Filmmaker Ari Aster talks about the 'Frankenstein's monster' that is 'Midsommar'
Barbara VanDenburgh
"Hereditary" didn't have to win any awards or break any box-office records to be the film of 2018. A nightmarish twist on dysfunctional families, the horror film quickly entered the pop-culture cannon. Toni Collette's shrieking face, a little girl obsessed with crafting freakish totems, people on fire for some reason — it was everywhere, and it was either something you ran toward or ran from as quickly as your legs could carry you.
"I'm always aiming to have the viewers leave at least a little bit confused as to how to feel," writer/director Ari Aster said in a phone interview. He's doubling down on that artistic commitment in his second film "Midsommar," a wild breakup movie by way of folk-horror that takes a couple on the verge of splitting to a Swedish commune for a solstice celebration. It goes without saying that bad things happen to them.
Aster is still early in his career, but his creative vision is a striking one, perhaps because he's spent so much time with so many difficult films. His mom, an artist and discerning cinephile herself, supported her son's precocious viewing habits, showing him films as advanced as "Blue Velvet" and "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" when he was 11 or 12.
"They all really bothered me when I first watched them, and they grew to be cherished experiences," Aster said. Here's more of our conversation.
Question: Your films take a certain delight in confusing and upsetting the audience. What films make you uncomfortable?
Answer: There are films that achieve a sort of tonal ambivalence that excites me. I saw "Dogville" (Lars von Trier's 2003 film) in a theater with my mom when it first was released. I remember just loving it and finding it to be hilarious and really exciting, and definitely feeling that the rest of the audience was on a different page.
Q: How did those films influence your own style?
A: As you're making short films and learning how to do it, you rip everybody off and make extremely derivative work and find what works for you and what doesn't. After a while, you forget about who you're copying and you find your own style, which ends up being a Frankenstein's monster of all the things that you loved growing up and all the things you connected with. Hopefully as I keep going, I'll be able to separate myself even more from whatever those influences are.
Q: "Midsommar" is incredibly scary and disturbing, but it's also really funny. Is it hard to achieve a balance of those tones?
A: Tone for me is sort of a gut thing, it's pretty instinctual. I'm never really straining to achieve a certain tone. If you're straining, there's probably something wrong. There are a lot of funny things in "Hereditary," it just depends on how dark your sense of humor is. For me, a film without humor is a film wasted. I know very few great films that are totally humorless. … It's about keeping a straight face and being as mischievous as possible. … Being mischievous without being superior is the key.
MOVIE REVIEW: Horror flick 'Midsommar' is ready to mess with your mind
Q: Florence Pugh goes to some dark places in "Midsommar." She's phenomenal in the lead role, and she's only 23.How did you get that performance out of her?
A: She's a really wonderful actress and she's totally untrained, which to me is still kind of shocking. It's totally instinctual for her, which is crazy. She is so poised and has such control of her machine. She's just a natural. She's so good, it makes my job very easy, because her instincts are very reliable. It was very seldom I ever even had to come up to her with any sort of adjustment, as far as how she was approaching a scene emotionally.
Q: "Midsommar" is essentially a breakup movie, but you've put a distressing horror-twist on it that's creatively so fascinating. Why do you turn to the horror genre?
A: I like genre, because it allows you to pass a more personal story through a filter that once it's passed through becomes something else. I think about these films less as horror movies, although "Hereditary" is certainly a horror movie. I see this one as more of a fairy tale.
Q: A very twisted fairy tale.
A: Well most of them are pretty twisted. We're living in the Disney age, where everything has been liquidated and turned into something toothless. I guess I'm a child of the melodramatic tradition, which is that you take characters and you try to have the scope and shape and size of the movie match the intensity of their feelings. It's also part of the expressionistic tradition, where you match the exterior with the interior, where the world of the film reflects the interior of the characters.
That's something I'm trying to get at with these films. When you're in a breakup, it doesn't feel like this minor chapter in your life that you'll get over and life goes on. It feels cataclysmic when you're in it. I wanted to make a movie that feels as consequential as a breakup feels to the person who's in the middle of it.
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