Ari Aster and his Eddington cast are unpacking what the film is saying about America.
The filmmaker was joined by Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Micheal Ward and Luke Grimes at Saturday’s Cannes press conference following the movie’s Friday night premiere.
The movie takes place in May 2020 and is set in a small fictional town in New Mexico, where the local sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) decides to run against the charismatic and COVID-conscious mayor Ted Garcia (Pascal). As Joe’s campaign intensifies, so does the pandemonium of the pandemic era with news coverage and social media posts stoking the flames of right-wing conspiracy, rising racial reckoning and protests against police brutality following the death of George Floyd.
“I wrote this film in a state of fear and anxiety about the world, and I wanted to try to pull back and show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore,” Aster said about the themes in Eddington. “The last 20 years, we’ve fallen into this age of hyper individualism… I wanted to make a film about what America feels like at that time, and it felt bad. I’m very worried. We need to re-engage with each other. That’s the only hope.”
“We’re on a dangerous road, and I feel like we’re living through an experiment that’s gone wrong,” he added. “It feels like there’s no way out… I think people feel very powerless and very fearful.”
Pascal said Aster felt like a “whistleblower” on what’s happening in the U.S. “I’m so used to lenses on us from the outside, because there’s so many ways to view issues of politics, sociology, our very, very complex culture and and with Ari’s movie it felt like we had a mole, a whistleblower — someone on the inside being like, ‘This is what’s happening.’”
Pascal said in response to Trump’s widespread crackdown and deportation on Latin American immigrants in the U.S.: “It’s obviously very scary for an actor who participated in the movie to speak on issues like this. It’s far too intimidating of a question for me to really address. I’m not informed enough. I want people to be safe and to be protected and I want very much to live on the right side of history. And I’m an immigrant. My parents are refugees from Chile. I, myself, was a refugee. We fled a dictatorship, and I was privileged enough to grow up in the U.S… If it weren’t for that, I don’t know what would have happened to us. I stand by those protections always. I’m too afraid of your question. I hardly remember what it was.”
A journalist asked the group: “I have a film festival… and we had some of our guests from other countries who were afraid to come to America. Even the guests from Canada were afraid to come because the universities in Canada sent out messages to the professors about crossing the border from Canada to America. This is unacceptable to me. Do any of you fear having anything put in your dossier because of the great movies you make?”
Pascal replied, prompting applause: “Fear is the way that they win. Keep telling the stories and keep expressing yourself. People that try to make you scared, fuck those people.”
Stone and Pascal said Aster’s script validated their fears about their country and what you can find online. “I felt like he wrote something that were all of my worst fears realized as far as what that lockdown experience was like,” said Pascal. “This building towards an untethered sense of reality and then going into a chapter that becomes a point of no return. Like, there’s no going back. I was definitely overwhelmed by that fear. It’s lovely to have it confirmed by Ari.”
Stone added: “The only additional thing that scared me a little bit in the [internet’s] algorithm system was looking into some of the things in this film that hadn’t been in my algorithm and unfortunately, added them to my algorithm, because once you start Googling it, you start seeing more and more things.”
Aster and his cast received a muted response at the A24 film’s Friday night premiere, with a 5-minute standing ovation for one of the fest’s most anticipated films. Though, a tearful Joaquin Phoenix earned big applause from the Lumiere theater crowd.
“I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to think,” Aster said after the film ended, while also thanking all of his collaborators. “I feel very privileged to be here. This is a dream come true.” He then added to laughs, “I don’t know. Sorry?”
The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney said of Eddington in his review: “Essentially a modern Western marbled with a vein of dark comedy, the movie is neither suspenseful nor funny enough to work as either. Mostly, it’s a distancing slog.”