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Mothers have loomed large throughout Aster’s work, from his short Munchausen, in which a mom poisons her son, to Hereditary, which produced a viral clip of Toni Collette screaming “I am your mother!” in a violent fury. Beau Is Afraid’s mom is glamorous and terrifying, the type of matriarch who’s always quick to criticize her son—who, in turn, can be a little shit. As you might, Aster is tight-lipped about why mothers interest him so much. “It’s where everything starts for everybody,” he says.
He’s free with his literary references, though. “The idea was to make this Freudian Odyssey,” Aster says. “So it’s very indebted to Freud and Jung and things like that. I wanted to make this Borgesian ouroboros narrative.” It’s also “very Jewish,” he confirms, and it feels it—from a shiva gag to the way it wrestles with guilt on a grand scale.
If a movie that combines symbols of infinity, magical realism, psychoanalysis, and epic poems sounds heady, rest assured that Aster undercuts it all with a raft of prurient and intentionally silly jokes. He takes out his phone to show me just how detailed, and packed with gags, the cityscape that Beau lives in is. On the Montreal set, there’s a store called “Erectus Ejectus.” The movie theater plays fake movies including Tears of a Spaceman. There’s a poster advertising Aster’s version of Criss Angel’s Mindfreak called Braintard and a flier for a music festival with bands including “Anal Puke and “Queef Hammers.” Plus, the walls are decorated with gential-heavy graffiti, some of which Aster drew himself.
Meanwhile, the scale of the production meant Aster was able to reach out to actors he had always wanted to work with, among them, of course, Phoenix—who took some convincing before he signed on. “He doesn’t come onto [just] any project, likely because he invests so much of himself into every part, which I experienced firsthand on this film,” Aster explains. “But my feeling about Joaquin before I offered him the part was that he might be the best actor in the world. And after working with him, I think he’s better than I thought he was.”
Phoenix was a bellwether, Aster says, for when something wasn’t working on set. “It would make him throw up to hear this, but he’s somebody who can’t actually really do anything that’s false,” Aster says. Phoenix would get stuck if he felt something was dishonest: “So often, I would see him almost bumping against something and I realized that something was wrong in the script or that something needed work.”
Aster has always recruited great performers—Collette and Gabriel Byrne in Hereditary; Florence Pugh, the relative newcomer, in Midsommar—but Beau has a dream team of idiosyncratic actors, among them Parker Posey. (“I was in love with her when I was a kid.”) As for the crucial role of Beau’s imposing mom, Aster secured LuPone, who he had seen in a David Mamet play some years ago. He was aware of her talent, but it was footage of her on a red carpet that cemented his desire to cast her. He tries to put the appeal delicately. She was “just being a hardass,” a familiar demeanor to anyone who has seen her put down someone misbehaving in the theater. Phoenix’s process couldn’t have been more different than that of the Juilliard-trained musical theater queen Patti LuPone, who plays his mother, but they “complemented” each other, Aster says.
Watching Beau Is Afraid is an almost distressingly intimate experience, like living inside a panic attack or climbing into someone’s subconscious. You have to give yourself over to the dream logic of Beau’s existence, where just journeying outside your front door is a terrifying prospect. “I wanted the film to be as subjective as you can get and I wanted the feeling to be like you’ve been through a person—through somebody’s nervous system,” Aster says.
Aster is prepared for people to have strong, possibly negative, feelings after watching the film. It’s a big swing, and he knows it. “I’m expecting it to be rejected by a lot of people on first viewing,” he says. “It’s doing very weird things and I’m hoping it’s something that will grow for people afterwards. I think if people do reject it at first that’s not bad,” he continues. “I think that the film almost wants that and then it wants to linger and shape-shift.”
He pauses. “I mean, hopefully, people like it on first viewing as well.”
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Esther Zuckerman
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