[Interview] ‘Hereditary’ Director Ari Aster and Actor Alex Wolff on Living Up to Audience Expectations
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Ari Aster‘s Hereditary is the horror film that everyone is talking about this year. Ever since the film premiered at Sundance back in January, reviews have been positively glowing. As of this writing, Hereditary is sitting at a mighty comfortable 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (with a 9.1/10 average rating) and an 89/100 score on Metacritic. I was nervous going into the film, but if my review out of SXSW didn’t give you any indication, I’m completely won over. I just saw the film for a second time last week and I’m happy to report that it is even better on a second viewing. I was fortunate enough to speak with Aster and actor Alex Wolff about the film’s origins and their feelings about the response the film will receive from mainstream audiences.
One of the most shocking things about Hereditary is the fact that it is directed by a first-time feature filmmaker. Though Aster got his start directing short films, Hereditary is his feature-length directorial debut, and it’s one of the most confident, assured debuts to come along in years. So how did Aster come up with the idea for Hereditary? Rather than come up with a plot, he actually came up with certain scenes and moments from the film first.
“There were a few images that I guess sparked it for me,” Aster told us. “One being an event that takes place 30 minutes into the film and from there, you know, you build a movie around those set pieces.”
I have no doubt that viewers will know the specific scene he is referring to when they see it (it’s quite shocking), but what may surprise viewers more than some of the more grotesque happenings in Hereditary is that the first half of the film is very much a drama. It’s not until the halfway point of the film that familiar horror tropes begin to emerge. Don’t get me wrong, Hereditary is a horror film through and through, but it takes a bit of time to get to the goods. Aster screened a few different films for the cast and crew to prepare them for the shoot, and the films he selected will probably give you an idea of the type of film you are in for.
“It was important to me that I catered to the family drama before I even concerned myself with the horror,” Aster said. “So on a lot of the films that we were watching, especially showing the crew, before production, were in the family drama space. So we watched a few films by Mike Leigh. We watched All or Nothing and I think Secrets and Lies. And I know that I had the crew watch 45 Years, which is a recent film by Andrew Haigh, which is incredible….kind of a bleak relationship drama but it’s really also just like a very nontraditional ghost story. And then we watched In the Bedroom, The Ice Storm.”
It’s no secret that expectations are sky-high for Hereditary, but will the film be able to connect with mainstream audiences like it has with critics? Or are their expectations too high? Over the past few years, critical darlings like It Follows, The Babadook and The Witch have been released to rather tepid reactions from audiences. Will Hereditary fall prey to the same phenomenon? Wolff quickly jumped to the film’s defense when I brought up this subject.
“I think that audiences are much smarter than the studios give them credit for,” he said. “Every single moment in Hereditary is linked to a moment in the end for the payoff. I think it has the ability of captivating people the same way that Manchester By the Sea did. It has that audience because it’s so wrapped in human drama. And I think it’s way more terrifying than any of the horror movies that I’ve seen. I really have zero concern. I think people are going to be upset by it and disturbed by it. I think there was a phase when people were excited for these jump scares, like when Saw first came out. But I think that right now, this is the kind of movie that I think people will be really excited about it.”
Aster agreed and admitted that less patient viewers will likely find his film to be somewhat frustrating:
“The film does demand patience. It does take its time. And I hope that it rewards patience, or at least I hope that it rewards the patience of the audience. But yeah, the film is very specific. It’s a very bleak film. It’s rooted in very, very, ugly emotions. And it’s designed to bother you. I think it’s inevitable that there are going to be people who hate the film and that’s great.”
Audiences will be able to make up their own minds about Hereditary when A24 releases it in theaters nationwide on June 8, 2018.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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