Director Ari Aster on genre expectation, his influences, and Hereditary (without spoiling it)

by Andrew Parker

Hereditary filmmaker Ari Aster’s love for cinema is infectious. Seeing that his heavily buzzed about debut feature (which opens in theatres everywhere this weekend) is so difficult to talk about in an interview without spoiling the terrifying game entirely, it’s probably easier for Aster to gush about the numerous different directors and films that influenced Hereditary when trying to talk about the film’s slippery, ever changing tone. When asked about his cinematic influences during a stop in Toronto on his first ever press tour, Aster opens up giddily.

Hereditary, which debuted to raves and plenty of admissions of outright terror earlier in the year at Sundance, tells the story of a seemingly cursed family terrorized by the unknown. After the death of their beloved grandmother, mother Annie (Toni Collette), father Steve (Gabriel Byrne), teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff), and creepy young daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) are left with the sense that the old lady was into something potentially demonic. Despite a family history of mental illness, signs and clues point to a more supernatural answer to the fracturing family’s increasingly disturbing and violent troubles.

Aster espouses the virtues of many of his favourite filmmakers when talking about the slow burning, incrementally creepy style of Hereditary, a story that was born from the writer-director’s own complicate feelings on the nature of grief and a three year period where his own family was put through the emotional wringer. The emotions of Hereditary are deeply personal to Ari Aster, but the style and storytelling techniques are elements he readily admits he came to by studying great films in sometimes disparate genres.

Aster says Hereditary’s most obvious influence is Don’t Look Now, and director Nicholas Roeg’s mastery of tone and montage. He gushes at length about Polanski (“which is dangerous to cite because he’s not the best guy”) and his directorial run from Repulsion to Chinatown, Japanese ghost stories like Ugetsu and Empire of Passion, and domestic dramas like In the Bedroom (which he cites as a big influence on Hereditary’s first major plot twist). He says that Mike Leigh is his favourite living filmmaker. (“No one can work the way he does”) He loves what South Korean genre filmmakers have been producing with the likes of The Wailing and Save the Green Planet. Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years and the long disputed three hour cut of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret are two of his favourite films in recent memory. Todd Solondz’s Happiness made a huge impact on Aster while he was growing up. He says that Peter Greenaway is a filmmaker that he admires, but he doesn’t actually like. (“His films feel evil in a way that I don’t actually enjoy. I think he’s an authentic misanthrope.”)

“I obviously love talking about other filmmakers,” he says with a laugh after rattling off a list of admirations. “I really consider myself a cinephile as much as I would consider myself a filmmaker. I’m making movies almost so they can have dialogues with other movies.”

We further chatted with Aster about the emotional impact behind his film, the terror of showing audiences an essentially unfinished version of the film at Sundance, battling audience complacency within the horror genre, and keeping track of the numerous metaphorical references within Hereditary.

It’s very rare these days to have a horror film so deeply rooted in a specific sort of emotion like grief, since most horror movies these days are based around jump scares, cheap thrills, or previously existing material. What was it like trying to create a horror movie specifically from an emotional approach?

Ari Aster (left) and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski on the set of Hereditary

Ari Aster: I’ve said this before, but when I started pitching the film, I was never pitching it as a horror film. I was always really careful not to do that. I was describing it as a family tragedy that curdled into a nightmare. When a disaster strikes, it can feel like a nightmare, especially when tragedies happen in quick succession. In that sense, I feel like the film owes more a debt to the domestic melodrama than it does to the horror genre. It’s a film that kind of collapses under the weight of feelings in the worst possible way.

Ultimately, though, I always wanted to meet those demands and make a satisfying horror film. But it was always important to me that the film functioned first as a vivid family drama. Then, the horror elements would grow out of what these people are going through. It is a film about suffering.

The more traditional horror elements of the film are something very important to what the audience feels while watching it, but I also heard that when the film first screened at Sundance that you weren’t fully done with the effects yet. What has changed about the film between when it first screened and now, and what was it like screening something that you might have felt was unfinished to an audience that ended up reacting well to it?

Ari Aster: As far as I’m concerned, a lot has changed, but I’m also sure that most people won’t really notice that much. (laughs) We were invited to Sundance, and we really needed about two-and-a-half to three months of post-production to finish, but we only had three weeks to make the deadline. So we had a decision to make. Obviously we made the decision to accept the invitation, and we tried packing as much as we could into three weeks as possible. We didn’t finish the film in the sense that the sound design, which is such a huge part of the final film, wasn’t finished, and the visual effects were mostly done. Everything was there, but not all of it was finished or polished.

There was some stuff that I thought was really bad, and that first screening was torture for me because you tend to obsess over that. You get so lost in the minutae of making a film as it is that it becomes hard to see anything clearly after awhile. You forget what you were even trying to make, honestly, and all you can think is, “Fuck, this scene needs work.” You’re not even watching the movie with the audience at that point. You’re lost in your own head for twenty minutes thinking about how a scene that’s coming up isn’t done, and you’re fearing that the whole audience is just going to turn on you.

It was a huge relief to see that people liked the film, and I guess they weren’t really noticing the things that I saw as unfinished. The film you saw has moments that are much more potent, but even now if you were to ask me, there are still things that I would say could be better, but that’s just because I have spent way too much time with it. (laughs) At a certain point, you just have to stop, especially on a low budget film, which this definitely was.

Do you get a particular joy out of upending genre expectations or would you prefer to be known as a provocateur when you make something like this?

Ari Aster: Nothing is more annoying than being provocative for the sake of being provocative. I do love genre, though, because people come with certain expectations. They know the devices. They know the tropes. They know the conventions. And I think that encourages a certain amount of complacency in audiences. There’s something exciting about establishing and setting up something that’s familiar, and then upending that. What happens thirty minutes into this film is almost like a chute opening up and dropping the audience into something else completely different. Hopefully, that shocks them out of that complacency. I think all the best genre films attempt to do that.

The challenge is trying to satisfy those demands while almost consciously rejecting them. You want to make the audience come with you on your own terms. I always look for that moment in movies where I don’t know where the film is going, and I no longer feel in control of the experience. That complacency can sometimes manifest itself as a resentment within audiences. I feel especially in the horror genre that a lot of them are produced so cynically because there’s already an audience that’s built in there, and it’s an easy way to make a buck on the cheap.

It’s too bad horror is a genre where films are almost always “guilty until proven innocent” because there’s so much that can and has been done with it. There are always horror films coming out that are doing something deeper and more sophisticated, but even all the way back to the B-movies of Val Lewton we’ve seen there have been filmmakers always striving to do something original with the medium.

I feel like this is the kind of film where years down the road – long after spoilers about what happens are out in the open for everyone to see – people will write about at great length from a number of different perspectives. It can be looked at psychologically, religiously, historically, and probably any other number of different ways that I’m forgetting. When you are coming up with material like this, are you constantly aware of how people are going to read the text of the film, or do you just prefer to let it flow naturally?

Ari Aster: I hope I did. (laughs) I feel like I took the time to make sure all of those layers were there. I hope that it’s rich with metaphor, and I feel like the best horror films are. I hope there’s a lot to pick apart here.

The original cut of the film was three hours long, and I would love to show that, but I’m not sure it would really work. I sometimes feel slightly disingenuous when I talk about the film as a slow burn because that cut is the original slow burn that I was talking about. (laughs) This one is definitely the best cut, though, because rhythm and pacing are important when you’re trying to let people take all of these themes in. I’m very happy with the pacing here, and I think the previous version demanded a lot more patience than a first time feature filmmaker has the right to when there’s money on the table. (laughs)

But I’m hoping that if you see parallels in the film that you’ll know that they’re intentional. I try not to talk too much about them for obvious reason. I think that they’re there and they’re explicit enough. A good example that doesn’t spoil much is how the dollhouses that the mother creates are a metaphor for the family’s lack of agency. Even when I say it, it feels obvious to me and that it doesn’t need to be said. I always wonder if I’m robbing something from the film if I’m articulating something specific to someone who’s going to end up watching it. But yes, I always tried to be cognizant of that, and if you read something into the film, it’s probably intentional.

Hereditary opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, June 8, 2018.

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