“Eddington” director Ali Astor could not “live on the internet.” So he made a movie about it
Eddington We also explore conspiracy theories and podcasters and YouTubers to spread them online in exchange for influence and profit. Phoenix characters will often go home and hear unembodied voices erupting unfounded claims through abandoned laptop speakers. His wife (Emma Stone) or mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) then reflux those fringe theories throughout breakfast.
Again, Aster made this dark corner of his world out of real source material.
“One thing was inspired by someone who listened to it with a microphone on the streets of New York,” he says. “I wrote it down later. Others were pulled out from various corners of the internet.”
Aster’s overall goal Eddington While making a fascinating film, it was about conveying the overwhelming sense of being online today.
“It was important to get a lot of voices in the dissonance and represent as many corners as possible on the internet. We can create a consistent story about the inconsistent miasma we live in,” he says. “We wish we could show more, but we did as much as we could without it distracting and not supporting the story.”
AI is creating an “era of total distrust”
Eddington It may be a film primarily about how social media is breaking our brains, but in his film, another technological innovation Aster, an artificial intelligence, was carefully expressed. The film begins with plans to build an AI training data center at the edge of town. This is a plot point that resurfaces several times throughout the story (including the Phoenix character campaigning against the shady business interests behind the new facility).
“It’s mostly the periphery,” says Astor, “but for me it’s the center of the film. It’s a film about people living through Covid. Meanwhile, just outside of town, another crisis is being cooked.”
In a recent interview with Character boxdThe director expressed his opinion that it was “obviously too late” to stop AI. But when pushed over the advantages and disadvantages of artificial intelligence, Aster explains it in a mix of wonder and fear.
“I am honored that I can do that, but I am very distracted by it too,” he says. “We live in an age of total distrust. This kind of image can lead to the end of video or audio evidence.”
As a director, he worries that his ability to create transcendental art is “flattened” by generative AI tools, while acknowledging that it opens the film industry to more people than ever before. “It’s democratized in an exciting way,” he says. “There’s more possibilities now, but there’s nothing left.”
In his own very Ali Aster way, the twisted mind behind some of the most disturbing visions of the 21st century (from the unexpected decapitation to kick off Hereditary Literally to a penis monster Bo is afraid) You’re missing out on the already creepy era of AI images.
“In the beginning, when these systems were creating hallucinations and strange images, it was even more interesting to me,” he says. “The more refined it is, the more exciting it becomes, not even exciting it becomes.”
About the end…
Warning: Spoilers towards the end of Eddington.
Despite sometimes feeling like the Coen Brothers in the West with amphetamines, Eddington It is impressively grounded throughout the runtime, nearly two and a half hours after the final act. A Phoenix character kills Pascal, and then afterwards he frames local BLM protesters for murder, an airplane full of real anti-fascist terrorists fly into town and starts blowing everything away.