“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 on our new YouTube channel.

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