So you were, like, photocopying stills from them?

• 22:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, still, still images. Uh, and I, I drew a lot, you know? That, that's really what it was, is I, is I, I drew, like, habitually. And I liked referencing those images.

• 22:58Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  I, I wasn't, like, thinking about it. I was just do, it was just impulsive, you know? Some, some of them I hadn't seen yet. I remember I was drawing Pinhead before I saw Hellraiser. I have this, like, collector's gene. I don't know. I, I buy too many books. I have too many DVDs, Blu-rays, VHS from, from that time.

• 23:18Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:18Speaker 05

  Um, and so I think this was just part of that, not being able to control that impulse.

• 23:23Sam Fragoso?

  That scene from Carrie, the one that, like, kept replaying, was that true of other films as well? That you'd ha, you'd see an image in a film and it just would be unrelenting inside your head?

• 23:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, there were a lot of, I mean, when I was younger, it was, you know, I think the films that really impacted me in that sense were Carrie, Cook the thief, his wife and her lover. Uh, Vincent D'Onofrio blowing his brains out in, in Full Metal Jacket. Um, I saw that when I was too young.

• 23:55Sam Fragoso?

  So, so. This makes, it explains a lot about us. I saw them when I was too young. And that scene traumatized me so much that I didn't know there was a second half of the movie. Like I.

• 24:06Speaker 05

  I love the second half of that movie.

• 24:08Sam Fragoso?

  I do too later, but as a kid, I think I may have stopped. I either blacked out the experience of the second part of the movie, or I may have just like hit eject.

• 24:18Speaker 05

  Well, that's a perfect film if you, if you, if you end it there. One, one of the great stretches of any film.

• 24:24Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 05

  The first half of that film, just absolutely mesmerizing. But I saw that when I was very young. I probably saw that when I was like 10 or something. It was on TV, maybe 11. And that, that, that really made an impact on me. Blue Velvet was big. Clockwork Orange was big.

• 24:39Sam Fragoso?

  I've heard you say in a bunch of interviews, but even here, do you think you saw those movies too young? Like, do you really believe?

• 24:48Speaker 05

  No, no. Well, they just made really outsized impressions on me, you know?

• 24:54Sam Fragoso?

  So like, was it good for your career as a future filmmaker, but bad for you as a human being, moving through the world traumatized?

• 25:02Speaker 05

  I don't know. Probably, it was probably just, it's, it's all fine. It was fine. Were they useful in one way or another? I'm sure because I, I tend to look for images that will be memorable. And I am a genre filmmaker. I like to take, you know, maybe personal material and pass it through like a genre filter. Yeah, I feel that that gives me a certain amount of freedom.

• 25:24Sam Fragoso?

  When you were 14 or 15, I read that your mother took you to see The Piano Teacher in Dogville.

• 25:30Speaker 05

  Oh, well, not, not at the same time, but yeah.

• 25:32Sam Fragoso?

  That'd be quite the. The double, the double feature? When you look back on that time, the two of you going, do you remember talking about those movies together after?

• 25:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I mean, we both really loved those films. I, I, there are a few films that I watched with my mother, who's a poet, who used to be a visual artist. And we, we, we really connected through certain films. I, I remember that we both loved The Piano Teacher in a way that was very meaningful. Mulholland Drive was one of those. And Dogville was one where I remember just the catharsis of that ending. We were both just like thrilled by what that film does, which is so subversive and kind of evil. Like, you know, that Dogville is a film that for about, it's a, it's a, it's an almost three hour movie that spends about two and a half hours

• 26:23Speaker 05

  of its runtime justifying the eventual mass murder of an entire town. Whoever hasn't seen it, but it is.

• 26:31Sam Fragoso?

  It's, by the way, we're past the spoiler warning time for this.

• 26:34Speaker 05

  Well, it's a film that weaponizes catharsis in a really interesting way. And I was, and at that, at that age, I was probably, I think I was maybe 17 when I saw that. I wasn't fully aware of what it was that was like so riveting to me, but, but that's become a more and more interesting idea to me, which is that catharsis is something that can be used to sort of overpower somebody. You can use it in like nefarious ways. And, and I think that's a film that kind of underscores like, there's like a sorcery to it. And it, it underscores the artifice of all of that, especially because it is doing this like Brechtian our town thing where there's no sets. And so you really see, okay, this thing

• 27:17Speaker 05

  is not real. But, but it's immersive enough in its storytelling that it becomes very emotionally real.

• 27:28Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, more from Ari Aster.

• 27:39Sam Fragoso?

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• 28:19Sam Fragoso?

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• 28:56Sam Fragoso?

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• 29:41Sam Fragoso?

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• 30:26Sam Fragoso?

  When you're a student in Santa Fe, you graduate and then go to AFI for a couple of years. Did you understand the power to manipulate by way of catharsis then? Like, when was that something you started thinking about in your own work?

• 30:43Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I mean, I was going to film school. And it was grad school at that point. But I was trying to find what my style was. And I was, you know, I was, in some ways, aping other people or, you know, just trying to find like, what is right, you know? Experimenting with things and finding like, oh, I like doing that. Or, and then maybe trying something else and thinking like, eh, this is boring to me in practice. At a certain point, probably when I was making my thesis film, The Strange Thing with the Johnsons, that I started to feel like, okay, I'm starting to just follow my intuition here.

• 31:22Sam Fragoso?

  I remember I saw that when it came out. And I sent that short film to at least 20 people.

• 31:31Speaker 05

  Oh, great.

• 31:32Sam Fragoso?

  I loved that movie.

• 31:35Speaker 03

  You killed your own father. How could you?

• 31:38Speaker 02

  What? Wait.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Get off of me!

• 31:40Speaker 02

  I'm warning you, mom.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  You don't warn me.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  I loved him better than you ever did.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  You sick! Sick! Sick!

• 32:30Sam Fragoso?

  In that film, in the process of making that, you said that was the first time you thought, "Okay, I'm kind of getting at, I'm getting at something I want to do."

• 32:40Speaker 05

  I'm talking really in terms of like form, what I was doing with the camera and with blocking. And I love melodrama. And I remember that the idea there was to do something almost like circadian. When I first was planning on making that film, it was much more arch.

• 32:59Sam Fragoso?

  Like Bo is afraid arch?

• 33:01Speaker 05

  Almost Sean Waters. Or like Die, Mommy, Die. Just people in drag. And like, it just, the tongue was like very far in the cheek when I first wrote that script. And then I, as I, and then because you have to live with your thesis film for so long at AFI, it's your whole second year. I remember that became less interesting to me over time as we were like preparing it. And I started to like slowly draw the tongue, the tongue from the cheek. I mean, it's hard to talk about this film because it's so long ago now. It's like, it's over 15 years ago that I made this film. And I-

• 33:35Sam Fragoso?

  You once called it a cautionary tale for liberal parenting.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  Right, there it is.

• 33:42Sam Fragoso?

  Which I think is an interesting conversation with Addington.

• 33:45Speaker 05

  Right. So The Strangest of the Johnsons, for people who don't know, is about an attractive, upper-middle-class African-American family. But the son has been molesting the father for years.

• 34:00Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  And anyway, yeah.

• 34:04Sam Fragoso?

  Look, I'm glad we have the context for people who haven't seen it.

• 34:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 34:07Sam Fragoso?

  So tell me this, like, after that film, which I do think that's one of the best short films, I think I've ever seen. But from there, you have a seven-year period where you're writing all these scripts. I think you have 11 scripts in total by the end of this run. You're working times as a script reader at Universal. You told Robert Eggers, "You got by in that time on savings." And I was wondering, for people listening who are trying to break into filmmaking, And who go to college and like college is not cheap. How did you go about stretching your savings? Was that from working as a script reader like had you had saved during college? What, how did you do that?

• 34:48Speaker 05

  It was, it was from that. It was from, I was bussing tables, waiting tables for a little bit. And just, you know, I was just living frugally.

• 34:57Sam Fragoso?

  A lot of ramen dinners?

• 34:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I was living in a tiny, tiny, uh, studio apartment in LA.

• 35:04Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, where were you? Were you downtown?

• 35:06Speaker 05

  I was living in Silver Lake.

• 35:08Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, okay.

• 35:09Speaker 05

  Although I, although for most of that time I had roommates and we were living in Atwater Village. Uh, when I was in, when I was going to AFI, I was living in Los Feliz. It was on, it was off Rowena. I would say that hereditary got off the ground just in time.

• 35:24Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, where were you at before that one worked? Because there was another film that you were working on, that you were really close on. And then financing dipped or, or an actor backed out or something another?

• 35:36Speaker 05

  The first project I tried to get going was actually the very first iteration of Eddington, which was, which has no, a, a, almost nothing to do with the finished film. So it was a contemporary, Western thriller that did have a sheriff at its center.

• 35:51Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm, set in New Mexico.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  Set in New Mexico, and it was about his feud with a copper miner in that town. It was, and, and, but otherwise it bears very little resemblance to what I ended up making.

• 36:03Sam Fragoso?

  But that one was close to happening.

• 36:05Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I, I had people, uh, kind of jumping on and trying to get it going. And, you know, we never had a cast, but there is a production company that was, uh, that was trying to get it going. And it just, it just didn't, it, it, it didn't get that close.

• 36:22Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 36:23Speaker 05

  But it was my first experience having people kind of attach themselves to it and try to help. And that, that was a boon because I, I at least had other people reading my stuff.

• 36:37Sam Fragoso?

  But it was also your first experience with heartbreak?

• 36:40Speaker 05

  No, no, no, that was. That's like number like 973. But I but then actually I I wrote the first uh the first draft of Bo is afraid, which was more similar to its final version than Eddington was. But Bo just needed a huge budget and I I didn't even know what it needed.

• 37:05Sam Fragoso?

  The seven year window before it does happen. And then it happened very fast for you. You know, I think a lot of people would get to around year four or five. Stop for whatever reason they stop. They go do something else. If you had that much heartbreak already and that one was 973, how do you manage to work through heartbreak?

• 37:29Speaker 05

  Oh, God, I don't know.

• 37:30Sam Fragoso?

  You don't know or you don't want to say?

• 37:32Speaker 05

  I don't know. I I I was joking and now this is almost feeling like kind of schmaltzy. How do I work through?

• 37:40Sam Fragoso?

  It's okay, we've avoided schmaltzy this whole time.

• 37:43Speaker 05

  I know, but I I like to just I like to dodge it completely.

• 37:46Sam Fragoso?

  Well, you can make jokes about it. Go ahead.

• 37:48Speaker 05

  No, I I I don't know.

• 37:50Sam Fragoso?

  I think to pretend like it's not part of the process is.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  No, of course.

• 37:55Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, I think it's so painful.

• 37:57Speaker 05

  There's so much disappointment.

• 37:58Sam Fragoso?

  It's so fucking painful to make anything.

• 38:00Speaker 05

  It's it's very painful to make anything. I I've I've said this before, but I think the process of making films is just like this constant grieving process.

• 38:11Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 05

  Whether it's at the end of the day, I have to, you know, kind of just make peace with the gap between my fantasy of what I'd be shooting and the reality. Although now I think there's less of that. Now I now I kind of court the movie moving away from me a little bit.

• 38:29Sam Fragoso?

  But on Midsommar, there was a moment where you went into a corner. And cried on set.

• 38:34Speaker 05

  Oh, I've done that, I think.

• 38:35Sam Fragoso?

  On all of them?

• 38:36Speaker 05

  Probably on every film. Oh, yeah, on Midsummer, the problem is that I was doing it in front of the whole crew. That was a morning where, you know, everybody was gathered and it was time for me to give instruction to the crew. And they were all looking at me and I just turned around and just started crying. And so what they probably saw was like my back like rising and falling

• 39:05Speaker 05

  in a fit of like, you know, silent stifled sobs.

• 39:09Sam Fragoso?

  Is that typically how it goes for your silent stifled sobs?

• 39:12Speaker 05

  When it's in front of people, you know, there's a, you don't want to indulge too much.

• 39:16Sam Fragoso?

  I like the alliteration.

• 39:17Speaker 05

  You kind of want to resist. That, that was just exhaustion. You know, it's very exhausting to make a film. But to answer your question, yes, there's so much disappointment and it's so hard to make films now. I feel so fortunate.

• 39:31Sam Fragoso?

  In that seven year window, were you deterred by the rejection or by the stops and starts?

• 39:36Speaker 05

  I didn't have a fallback. And, you know, I, I think I, I was good about making shorts intermittently. So that, you know, it wasn't just that I was trying to get my scripts made. And when I had finished one script, I would start writing another just so I didn't become too dependent on it, on any one thing I had done. And, you know, it's true that I had 11 scripts by the time I made Hereditary, but I had been writing scripts since I was like 13. And so, and some of those I never had any intention of making past, you know, like, like once I went to college, like, you know, I would say I had probably had like five or script or, or six scripts that, you know, they were just exercises, I realized.

• 40:21Speaker 05

  Me like learning how to write.

• 40:22Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, you said once that as a kid, it was easier for you to sit in a room and write a script than it was to marshal other kids into helping you make a movie.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  That's right. Yeah. I always heard about, you know, the filmmakers who, when they were kids, they made these super eight movies with their friends and, you know, I was a fat kid with a stutter.

• 40:40Sam Fragoso?

  There's, but there have been other fat kids with a stutter.

• 40:43Speaker 05

  I couldn't get a, I couldn't get a single word out. But no, yeah, no, I, I, I just didn't have.

• 40:49Speaker 05

  I didn't have friends who were interested in film. You know, it really came down to that. That also might be why I have a discipline problem and my films are all. I make longer films. I, I, I hope that they're not saggy, you know, like I want to make films that feel sort of novelistic, but I think that comes from having grown up writing feature-length stories and not, never really writing short films. I mean, even The Strange Thing with the Johnsons-

• 41:13Sam Fragoso?

  Thirty Minutes.

• 41:14Speaker 05

  Was a thirty-minute short, which is just not useful because it makes it almost impossible to program because when you're sending these films to festivals, you're, you're sending them to be in contention for like a shorts-

• 41:27Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:28Speaker 05

  Block.

• 41:29Sam Fragoso?

  It's best to be slotted in. How can it be slotted in easily?

• 41:31Speaker 05

  It means that of a ninety-minute program, your film is a third of, of that. And so, uh, that was just very hard to get programmed and we, we ended up taking that to the New York Film Festival, but that was after a year of nothing but rejection.

• 41:46Sam Fragoso?

  Bo's Afraid is almost three hours long. Midsommar and Eddington are both about two and a half hours.

• 41:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:52Sam Fragoso?

  You said that the only pushback I get from studio executives is to make my film shorter, which, you know, if anybody were in the room hearing the arguments, they would not be on my side.

• 42:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:05Sam Fragoso?

  Why would we not be on your side?

• 42:06Speaker 05

  No, no, I'm just saying, I, the, the, you know, for instance, the first cut of Bo's Afraid, my, my first assembly, like was three and a half hours long and, and at a certain point, I got it to three hours and ten minutes and I, I was like, okay, that, that's, that's as far as this is gonna go. And that's not reasonable when you're working with a certain budget and, um, and, you know, same with Eddington, you know, like that, uh, my first cut of that film was about three hours and ten minutes. I, I didn't show it to the studio at that length. I, I showed it to them at two hours and forty-four minutes, but, you know, I, uh- I get it, you know, you're you're alienating people when you're that long.

• 42:49Speaker 05

  If a film is good, I want to live in it for a while.

• 42:52Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 42:52Speaker 05

  I can't get away from the way that I kind of just naturally pace things, which is that I I like a deliberately paced slow burn. I like a film that like ramps up.

• 43:02Sam Fragoso?

  You want to go to the photocopier machine and print out pieces and continue living in the worlds that other people make?

• 43:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, if it's if it's working.

• 43:10Sam Fragoso?

  I forgot my three ring binder, otherwise I would have brought it in. You know what? In Hereditary, Annie is this artist that feels out of control for life. And she has these miniatures where she can control the dollhouse, basically. It's controlled things that she cannot in her day to day. And I was thinking, do you see a kinship in that in terms of how you think about directing and what you can control on set versus the maddening nature of of life?

• 43:36Speaker 05

  Well, I I have a problem with ambivalence.

• 43:39Sam Fragoso?

  That's what you said Bo is about, is that it's about an unlived life, the ambivalence of that.

• 43:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, and just being so afraid of consequences that you end up not making choices or being paralyzed by, you know, the fear of consequences. That can be as small as not being able to choose where to go to lunch, and it could be as major as, you know, how how to lead your life. I would say that I do feel I'm in my element when I'm on set, when I'm making a film. I feel that those decisions are much easier to make. Sometimes I'll really get hung up on something and that part of me will will hang up the process, but.

• 44:19Sam Fragoso?

  The the scene in Bo with the dental floss.

• 44:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:23Sam Fragoso?

  Can you explain that for people who maybe don't remember? And is that kind of what you're getting at in terms of ambivalence?

• 44:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a he. He has to go. He wakes up late for the airport. Has his bags at the door. Just before he locks the door, he realizes, oh, shit, I forgot my floss. Leaves the the key in the door, goes to get his floss, comes back to find that the key is missing and so are his bags. And then he's left with the question, do I? Go on this trip that I need to go to? Or do I stay with my exposed apartment? And so, you know, it's just, it's just a dilemma, right? But um, because, you know, he, it's an emergency trip. He has to make it.

• 45:08Sam Fragoso?

  That seems like a very small moment, but that can be so paralyzing. Like the, to not be able to make that decision is somehow emblematic.

• 45:16Speaker 05

  That movie's a Rube Goldberg machine, too. Like, that's just, I, that's, that's this triggers this, which, you know, sets off this, which then holds up this, and that's just fun.

• 45:25Sam Fragoso?

  The one thing that you don't seem ambivalent about is like your shot listing process. My understanding is you, for months, shot list on your own, and then you go to your cinematographer and production designer, show them scenes shot by shot, and that takes another three weeks. And I'm curious, Paul Schrader, I mean, he wrote Taxi Driver.

• 45:45Speaker 05

  Mishima.

• 45:45Sam Fragoso?

  He began 2025 with a post on Facebook, which, I don't know, did you see what he wrote on that?

• 45:51Speaker 05

  He's been posting a lot of like AI images.

• 45:53Sam Fragoso?

  AI thing, and I thought maybe you could just read this and see where it lands with you.

• 45:59Speaker 05

  Okay, so Paul Schrader wrote, "I'm stunned. I just asked ChatGPT for an idea for a Paul Schrader film, then Paul Thomas Anderson, then Quentin Tarantino, then Harmony Karine, then Ingmar Bergman, then Russellini, Lang, Scorsese, Murnau, Capra, Ford, Spielberg, Lynch. Every idea ChatGPT came up with in a few seconds was good and original and fleshed out. Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds? Leave it to Paul to provoke some."

• 46:36Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I'm thinking about the collaborative process you have with your colleagues.

• 46:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:40Sam Fragoso?

  He said this is an existential moment in another post. Do you feel that this is an existential moment as a filmmaker?

• 46:47Speaker 05

  I'm more worried about what's coming in even grander terms, what it's gonna do to us as a. Species, you know.

• 46:56Sam Fragoso?

  How do you mean?

• 46:58Speaker 05

  I don't know. I, I just, we don't know. Like, you know, and, and when you talk to the engineers who are like ushering this thing in, they don't talk about it as this thing that they're, that they're, that as this cool tool they're bringing into the world or this, this technology they're really excited about. They talk about it as disciples, like they're very worshipful of this thing. They talk about it like it's a god. And the genie is out of the bottle. It is too late. It's too big to fail. And now we're in, you know, the equivalent of an arms race with this thing. So it's, it's almost not even worth it to get stuck on like, you know, is this a bad idea or a good idea? It's happening.

• 47:41Speaker 05

  And, you know, and there's, you have a lot of people doing alignment research, which is basically making sure that the AI, that its values align with ours. But then that just makes me ask the question.

• 47:53Sam Fragoso?

  What are our values?

• 47:53Speaker 05

  What are human values? Because if you look at the news, it's hard to be a Pollyanna.

• 47:59Sam Fragoso?

  So filmmaking is low on the list of priorities then?

• 48:03Speaker 05

  I'm, I'm very nervous about it. And I think that, you know, things are being democratized that never had been before. What you can do with AI generated videos now with the, with the Google stuff is amazing.

• 48:15Sam Fragoso?

  And do you like using it?

• 48:16Speaker 05

  I, I've been shown what it can do. Like I've, I've sat with somebody who has it, who subscribes and, and I've told them what to type in, but I, I don't use it myself. And for me, the thing that's most uncanny about it is that it's not uncanny enough. It's, it's, it's looking really real. And I, and there are certain people who are very, who are still dismissive of it. Like, I can never really do this. It's like I, this thing is, is getting very, very close to.

• 48:44Sam Fragoso?

  Have you put in a way?

• 48:45Speaker 05

  Exponential.

• 48:46Sam Fragoso?

  To ape your style? Like, have you put in like, do a film in the style of me?

• 48:50Speaker 05

  No, I haven't. But I'm sure it could. And I, and, and look, it's, it's, it's, uh, these things also have like ceilings on them so that they do seem more limited than they are. And of, and of course they are limited. Like this thing is, it's, it's still in its nascent stages. You know, it's like a, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's still like a child. But, you know, it, it's exponential. So, so every minute it's, it's, it's learning faster and better than it was the last. And, uh, and, you know, I guess this is a way to bring it back to Eddington. Is that, you know, I've been asked, you know, how would you describe the film in like one sentence? Early on, somebody asked me that and I realized I, you know, the best way to describe the film for me is that it's about a data center being built.

• 49:37Speaker 05

  And, you know, and the film begins on the promise of one being built and, and it ends on a data center.

• 49:46Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, irrespective of who's in charge.

• 49:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, and for me, that's, it's peripheral in the film, but it's, it's really the heart of it, you know, that, that while all these people are navigating this one crisis, there's another crisis that's incubating over here. And, and, and really in the end, all of these stories are just data for this, this machine, just training data.

• 50:06Sam Fragoso?

  When it came to Midsomer and Hereditary, you were dealing with situations where you had no closure. And the movies forced you to create a certain kind of closure. And I was thinking, when it comes to Eddington, did you find some closure in what you wanted to say and, and tell or show about this moment?

• 50:26Speaker 05

  I wouldn't say closure, no. If anything, I wanted to keep it open ended, but I wanted to also be clear. And so, you know, I would say my other films have maybe more, more clear like catharsis. And, you know, in some cases, they're pretty apocalyptic, but they are still, they're wrapped up maybe more tightly than this one, I think can be or should be.

• 50:51Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think the movie is most clear about the hyper individualist track that we're on?

• 50:56Speaker 05

  I hope so, you know? Again, I mean, I, I, I think something has gone away that was always at the center of, you know, liberal mass democracies, which is disagreed upon vision of, of what's happening and agreed upon version of what's real. You could disagree about, you know, that thing, but we all kind of agreed about what we were talking about. And that's gone and it felt like COVID was the moment when that, that, that last link was cut.

• 51:28Speaker 05

  That link to whatever that old world was. And I don't think COVID was like really the beginning of anything or the advent of anything. I think it was an inflection point and we're still living in it. We're not locked down anymore. But the film, despite being a period piece, I don't really see it as one. I see it as being a film about, and anyway, I don't think we've been able to metabolize what actually happened in 2020. It's so seismic. But I do think that this age of hyper individualism has led to a real feeling of being lost and alone.

• 52:09Speaker 05

  And we know that we're powerless and we feel powerless, although that's also contradicted by the fact that we have this autonomy online. And, you know, like, when I leave here, I can order a chauffeur from Uber, right? And so I have this, I have this power. But, you know, what comes with that system of individualism is that you are on your own. And that can be really, really thrilling when things are working out. And it is terrifying when things aren't.

• 52:40Sam Fragoso?

  At your premiere in Cannes, you said that there was a quote, a passage, that you were thinking about. And I have it here, if I thought maybe you'd want to read it.

• 52:48Speaker 05

  Well, I only kind of brought this up at the press conference because the opening night at Cannes, they kept referencing Nietzsche. And this kind of brought this up for me, or just I thought about. So the quote is, so this is what you're having me read.

• 53:07Sam Fragoso?

  Having you make it seem like you're forced, you're not forced.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  No, no, no, no. So the quote that came to mind was, "The oversaturation of an age with history seems to me to be hostile and dangerous to life in five respects. Such an excess creates that contrast between inner and outer, which we have just discussed, and thereby weakens the personality. It leads an age to imagine that it possesses the rarest of virtues, justice, to a greater degree than any other age. It disrupts the instincts of a people and hinders the individual no less than the whole in the attainment of maturity. It implants the belief, harmful at any time, in the old age of mankind, the belief that one is a latecomer and epigone.

• 53:51Speaker 05

  It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself, and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism. In this mood, however, it develops more and more a prudent, practical egoism through which the forces of life are paralyzed and at last destroyed."

• 54:08Sam Fragoso?

  A dangerous mood of irony in regards to itself.

• 54:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:12Sam Fragoso?

  Into an even more dangerous mood of cynicism feels about as accurate

• 54:18Sam Fragoso?

  of a reading of Right Now as I could possibly come up with.

• 54:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm with you.

• 54:23Sam Fragoso?

  And you go about combating that, how?

• 54:28Speaker 05

  It's too big of a question for me to come up with, you know, kind of an easy answer right now. I will say, though, that Eddington is about cynicism as much as it may be, you know, accused of being cynical. And I, I, I hope that it's not cynical. I think, I think it's a film that's very much about a bunch of people who care deeply about the world, and it comes out in distorted and fucked up ways. I feel we're living in an age where nobody trusts anybody or anybody else's picture of the world. And I, I don't know what the answer is, but I do feel that without somehow reconnecting

• 55:12Speaker 05

  with each other, reaching out, re-engaging in some meaningful way, that there is no hope. And that we, we, we have been siloed off. I hope that there can be some sort of solidarity and at least kind of pulling back and seeing the absurdity of our collective situation. That's part of what was animating Eddington for me.

• 55:42Sam Fragoso?

  And I think it's part of what's animated this conversation. And I don't think anyone would have thought, based on those first three movies, that the fourth one would actually be an invitation to make an empathic leap. I look forward to the next one. I hope it's made by Ari Aster and not an AI and a human being that is sitting across from me with, with all the idiosyncrasies that you have, that I have. It's meant a lot. Thank you, sir.

• 56:09Speaker 05

  Thank you. Thanks.

• 56:46Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode with Ari Aster, be sure to share it on social media, tag us at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to go above and beyond, you can review the program on Apple Podcasts, leave us five stars on Spotify, share the show with a friend, whatever you do, we appreciate it. Special thanks this week to the teams at Paula Woods Consultants, A24, Synetic, and Ginsberg Libby. I also want to thank Kayla Fang and Austin Morales at 186 Films, and of course, our guest, Ari Aster. His new film, Eddington, is now playing in theaters across the country. To learn more about Ari, visit our website at TalkEasyPod.com.

• 57:29Sam Fragoso?

  For more episodes, I'd recommend Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, and Richard Linklater. To hear those and more Lebanona podcasts, you can do so on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can also subscribe to Lebanona Premium for exclusive bonus content and ad-free listening. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple or head to LebanonaPremium.com. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Lucas Wyatt and Ariel Gardner and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations, Chris Shadon. Photographs today are by Sarah Schneider with research assistance from Pierce Harvey. This episode was made in partnership

• 58:14Sam Fragoso?

  with the good people at Lebanona Media, and I'm Sam Fercoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next Sunday with a brand new episode. Till then, stay safe, and till then.

• 58:36Speaker 09

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed,

• 59:19Speaker 09

  avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview." So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S dot com slash R-Z for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.

• 59:57Speaker 10

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:00:09Speaker 10

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:00:14Speaker 10

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 1:00:20Speaker 10

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.