From writer-director Ari Aster comes a modern Western and paranoid thriller set in the American Southwest during the tumultuous summer of 2020. Isolated and sheltered in place, in a global pandemic, a nation under pressure found itself sifting reality through the haze of social media and lost its collective mind.
A “true conversation starter” (you can read our review here), Eddington is a microcosm of the early days of COVID, something we all went through together, and the aftermath of that. It’s a film that will test its viewers, but that’s entirely the point, and writer/director Aster elaborated on such a mentality as he spoke with our Peter Gray ahead of the film’s release, detailing what inspired the story and the bigger picture he hopes audiences take away from it.
You’ve spoken about being possessed by your films when making them. For Eddington, was there a single image, idea, or line of dialogue that anchored the entire project for you, emotionally?
It wasn’t so much an image or a line of dialogue, it was just the environment that I was living in. I assume it was similar to the environment you were-slash-are living in, and just wanting to find a way to talk about it. I started writing it at the end of May, early June 20202, when the film is set. I wanted to make a movie about what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real, where we’re all living in our own worlds of information that we’ve, in some ways, curated, and in other ways we have very little control over. That, for me, was a big part of the project, which is (how) can I pull back and try to describe the structure of reality at the moment? Which is that nobody can agree on what is happening.
Setting it during the pandemic, it was this time of fear and misinformation. There’s such an urgency and a little bit of danger to the film. Did the pandemic unlock, thematically, anything for you that you wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise? If there was another story that you thought you could tell?
It gave me a setting. And I don’t just mean the setting of New Mexico. The scene is COVID, and it’s saying how people are warring on ideological grounds that, at that moment, were revolving around the virus and around what is real. It’s questions of public health and safety, of personal freedoms and how easily that stuff gets conflated with personal grievances, and how hard it is to kind of catch when one thing ends and another begins. Just how much are we projecting our personal lives onto the architecture of everything outside of us? And how honest are we being about those things? Those questions are the landscape of the movie and what it’s thinking about. It’s about just wanting to make a sort of microcosm, not just for America. What’s interesting about New Mexico, and I grew up in New Mexico, in Santa Fe, and it’s a very interesting place. It’s a very fraught place. A lot of racial resentments. A very violent history. It’s a blue state, but most of the small towns are red, and New Mexico feels to me like a very interesting microcosm for America. I was excited about creating a microcosm for that microcosm (laughs).
Was there any time you were writing a scene and you immediately think, “This is going to be misread. And I’m okay with that.”?
I would say that there are scenes where I was aware that they were going to be misread, and that’s almost the point, right? There’s a lot of bait-hanging there for different people, depending on where you stand. And I do, by the way, have a very clear stance, and I hope that by the end of the movie, there’s evidence it’s in the bones of the movie. It’s taking aim at many different identities, and let’s just say that part of the project for me was about questioning myself. Turning a mirror on myself. And then also reaching to see the humanity in people that I might abhor or are standing against me.
There is something profoundly psychological about how easily communities fracture under pressure. Were you more interested in how the pandemic revealed people’s hidden selves, or how it created entirely new ones?
Yeah, yeah it was. I think the pandemic was an inflection point. It wasn’t the start of anything. We’d been in this place for a very, very long time, but that feels like the moment at which the doors got kicked shut and suddenly we were stranded. One thing I want you to maybe feel, it might even be kind of subliminal, but I want it to be there in the film, is how these phones, and not just social media, it’s so addictive. It’s this fortressing off that’s happened. It’s not an innocent consequence of social media. It’s how social media has been harnessed. It’s a tool, and how it’s being used by big power, and I wanted it to be felt in the bones of the movie. That there are things that are changing us. We’ve been changed. The film is a period piece, so it’s looking to the past, but it’s also tilting towards the future, and it’s looking at something that’s coming. Something is coming, and it’s already here, but it’s growing exponentially, and it’s going to be changing us in ways that we can’t even begin to fathom. And every character in this movie is not looking at that.
Eddington is screening in Australian theatres from August 21st, 2025.
