Horror maestro Ari Aster on new film Beau Is Afraid: ‘It’s possessed of a nightmare logic’

For a decade, Ari Aster toiled in obscurity writing a dozen feature-length screenplays that he dreamt of directing but never got the chance. One of these was the original draft for his latest film, Beau Is Afraid, the sprawling adventures of an angst-ridden mummy’s boy. “This was the one that felt the freest and most unrestrained thing I had written,” explains the American director when we meet in London. “It was just me making myself laugh and going strictly by my gut.”

Aster, 36, returned to the screenplay after scaring the wits out of audiences with his first two features, Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019) — and scoring hits with both. He constructed his film like a Homeric odyssey and found himself thinking of the ancient Greeks — as well as his own heritage. “There is something very funny and Jewish about many of these gods being so petty. There’s a tradition in those plays of gods punishing people for not celebrating them with enough devotion.”

But Aster also wanted to bring what he describes as a “Talmudic weight” to Beau’s almost three-hour running time and says that “in Jewish fashion, the gods are replaced by the mother here.” One of the most striking things about Beau Wassermann, as played by Joaquin Phoenix, is his crippling passivity. Throughout the film he is assailed by all manner of indignities and never seems to catch a break, especially not from his mother Mona (an imperious Patti LuPone). 

“In retrospect, Beau’s passivity almost looks like a corrective to the traditional hero’s journey and an aberration of it,” Aster says. “But for me the film was from the beginning like a picaresque, and there was a real joy in building something that could contribute to that tradition.” The hellish world that Beau encounters when he leaves his apartment is full of random acts of violence and confusing flights of fancy. “My idea was to create a landscape which fits Beau’s interior,” Aster says. “The film is possessed of this nightmare logic, which I had to feel my way through and find a way of keeping that process intuitive.” 

We are seated in a hotel room. Aster, who is dressed in a black zip-up hoodie, cradles a tiny coffee cup in his hands as if it were a wounded bird. He speaks carefully with a halting cadence (in his youth he suffered from a stutter) and maintains direct eye-contact throughout our conversation. He looks back on those early years of struggle when no one wanted to make the films he was writing as an important period of “experimenting and practising”. But he also acknowledges that until he finally broke through with Hereditary, “the feeling was that it might never happen.”

As a teenager, Aster was a devoted cinephile with a penchant for horror. “I was probably more drawn to provocation than anything else,” he says. “One film I loved as a teenager was Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q, which felt truly transgressive and exciting.” While studying directing at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, Aster brought his own sense of transgression to his first short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011), which has been viewed nearly 5mn times on YouTube. The film’s incestuous plotline upended narrative convention by depicting a son coercing his father into a sexual relationship.

Aster had the idea for Beau Is Afraid when he was on the point of vacating his Los Angeles apartment to move back in with his parents. His mother is a published poet and his father is a jazz drummer. He imagined the story of a man living in an apartment like his own, who is filled with anxiety, afraid of nearly everything and preparing to visit his mother, only for life to conspire against him achieving his aim. “It’s like a Jewish Lord of the Rings, but he’s just going to his mom’s house,” Aster says in a behind-the-scenes video for the film.

It is an understatement to say that Beau Is Afraid has divided critics. Martin Scorsese, an Aster supporter, compared the film’s largely negative reception to the one received by Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (another picaresque) when it came out in 1975. Scorsese suggested that it could take several years before Beau is reappraised in similarly positive fashion. “It’s a dream come true because he is my hero,” says Aster. “I was very moved by how many filmmakers he supported before he ever supported me.”

Aster credits the New York-based independent studio A24, which also produced Hereditary and Midsommar, for backing his vision to the hilt. “I made very few compromises for Beau,” he says. “For better or worse Beau is what I set out to make. The fact that A24 got behind this film and its scale, given just how strange it is, I think is really amazing in this climate.”

Working with an actor of Phoenix’s calibre also seems to have opened a more intuitive side to Aster’s filmmaking. “I knew that my ways of working in the past would not fly with him,” Aster says. “Any of the scenes that required a lot from him were ones where I had a plan in my back pocket only if we needed it or were stranded. That way of working instinctively breathed new life into the material and made the experience of shooting the film less like rote. It made me realise I want to go further in this direction. I now feel enough confidence in my sense of vocabulary to just pivot or throw away a plan and recognise when we’re spinning our wheels.”

Aster does not reveal what his next film project is but there is the sense with Beau Is Afraid that he has reached the end of a cycle of trauma-based dramas. “In some ways, Beau is parodying that and represents a sort of end of the road,” he says. “There’s a feeling that this is maybe the third of a trilogy and that this one was meant to explode a lot of those ideas we’ve been playing with. I wanted to make a film that felt like it was devouring itself or eating its own head.”

‘Beau Is Afraid’ is in UK cinemas from May 19 and in US cinemas now