You’d expect the guy who made his debut with “Hereditary,” the 2018 supernatural thriller loaded with domestic possessions, shadowy shapes in corners and a fair amount of household witchery, to know about the horrors of home. And the writer-director Ari Aster’s version of that hell was a box in the East Village.
“It was like Travis Bickle’s apartment, but with no windows,” moaned Aster, 36, going off on a recent video call about his “total hovel” of a pandemic lockdown. “I was punishing myself. I don’t know why I lived there for so long. I guess I was trying to save money, but it was a really terrible situation.”
Aster followed “Hereditary” with 2019’s most ill-advised date movie, the nerve-shredding “Midsommar” (gaslighting boyfriends and weird Swedes). Just as the filmmaker was becoming a big deal, the world had other plans. But his time in the East Village rekindled something.
His forthcoming third feature, the rippling pitch-black comedy “Beau Is Afraid” (in theaters April 21), begins in one of those nightmarish apartments, permeated by ravenous brown spiders, shrieks from violent neighbors and the clammy air of dead prospects. Inside lives Beau (a paunchy, failure-to-launch Joaquin Phoenix), exquisitely neurotic and justified in those anxieties.
Beau needs to leave, especially after hearing that his distant mother has been crushed by a chandelier — this is, after all, an Ari Aster film. Venturing out, Beau wanders into a landscape of vicious suburban teenagers, broken war veterans, helpers, hinderers and assorted psychos. (The cast includes Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Richard Kind and Parker Posey.) “Taxi Driver” will come to mind, as will, more aptly, Martin Scorsese’s 1985 midnight purgatory, the now-classic “After Hours.”
“It began with me just trying to make myself laugh,” Aster said of the script, which was developed in drafts over several years. He once thought it would be his debut and even shot a short sequence in 2011, during graduate school at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The screenplay “grew into this receptacle for all sorts of ideas, things that struck me for maybe reasons I didn’t quite understand,” he said. “I built out something that was this comic, Freudian odyssey, very episodic and, I thought, very funny.”
He said that serenely, confidently. Behind Aster was a framed Hermès scarf featuring a mysterious masked woman, designed by Daniel Clowes, the “Eightball” cartoonist whom the director considers a close friend and who offered encouragement on “Beau.” In both men’s work, chiaroscuro laughs come hand in hand with personal catastrophe.
The actress Florence Pugh, the indelible core of “Midsommar,” called Aster “a stand-up comedian at heart.” She explained, “Once you laugh at one thing, he will try and make you laugh at all the other things. He’ll keep going and everybody will be crying in fits of laughter.”
She’s fully aware of the disparity between the cutup she remembers from weekends and dinners and the perfectionist on set. “We were shooting in a very hot field with three different languages, so I wouldn’t say that all of it was pleasurable,” Pugh recalled. “Also, it shouldn’t be. Why would making a movie like that be pleasurable?”
Regardless, Pugh spoke lovingly of a director she found “peculiar in the mad genius kind of way,” one who put her and her co-star Jack Reynor through their paces. “He would do therapy sessions with Jack and I in our characters. Ari would be our therapist and would be asking us questions. I find that stuff quite hard.”
Aster said that for him, “‘Midsommar’ is a joke,” adding: “It’s working toward a punchline. I remember reading a couple of reviews where people were like, the sex scene is unintentionally funny. I got very defensive. That was supposed to be funny.”
Doubling down on his skewed sense of humor, and fleeing his hovel to be closer to family in Santa Fe, N.M. (he’s since relocated to nicer digs in NoHo in New York), Aster spent time shaping his script into something he could finally attempt without compromise. He needed a Beau and swung big, writing a letter to someone who seemed to enjoy a challenge.
“I knew that I could never, ever just ‘act’ in front of Ari — it’s something that I find repulsive and difficult to do,” Phoenix said, calling from New York, where he’s shooting “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the sequel to his 2019 blockbuster. “You couldn’t do that with Ari. He would sense it immediately. It’s nice to know that you are working with somebody like that.”
Phoenix speaks in halting sentences, protective of a process that he’d like to keep in the dark. “I enjoy things that are, at times, difficult to achieve,” he said.
But was Aster funny? “We certainly laughed a great deal,” the actor replied. “What do they call it? Gallows humor. The characters are going through such trauma, you haven’t a choice but to find something funny about it.”
Beyond praising Aster’s standards, Phoenix articulated a bond rooted in risk. “Sometimes it’s as simple as: I could be around you for four months because I like the way you talk about these characters, and I can see that you have a willingness to push yourself, and to be pushed and to push back, and that’s exciting to me,” the actor said.
Aster confirmed that “Joaquin is ruthlessly investigative.” The director said, “If something feels false or not right, he won’t be able to do it. It’s not even about him refusing to do something — his body will stop him.”
Over months of preliminary chats with Phoenix (“a real courtship,” Aster said) and weeks of page-by-page screenplay analysis that extended through more than 60 days of shooting in Montreal during the summer of 2021, a sharper, stranger movie came into focus.
“It was the best experience of my life,” Aster said. “But it also taught me how I want to work in the future — the seriousness with which I expect an actor to approach any given part.”
Teary-eyed and pitched on the edge of panic, Beau is unlike anything Phoenix has created, save for one notorious turn that now feels like a watershed: “I’m Still Here” (2010), supposedly a chronicle of the actor’s breakdown. Aster identified that mockumentary meltdown, poised between humor and cringey self-ruination, as the Phoenix performance that grabbed him.
“What he was doing with his own name was very brave, and arguably suicidal,” the filmmaker said. “And that to me was thrilling.” In coy half-nods, Aster let on that they have another project in development; his next film will “almost certainly” be a western.
Aster would rather not address his fixation on families in extremis (“I’m going to have to be a little closed on that one,” he said after a 10-second pause), nor on the guilt that thrums through his movies like a live wire. LuPone joins Toni Collette’s Annie from “Hereditary” as another monstrous mom, though his own mother, the poet and visual artist Bobbi Lurie, is nothing like his creations, the director insisted.
“Guilt?” Aster repeated. “Isn’t that just a huge part of life? For me, the film is like a big Jewish comedy, and that’s the first thing to go in the pot.”
“Beau” arrives at a moment of post-Oscars triumph for its studio, A24, the company behind “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Aster is as close as the indie company has to a signature voice, a house stylist. And with “Beau,” his style vaults into uncharted territory, unencumbered and free.
Is he happier?
“It feels more like me than anything I’ve made,” Aster said of his latest work. “But I’m still me. So ‘happier’? Not really.”
He’s better at the stand-up thing than you’d guess.
