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.