“Beau Is Afraid” kicks off today’s craziest movie of the year – we met director Ari Aster for an interview!

Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix (“Joker”) embodies in “Beau Is Afraid” the main character plagued by every conceivable phobia who really only wants to travel to the funeral of his Jewish (super) mother, but perceives the world at his doorstep as if it had ended A post-apocalyptic civil war rages on the street, in which a naked serial killer, among others, blindly stabs passers-by.

You might recognize it from the short description of the plot: “Beau Is Afraid” is a movie like no other – and an absolute must for any cinema fan who also feels at home off the beaten track! At the same time, there will be hardly anyone who does not need to talk after the three-hour psycho(s) trip full of absurd and bizarre events – but if you have specific questions about the content, you are more likely to ask Ari Aster (“Hereditary”, “Midsommar “) not in the right place…

MOVIE BEGINS:

Ari Aster: Don’t worry, everything will be fine (laughs).

World premiere in the form of an April 1 joke

MOVIE BEGINS:

Ari Aster: I haven’t followed the interpretations yet. It’s just too early, I can currently only absorb anything “Beau Is Afraid” related in small amounts. It’s downright disorienting to release a movie. It’s taken so much time to get it in the right shape and it’s all yours, but once it’s released, it’s over. That’s why I’m staying away from the current discourse about the film for a while, to hopefully be able to keep a bit of the film to myself for the time being.

MOVIE BEGINS:

Ari Aster: I didn’t see the whole movie, my stomach couldn’t take it. But from what I heard, the response in the room sounded very encouraging.

MOVIE BEGINS:

Ari Aster: I just missed the world. I had so much fun writing them. I started it ten years ago and then I put the script in a drawer and didn’t think about it. At one point I pulled it out and it still made me laugh, even though I’ve aged over time and a lot has changed for me in other ways as well. Then I blew up the story again and cast it in picaresque form, even though that is actually more of a literary than a cinematic tradition. It became this spacious thing that I like to wander around in.

MOVIE BEGINS:

Ari Aster: This is actually very close to the real process…

A nightmare from which there is (almost) no escape

MOVIE BEGINS:

Ari Aster: I don’t know exactly either. That is ultimately how my imagination works. I know I always think of the worst case scenario first, even though I don’t want to right now. But at least I have the movies as a creative outlet to let that come out and process…

MOVIE STARS:

Ari Aster: You just have to trust that as long as it works for you, it will work for others. You need to pull the audience as deep into this situation as possible. It also takes a lot of skill to stage something in an exciting way that maybe shouldn’t work at all. But that’s exactly what I love about filmmaking…

The pure surplus

MOVIE BEGINS:

Ari Aster: They’re just very different movies. There’s a whole different contract between me and the audience when I’m making a low-key movie – or Beau Is Afraid, for that matter – that’s inherently uninhibited at this point. My goal was glorious maximalism. Also, each part of the movie calls for different things, a different attitude, and a different philosophy. “Beau Is Afraid” changes completely again and again within three hours.

MOVIE BEGINS:

Ari Aster: The plan was always to make the movie as big as possible. The nature of a picaresque novel is that it meanders in a satisfying way – and I don’t mean the derogatory sense of the word “meander”, but it just very well describes the film that keeps peeling off its skin and moving on to the next. , and doing it anyway find inner cohesion. I see the film as a shape-shifter, descending deeper and deeper into Beau’s character – to create an epic that becomes more and more intimate at the same time. The landscape of the film is the main character’s interior.

MOVIE BEGINS: The exorcist

Ari Aster: I was obviously joking and I hope people will understand the irony…

MOVIE BEGINS: … well, I’d pay money to sit on “Beau Is Afraid” between two people going to the cinema in anticipation of another “Lord of the Rings” …

Ari Aster: …Yes! I only regret it because “Lord of the Rings” is such a Jewish lyric anyway. The phrase “the Jewish Lord of the Rings” is therefore somehow double dubbed. I should have said “the jewish ‘Lawrence of Arabia'” – except that as the film progresses, Beau travels not Arabia, but his own guts…

To the extensive MOVIE STARTS review of “Beau Is Afraid”

MOVIE BEGINS:

Ari Aster (thinks for a long time): Yes, maybe his father. If people have seen the movie, they’ll know why that would be pretty cool…

Speaking of the need to talk, our podcast moderator Sebastian and I had that too after the movie, which is why we have iIn fact, we covered “Beau Is Afraid” in great detail again in the new episode of big screen love. Listen up:

After “Beau Is Afraid,” we remain extremely excited to see what Ari Aster will pull next from his script drawer, which is apparently still bursting at the seams. Plus, it almost doesn’t matter exactly how you feel about the movie at the end, it’s just nice to see a studio like A24 spend a whopping $30 million on a trip like this, showing that there are still studios willing to take a real risk for a director’s vision. Ari Aster seems to have built up a huge reputation with “Hereditary” and “Midsummer”…