Against crowd-pleasing

On Ari Aster and Beau Is Afraid. vox.com/culture CULTURE   As you might have [heard](, in the next few weeks the American entertainment industry may once again be facing a writers’ strike. (The longest on record was in 1988, and lasted for five months!) More on that soon, but in the meantime it’s made me think a lot about the value of writers having the freedom to experiment, mess with stories, and do weird stuff that might not please the whole crowd. Which is why it was so fun for me to [talk to Ari Aster](, director of the sure-to-be divisive [Beau Is Afraid](. Aster (who, despite what his movies might suggest, is a very nice guy) writes his own screenplays, and they’re wild, as you know if you’ve seen Hereditary or Midsommar. But there’s something really wonderful about watching his movies, because you get the feeling sometimes that he’s tapped into something subliminal. “It was very liberating to just have this invented world that allowed me to go wherever my intuition led me,” he told me in [our interview](. “If some very stupid idea made me laugh, the challenge was to find a way to get it in there and have it be cohesive with the whole.” My hope is that working writers will have the support they need to follow their own creative impulses; some will succeed, some will fail spectacularly, but that’s how culture keeps from turning a rut into a grave. – [Alissa WIlkinson](, senior reporter Ari Aster doesn't want to explain Beau Is Afraid [Joaquin Phoenix in Beau Is Afraid]( A24 Asking Ari Aster to explain his movies is not a winning proposition, and thank goodness. The director of [Hereditary]( and [Midsommar]( works highly intuitively, and that shows up on the screen. While his films seem to beg for a close reading — take, for example, all the many bizarre and hilarious signs in the background of his latest film, [Beau Is Afraid]( — ultimately, they tend to defy explanation. That makes his films less locked to one way of thinking about them, less obviously “about” one thing in particular. Audiences get the chance to feel their way through his movies, just as Aster does when he makes them. You can take away your own ideas and discomforts and revelations from Beau Is Afraid, and they might not be the same as anyone else’s, and that’s just fine. Nevertheless, it’s fun to talk to Aster, who is deliberate and insightful about his own working process. Shortly before the film’s release, he and I spoke about how he designed some of the movie’s more comical and whimsical elements, what he’s trying to do when he makes a movie, and one little key to understanding Beau. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Midsommar fans keep asking me about this movie. The way I describe it is that, whereas Midsommar is an inversion of a Disney Princess fantasy, this is an inverted, twisted hero’s odyssey. Did it start off being that kind of story? It was always something of a risk, playing with the hero’s journey. But it’s also a film that’s about an unlived life. It’s set in this cartoon world that should function as a mirror of the world we’re in. It’s awful in all the ways that the world is awful, but with the dial turned just a little bit higher. The trick was to make Beau very real. He’s our surrogate. He is who we have to hold on to. The challenge was, how do I make that experience incredibly visceral and immersive, and then at the same time, put him in this world that is just endlessly malign? That’s part of what’s so stressful and good about it. It honestly mirrored some of my most banal but aggravating recurring dreams, and that made it even more tense. I have a recurring nightmare where I need to go somewhere, and everyone I encounter is keeping me from getting there. I have nightmares about everything I do in life being projected in front of the whole world. The fantasy that everyone’s mad at me. These are all very common, boring things that everyone encounters, and yet they are the world as it exists to Beau. Right? Yeah. It was very liberating to just have this invented world that allowed me to go wherever my intuition led me. If some very stupid idea made me laugh, the challenge was to find a way to get it in there and have it be cohesive with the whole. But there was nothing too crazy, too stupid, too strange. That was just fun. It felt like one guy’s nightmare that just kept getting worse. Hopefully, it’s not a pile-on. I tried to shape it so that there were these respites, where the nature of the film would keep changing. Again, it’s tricky, because you hope that all those pieces are in harmony with each other. But with a film like this, you’re really, really clinging to your intuition. And nightmares are funny — when you’re not having them. Yes, that’s right. [Read the full story »](  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( Star Wars has a Baby Yoda problem The Mandalorian was the answer to all of Star Wars’ problems — until it embodied them. [Read the full story »]( When your neighbors become your overlords How HOAs became an unnecessary necessary evil. [Read the full story »](   Support our work We aim to explain what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters. Support our mission by making a gift today. [Give](   More good stuff to read today - [Small acts of kindness matter more than you think]( - [Beef's sexual assault controversy, explained]( - [Ron DeSantis is plotting revenge on Disney]( - [What is misoprostol? 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