The Press Box - Hereditary’ Is the Most Disturbing Horror Movie in Years, With Ari Aster | The Big Picture (Ep. 479)

Episode Date: June 8, 2018

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey sits down with filmmaker Ari Aster to discuss his first full-length feature, ‘Hereditary,’ and the process of crafting a deeply disturbing experience for moviegoers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Try Mooby free for 30. days at M-U-B-I-com slash big picture. That's mooby.com slash big picture for your extended free trial. When I was pitching this film, I was pitching it not as a horror film, or I wasn't using the word horror. I was describing it as a family tragedy that

curdles into a nightmare. I'm Sean Fennessey, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is the Big Picture, a conversation show with some of the most interesting filmmakers in the world. I had a tough night in Texas a couple of months ago. I was in town for a film festival, and I was getting a ride back where I was staying. We were stopped at a red light, idling at three o'clock in the morning, and then bang. I was rear-ended by a reckless driver. It was terrible. That awful feeling of vague

hurt that could mean long-term pain. But it was worse than your typical fender-bender, not because I was far from home, and not because it was in the middle of the night, miles from any living soul that I knew. It was particularly haunting because I had just left a midnight screening of the movie Hereditary. Hereditary is the most upsetting horror movie I've seen in years. I won't spoil much of it other than to say, it's still. It starts out as a dark family drama, and it gets much, much darker. On today's show, I talked with the movie's writer-director, Ari Aster, about his long road to feature films and scaring the hell out of people.

So here's my conversation with Ari Aster. I'm delighted and horrified to be joined by the director of the movie Hereditary Ari Aster. Ari, thank you for coming in. Thanks for having me. Ari, your movie's very fucked up in a wonderful way. And I want to talk about the movie a lot. But I want to hear a little bit about you and where you came from because I was not familiar with your work beforehand. and this movie hit at Sundance

like a shot out of a cannon and people had said this is the scariest damn thing that I've seen in years. So where are you from and how did you start falling in love with movies that upset people? I was born in New York

and I was there for the first few years of my life and then moved to Chester, England for a few years of my family and then I spent most of my adolescence in Santa Fe, New Mexico and then I

moved to L.A. to go to A.F.I., the A.I. Conservatory, the American Film Institute, to study as a director. And I graduated in 2010, and I spent the last, about nine years in L.A. before Hereditary went into pre-production in Utah. I want to know what happens between that 2010 to 2017 period. But before we do that, do you remember the first horror film that you saw? First one, no. I remember the first few that like really had a big impact on me. I, I, from, well, I, I'd say the ages of like, I'd say age 12 and 13, I was, I was just really, really obsessed with horror films. Like, I would just exhaust the horror section and edit, in every video store.

What was your preferred sort of like subgenre of horror movie, you know, or did you lean towards? I really was looking, I think, for like, visceral, like, I was obsessed with the grotesque, and at the same time, I was getting into Joel Peter Whitkin and Ouija. And I, you know, I, uh, Ouija, the photographer, not the board. Well, I would be reasonable in this conversation, too, but yeah. I was always drawing, like, very morbid imagery and, but there were a few films that really, really had kind of a devastating impact on me. And, you know, one of them was Ryan De Palma's carry. That one really troubled me.

And it's funny because I saw it again recently, and I was shocked at like how campy it was. And I see it now as like this very, very sad comedy, but like deeply, deeply sad. Like a really... There is like a level of kitsch to it too. It's also like so imprinted in pop culture now that we see these things happening that are referencing it so specifically. And so you can't... When you're 11, you just receive things so differently, right? Exactly.

And I think I've always been troubled by kitsch. And De Palma, I mean, like, De Palma's always kind of like skirting the edge of, you know, He's putting like one toe in Kitch. And I mean, even with like Pino-Dinagio's score, which is like so sentimental, it's like dripping with sentimentality. It's like gross. Like it's like really, it's really beautiful, but then at the same time it's like, I don't know. It's very melodramatic, right? It's really melodramatic.

How do you, how does your family feel about an 11-year-old Ari becoming obsessed with Carrie and really gory horror films? Well, with Carrie, I was less, I was obsessed with it, but I wasn't, I didn't. I didn't like it. I really regretted seeing Carrie because I just, it was keeping me up for like years. Oh, wow. Like there were images in that film

that would not leave me. And, you know, like when you're walking in the dark and you're telling yourself so many times to not think about something that you're just like, you're forcing yourself to project these images like onto these dark walls. So I couldn't deal with walking around in the dark

because I couldn't get away from the images. I was like tormenting myself with them. My parents, know how they felt about me loving horror films. I was drawing a lot of morbid imagery and a lot of like, you know, like bodies being ripped apart by like tentacles and stuff like that.

Wow. And it's funny because I actually don't really, it's been a while since I've been into horror films. And I don't really consider myself primarily a horror director. But back then there was a clear trajectory, I would say. Back then, did you imagine yourself making movies when you were falling in love with those

movies or being terrified by them? Yeah. I mean, it's always been what I've wanted to do. My mom likes to tell a story about the first movie that she took me to go see in New York. I think it was Dick Tracy. And all I remember is that there was a scene of where somebody's firing a Tommy gun with like a wall of like flames behind him. And I like screamed and jumped out of my seat and ran down like five different city blocks in New York. My mom was chasing after me and I was just running in front of cars and almost got, almost got killed. Wow. That also was a movie that plays a lot differently when you're an adult. If you see it as a kid, it's like it feels not real, but there's something like hyper-real about it. And then when you watch it as a little, you're like, wow, this is a high-level camp. Like, you really just the colors and the violence and the dialogue.

Absolutely. So campy and just like the level of artifice there. I don't know if we have a comic book movie that is that devoted to like kind of replicating the comic book aesthetic. Thor Ragnarok was pretty fun and bright, but maybe not quite in the way that we're talking about. Well, yeah, because so much of that is also achieved in CGI, whereas Dick Tracy was kind of fat. I haven't seen it in so long, but I do remember being excited by how much of it was just, like, was built this fake. The whole world, yeah, they created a living comic book, right? Yeah, it's kind of amazing.

It's interesting because that movie is all artifice, like you say, your movie is not. It's interesting, too, that you told me that you spent some time living in England because it does. There's some austerity to the movie. There's something like very tense. It's like a family drama. You know, there's a little bit of like 70s drama in the movie that you made. Tell me a little bit about like the other movies that you started falling in love with when you were getting older and moving, maybe moving away from horror movies. Okay. And really quickly, I'll say that the other film that traumatized me as a kid was the was Peter Greenaway is the cook, the thief, his wife, and her lover. I don't like it. I find it really upsetting and it really did a number on me when I was a kid. It feels evil to me. those images are just seared into my brand. It's like you've been branded.

Yeah, well, that film branded me for sure. Another film that does that is Dogville, like really, really well. Your movie has something in common with all those movies, there's something like slightly unnerving and off at all times. That a low hum of dread,

even in Dick Tracy, there's a little bit of a like, is someone going to blow someone's face off at any moment feeling? Even though it's meant to be a comic book movie for 10-year-olds, I don't know. It's interesting that you hit on that so early. Yeah. It's funny because it's not like a mission for me.

I've been asked a few times, like, you know, why is all your stuff so dark? Is everything going to be this dark? And I haven't even thought about it. It's just that's what that's, I mean, in the case of hereditary, that's just what it was. But in the case of the shorts that I've made, it's, I guess, the same thing. At AFI, did you have a sense of what kind of movies you wanted to make when you finished? Yeah, I mean, I was mostly making dark comedy, and that's still something. I still, I see myself as being primarily a dark comedy filmmaker.

I think that's where my heart is, really. So how does Hereditary start coming together for you then? Hereditary came together because I had, at that point, I had written about nine feature scripts, and I had... All different genres, all different... All different genres. Yeah. To sell, to make?

To make. To direct. And there were a few that had, I almost got them going, but, you know, but they were either too big or, or, you know, for whatever reason they didn't happen. Is this in this period, this 2010 to 2017 period? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

And I. So what does someone like you do to live in that time? If you're not making the movie you want to make, are you waiting tables? Are you making commercials? Are you making short films? Like, how does that? Has that work? I was really like burning through savings. And I was, at one point, you know, I got paid to write a script and that lasted me a couple years. I was doing everything I could to basically not take the jobs that would be like a distraction. And hereditary got going right when I needed it to at the point where I would have. have to shit or get off the pot. Did you know what that, what the flip side of Ari's life would have been? What, like, what does the, if it, Harry doesn't happen, what are you doing right now?

I don't know. I don't know if I'm waiting tables, but I'm, you know, I spent about a year, like, reading scripts at Universal and I might have, you know, gone, I mean, I don't think I would ever want to be a script reader again. Although that was an education. But, yeah. It worked out. It worked out by the skin of my teeth.

And someone said, we'd like to give you money, you should make this movie. Well, it had traded hands a lot. So it was with one producer for about a year, and that fell through. And then another production company came on, and then it didn't quite work out with them. And it just kind of kept trading hands. But luckily, I had an agent, and luckily the script was. gaining traction and people knew about it and it had something of a reputation.

And then finally, it found financing. Tell me about making it because, as I said, there is an unnerving quality to most of the movie where we sense that there's something happening. So how do you build that on set? How do you build that into the story in a way that actually makes it work? The way I work or the way that I have worked thus far is that I compose. was a shot list before I talked to anybody on the crew. I spent a few months building a shot list so that I had the whole movie in my head. And then I sit down with my cinematographer and my

production designer in this case that's Pavel Pogorjelsky, who I've been working with since AFI and who's one of my best friends. And he's just brilliant. And the production designer was Grace Yun, who did an amazing job on this film. And so we would just go for every day, we would sit down with a dry erase board and map out, you know, like, you know, an overhead view of what the space might be. And then I'll draw out for them what the blocking is and where the camera will be. I take them through the whole movie, which took about three weeks of us working like four or five hours a day on that. At that point, we all have the same movie in our head. You're saying to them maybe watch this movie, this is the tone I'm going for, here are some reference points, or is it all?

Yeah. Yeah. I actually screened a lot of films for them, and I was kind of careful to not screen horror movies. Like when I was pitching this film, I was pitching it not as a horror film, or I wasn't using the word horror. I was describing it as a family tragedy that curdles into a nightmare. And so it was important that we address the family drama before even thinking about the horror elements. And I'm screening them all for different reasons, but we watched a couple Mike Lee films, and Mike Lee is probably my favorite filmmaker. We watched in the bedroom, which has a turn about 30 minutes. that isn't far,

it's not dissimilar from something that happens in hereditary. Yeah, something that changes a family. Yeah, and it changes the movie. It changes, the movie itself, reveals itself to be something kind of unsafe. It's very similar to Psycho, actually, what in the bedroom does. And I think what this film is trying to do, like, we have our shower scene. What was the most challenging thing about actually doing the movie? Because you're creating this family drama, but then there's also some,

genuine horror elements these two story versions colliding. Was it, were there technical challenges? Was it more like figuring out how to pace the movie? What didn't you see coming? Well, the technical challenges were huge. So we have the shot list now, right, that I was describing earlier. And so now we have to find a house that accommodates that.

And we scouted for a long time, didn't find anything, and then we realized that we would have to build the entire house on a stage. The exterior of the house, that is an actual location, but everything interior, the first floor, the second floor, the attic. Did you have to build that kind of tree house as well? The tree house was totally built. So the exterior was built on location, but the interior was built on the stage. Okay.

And we actually built two versions of the interior of the tree house. So everything in that house was built from scratch. But because we then had to replicate all the spaces with the miniatures, because Tony Collette's character is a miniatrist who, makes these dollhouses that are perfect replicas of the spaces that she lives in, or the spaces in her life. We had to have everything designed well in advance of shooting so that we could get those miniaturists going. That means we needed to know what the furniture was, what the plants are in the room, what's the wallpaper, what are the drapes, you know, over the windows.

It has to be perfect. It all has to match exactly. Exactly. I mean, you've got some also pretty intense effect shots in the film, and is all of that stuff practically done? Everything that we could do practically, we did do practically. There is... It feels like that for the most part in the movie. It feels very tactile. Well, thank you.

That was really important to me. I love what CGI can do as an enhancement tool. And then to get rid of things that you need to make the practical stuff work, right? Because there's like wirework and there's... And then if you're lighting somebody on fire, you know, there are like hoses and there things that are in frame that you need to remove. People have seen the trailer. They know someone gets lit on fire.

Yes. Yeah. It's okay. Did you like doing that stuff? That affects work? Because I imagine in your short films you didn't have too much of that to do, really. I did have some stuff in the short I made called Munchausen. It's always stressful because you don't know if you're going to achieve it. It's all theoretical until the day.

You over plan. Why Tony Kled is the matriarch in the story? I mean, she's somebody that I've really. I've been watching her for a long time, and I really think that she's one of our most reliable actresses, and she read it, she knew what the challenge was, she had the balls to take it on. Because I really think it requires, like, a certain lack of, like, vanity

to take a part like this on. Absolutely. Did you like that there was a little bit of an echo with the Sixth Sense and that there's some something, some low similarity between those two characters? Yeah, I mean, I like that. I wasn't thinking about that. And people have sort of likened this film to The Sixth Sense, and I sort of see it, but then I also, I feel like they're almost opposites in their, like, in their...

They're superficially similar, but totally completely different. Yeah. Well, I mean, the Sixth Sense, it's pretty hopeful by the end, and it's, it's like, it's a nice movie. So you're saying your movie's not nice or hopeful? No, I think creditory is really, it wants to be upsetting. It wants to be kind of alienating. That's why I've been sort of surprised by the reception. I've been really excited by it.

But it is a movie that aims to upset you. If it's working, it should be a pummeling experience. Can I share with you my theory about why that is? Yeah. Movies are very boring. People don't feel anything when they go to the movies anymore. Your movie really makes people feel things, especially in a communal way, and they're really responding to that.

I sensed it in the screening I was in. I think it's also one reason my horror movies are having a sustained moment for a time, but I don't know, do you get that sense that people are just like, you really had me gripping my chest the whole time? Yeah, yeah, which, and it's been amazing. It's nice, too, because I was talking a lot about, you know, wanting to make a film that was, like, patient and that took its time and that, like, really kind of earned everything that happened. And, you know, the film, the original cut of the film was three hours long, and so there are, like,

30 scenes that are not in the film. And so I feel like when I talk about it as, you know, a family drama more than a horror film, you know, I, that might be a little bit disingenuous now because I do feel like some of that was like scaled back. Where does this movie come from? I imagine that there's some personal experience that goes into writing something that is so intimate. So how do you make that into something that is for the world? Well, I think that's the beauty of not just the horror genre, but genre filmmaking, is that it's like this beautiful, like, filter where you can take something personal and then conform it to, like, meet these demands.

And the horror genre has, like, very clear demands, and a lot of that has to do with catharsis. How close is hereditary to the movie that you saw in your head? Well, it's shorter, right? Or it's leaner. Yeah. And I do think this cut is probably the best cut. Was it painful for you to have to winnow it down the way that you did? Yeah, it's always painful, but you have to do it.

So every cut hurts. Like every scene you remove, especially if you executed it in the way that you wanted to. It hurts. But you also know it has to happen. Or to make it more digestible? Like, why do you say you have to do it? Well, I think in the end, like, pacing is probably the most important thing, period. Your movie has to flow and breathe and, like, live.

And you watch it and you know, like, okay, I'm attached to this scene. I'm attached to like the dialogue. I really like how we lit it. The camera moves very beautifully here. But the movie's like stopping for a second and then starting in the next scene. And you have to listen to that.

And I'm still learning to listen to that. I feel that we've finally arrived at a cut where I had finally listened to everything. But it took a long time. It has to go bit by bit. You can't just like scorch earth because it's so painful. You're at peace now though?

Yeah, I'm at peace. Yeah. What other kinds of movies are you can? to make. Well, I'm in pre-production right now for, I guess it's a horror movie for another horror film, although I think that's the last one, I'll do. Why are you reluctant to even call it that? Like hereditary, it starts as one thing, and ends as another. And it's, in the most superficial sense, it's like Scandinavian folk horror, but it's really a character study. Was this one of the scripts that you had written before that you're finally getting a chance to make?

Yes, I had written it, but I had written it very recently. Can you describe just a little bit the feeling of being, I'd say this at the risk of seeming a schmuck, but like a hot young director, you know, there's very much like, I know that all the people that saw this movie that I've spoken to was like, wow, this guy's going to make amazing movies. And that must be cool. I presume that you're getting a lot of that as you talk to people about the next projects you're going to do. What does it like to be in that moment? I mean, it's really exciting.

It's great. Right now, like Herditary has not come out yet. and the reception has been like really warm and there's been like a lot of like hyperbole happening and you fantasize about those superlatives right like you like when you're making the film you fantasize about people talking this way about your film but I'm also maybe it's the realist in me

or the pessimist but I'm you know I'm waiting for the backlash and for the pendulum to swing in the other direction because I don't think a film can you know can really survive, like, those kinds of expectations. Like, I'm worried that people are going into redatory expecting something that it isn't. And so in some ways, I feel, like, pressure for the next one, that's maybe... You'll just have to keep topping yourself until you die. It'll be fine.

My goal is really just to keep making the next one. It keeps signing up for the next one before the new one comes out, you know? I know. That's the strategy. All right, I end every show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing that they've seen? what is the last great thing that you've seen? One movie I just want to mention, and it came out a couple years ago, but I'm kind of obsessed with it,

and I think it's really, really special, and I think it's just a perfect film. I'm tantalized right now. Is Andrew Hayes 45 years? That's amazing. He was here a few weeks ago. Oh, he was here a few years ago for Lean on Pete. For Lean on Pete. Wow.

Wonderful dude. I really, I've never met him, But I really think 45 years is like an all-timer. Like I've seen it so many times, and that's one movie that I screened for the crew on Hereditary. I guess the last thing I saw that I was really excited by, I guess there were two, I thought Isle of Dogs was kind of incredible.

Are you a West guy? Not all the time. Obviously, he's an incredible craftsman. But I, like, fall, I fall off the wagon and now I get back on. But this one I thought was just, like, kind of staggering as an aesthetic achievement. And then I really liked, you were never really here by Lynn Ramsey. Yeah. Can you talk about that just a little bit?

It's, like, really absurd. Like, it's a really ridiculous story. Like, it's so pulpy, and I love how pulpy it is. Like, there's this, like, Pizza Gate plot that's, like, happening. And you don't even, like, you might. Like blink and you miss it, but like that's what's happening. Yeah. But it is like so...

I had not heard it described as Pizza Gape, but that is exactly what it is. That's what's happening. It's so funny. And it's it's so tied, like it's sympathetically tied to this unhinged person's perspective in a way that I'm not sure if I've really seen it that way before. Like it really, it felt like it got at PTSD in a way that I had not seen before. and she's just such a brilliant filmmaker when it comes to editing and Joaquin Phoenix is incredible and Johnny Greenwood score is amazing

and yeah I really really loved that film and I think my expectations were dropped because there were a lot of people who I guess were disappointed by it and I was looking for that I was like looking for like what people had a problem with and I couldn't find it. I really like that film my producer is silently applauding right now because he really loves that movie too.

All right, I really loved your movie Hereditary. Thank you for doing this today. Thanks so much for having me.