Director Ari Aster (‘Eddington’) Has Made an American Western for 2025 - Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

“Eddington is a film about a bunch of people who know that something is wrong,” says writer-director Ari Aster. “It’s just that nobody can agree on what that thing is.” Aster joins us this week to unpack his controversial, COVID-era western: his time back home in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he wrote through lockdown (9:30), the works of Robert Altman (18:00) and Oliver Stone (19:15) that served as sources of inspiration, and how Beau Is Afraid (5:54) cleared the path for Eddington. Aster also shares his early adventures in moviegoing: including Brian De Palma’s Carrie (22:10), Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (23:45), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (23:47), and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (24:50). On the back-half, we talk about how he found his voice in film school (30:28), his divisive AFI senior thesis film The ...