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Ari Aster
아리 애스터・アリ・アスター
Ari Aster (born July 15, 1986) is an American filmmaker. Having garnered some initial recognition for the short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011), he became best known for writing and directing Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), and Beau Is Afraid (2023), all of which were released by A24. His films have been noted for their unsettling combination of horror, dark comedy, and depictions of graphic violence. In 2018, he co-founded the production company Square Peg with Danish producer Lars Knudsen.
Known for | Directing |
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Born | 15 Jul 1986 |
Place of birth | New York City, New York, USA |
Favorite films
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I could include any number of Fellini’s films, especially La strada, La dolce vita, I vitelloni, and Amarcord. But 8½ is his most perfect while also being his most freewheeling and untethered. I watch this film before I make anything. It’s so alive! Even though it’s about a director experiencing a directorial version of writer’s block, it’s so inspired. There’s so much Fellini wants to jam in there. Everything is in there: his love of women, his love of the eccentric, his idea of life as a circus.
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I’m always thinking about the Powell and Pressburger films when I’m thinking about color, about creating worlds, and about how to tell a story as exuberantly as possible.
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I love all of Bergman’s films, but his later period has had the biggest impact on me, starting with Persona. The film marked the advent of a new period for him; I know that he wrote it when he was in the hospital and thought he was going to die. It adopts a dream logic in a really forward-thinking way, and like Altman’s Three Women, is an example of a proto-Lynchian dream movie. I was thinking about that when we were making Hereditary, how it gradually adopts a nightmare logic.
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I just fell in love with Mizoguchi’s work. He called the Academy ratio the “painterly ratio,” and I feel like there are very few filmmakers who did as much with that frame. ... Ugetsu is a beautiful, ethereal ghost story.
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Cries and Whispers strikes me as the most painful and beautiful film about death . . . and sisterhood. I screened it for the crew when we were making Hereditary, which is also a movie about suffering. Bergman was always wrestling with the big things—family dynamics, one’s relationship to God—but he did it in such an accessible way. His films are entertainments—they’re fun, and they’re beautiful. I feel like he has a reputation for being a forbidding director, but I find him to be as inviting as a filmmaker like that could possibly be.
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This is such a fascinating trilogy about a boy who has cursed his family and brings death and destruction to everybody he loves—or at least it feels that way. Of course it’s about a million other things, and in the end it’s about everything. I love The Music Room and so many of Ray’s other films, but there is no overstating how wonderful these three are.
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Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them.
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This is such a fascinating trilogy about a boy who has cursed his family and brings death and destruction to everybody he loves—or at least it feels that way. Of course it’s about a million other things, and in the end it’s about everything. I love The Music Room and so many of Ray’s other films, but there is no overstating how wonderful these three are.
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This is such a fascinating trilogy about a boy who has cursed his family and brings death and destruction to everybody he loves—or at least it feels that way. Of course it’s about a million other things, and in the end it’s about everything. I love The Music Room and so many of Ray’s other films, but there is no overstating how wonderful these three are.
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Macbeth always struck me as one of his masterpieces, and it’s clearly haunted by the Manson murders in a very visceral way.
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Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them.
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Cul-de-sac is like his existential Beckett movie, and it draws a lot from absurd theater.
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Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher must be my favorite female performance. I saw this with my mom at the theater when I was about fourteen or fifteen and we both loved it so much. I remember thinking, I want to make movies like that.
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A Brighter Summer Day is just an amazing gangland epic. I don’t know how you watch it without becoming convinced that you’re watching the greatest movie ever made. It’s like The Godfather in that way.
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All of the stories being told in Yi Yi are kind of unremarkable—it’s the telling that is so remarkable.
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I’m always thinking about the Powell and Pressburger films when I’m thinking about color, about creating worlds, and about how to tell a story as exuberantly as possible.
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I’m always thinking about the Powell and Pressburger films when I’m thinking about color, about creating worlds, and about how to tell a story as exuberantly as possible.
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I’m always thinking about the Powell and Pressburger films when I’m thinking about color, about creating worlds, and about how to tell a story as exuberantly as possible.
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I’m always thinking about the Powell and Pressburger films when I’m thinking about color, about creating worlds, and about how to tell a story as exuberantly as possible.
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David Thewlis’s performance is my favorite male performance ever. There’s nothing like it. It’s a bleak film, but it’s so filled with life and passion and it’s so funny.
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Topsy-Turvy is perhaps the most generous period piece I’ve ever seen. It is so funny and so filled with period detail and so clearly a film that doesn’t want to stop. It’s purely anecdotal; there’s no real plot. It’s structured around the writing of The Mikado, but really it’s just about the period, and every scene is so rich.
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45 Years and The Age of Innocence strike me as two sides of the same coin. Most filmmakers would tell the story of 45 Years from the perspective of the husband, the man who followed convention and married the woman he didn’t love and then lost out on the grand romance. But 45 Years is like The Age of Innocence as told from the point of view of Winona Ryder’s character fifty years later. She’s the woman who never questioned convention or the institution of marriage and then realizes later that she doesn’t recognize her own life. This illusion comes crashing down on her. I think the last shot of 45 Years is one of the all-time great shots—I feel confident in saying that even though it just came out a few years ago.
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The Age of Innocence has always been one of my favorite Scorsese films—it’s one of the most painfully beautiful unrequited love stories ever. It’s Scorsese’s Max Ophuls movie, and the best Ophuls movie that Ophuls never made.
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Sansho the Bailiff is just one of the most devastating melodramas I’ve ever seen.
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