Ari Aster started writing the film that would become Eddington in 2020 as COVID19 halted the world. Five years later, COVID19 is still killing thousands of people monthly around the world, and the political landscape has changed in ways that people in the 2010s could never imagine. It’s a stark backdrop for Eddington to set its stage, as well as our interview when sit down with Aster just days before his next controversial film hits screens. In case you’ve yet to watch the A24 conversation-starter, it’s set in the titular fictional town in the very real state of New Mexico where Aster grew up. It spans a week in 2020 and centers on Joaquin Phoenix‘s Sheriff Joe Cross as he embarks on a doomscroll spiral in reaction to the liberal Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and his masking policies. It’s the kind of film that makes you feel like you’re right back in the midst of the strangeness of the early COVID19 response, and isn’t that one of the most horrifying things you can imagine? For Aster, it certainly is just that. cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});It began with the idea of a modern Western, and during the pandemic Aster’s creative process was simple, capturing everything he could from that deeply chaotic time.“So the film is set in late May, early June 2020, and that’s when I started getting ideas down on paper,” Aster shares. “That was the most important part of the process, trying to grab what was in the air, and I think that part of the process was mostly distinguished by living on the internet.” Diving into the internet and the way that people were utilizing it gave Aster a chance to do a kind of cinematic immersion therapy to really get into the minds of the people and personalities he was trying to portray in his fictional New Mexico city.“I was creating different profiles on Twitter and building different algorithms and taking screenshots, making sure I had them for later,” he says. “The film is a Western, but I wanted it to be inflected by a very modern realism, which is another way of saying all these characters live on the internet.”Eddington is destined to become a deeply controversial film, which will spark much conversation around what it’s trying to say. For Aster, it’s simple: “I’m really trying to pull back as far as I can and describe the structure of reality at the moment, which is ‘Oh, nobody agrees about what is happening.’ It’s not that we disagree on any number of issues,” he explains. “It’s that we don’t agree about what those issues even are. The film is aiming to capture the environment.”Spiralling back into 2020 is just as awful as you’d imagine, but the film isn’t just scary in its hindsight but also in its prescience as much of the plot centers around the building of a datacenter for an upcoming AI company. That thread feels frighteningly real as actual communities in South Memphis Tennessee currently fight against Elon Musk and the dangerous impact of his xAI. “It’s more relevant now than when we made it,” Aster says. Taking on such a broad cast of characters and ideologies was a serious undertaking, which Aster tried to make fair and balanced. “It was important to me to not judge any of these characters and to understand them as much as I could,” he says. “I hope that the film is empathetic, it’s just that it’s empathetic in many different directions, and some of them are oppositional.” While in post-production for Beau Is Afraid, Aster flew out to New Mexico, a location he’s wanted to put on film for years due to growing up there.“I flew back out and I drove around the state for a long time, and I went to different counties and I talked to different sheriffs. I went to small towns, I spoke with mayors, police chiefs, and public officials. I went to Pueblos. I just tried to get as broad a picture of the landscape and the political climate of New Mexico as I could.” Although he was doing that research in 2022 and 2023, he was specifically asking the people he met a lot about what their experience was during 2020 which would help shape the film and its cast of eccentric characters.“A lot of these characters are modeled on people I met, and it really helped the movie get away from me. Joaquin’s character Joe Cross is specifically modeled on one sheriff that we both found very interesting, even his wardrobe is basically a rip off.” When building his fictionalized New Mexico city, Aster was trying to cover as many corners of the internet specifically as he could.“I would have included more characters, more ideologies, if I could have without sacrificing story or just narrative coherency,” Aster explains. “Coherency is an interesting thing with this movie, because it’s about the incoherent miasma, right? It’s a film about a bunch of people who care about the world and are very paranoid, and they all see that something is very badly wrong. They don’t agree about what that thing is and there’s a very clear point in the movie where I think the film becomes fully gripped and possessed by that paranoia.”So how does it feel to release the film in 2025 when the political and cultural impact of the COVID19 crisis has accelerated drastically?“The film is a period piece that’s helpful, right?” Aster says. “No matter what’s changing day to day. It’s about one week in 2020, yeah, but I will say that I’ve never made a film that changes so much day to day based on what the headlines are.” He continues. “The thing about 2020 is I don’t think we’ve metabolized what’s happened. I don’t think we’ve been able to metabolize just how seismic COVID was because we’re still living through it and it’s only gotten worse. This is a film about a bunch of people who are living in different realities, and they are unreachable to each other, and kind of blind to the fact that they’re all in the same situation and they’re all subject to the same forces.”Even when those forces come into direct, confrontational conflict.Edington is in theaters now.The post Ari Aster: Eddington Is a COVID Period Piece About a Moment We’re ‘Unable to Metabolize’ appeared first on Den of Geek.