“Brilliant images that have never left me”: the master director Ari Aster calls a punk
Setting the tone for what was to come, Ari Aster decided that the best way to put himself on the map was to see how far he could push the boundaries of acceptability, and it ended up working wonders for his profile before he’d even made his feature debut.
Aster’s thesis film, while a student of the AFI Conservatory, was born entirely from a desire to cover topics that were too much of a taboo to even be considered as the basis for a work of cinema. This led him down the path towards an abusive incestual relationship in the 29-minute psychological short The Truth About the Johnsons.
Given its graphic nature and shocking content, it quickly became an underground viral favourite. Aster doubled down on his aversion to playing it safe by debuting on a feature-length scale through Hereditary and following it up with Midsommar, painting him as a unique voice with a habit of combining jet-black comedy and jarring violence with the lingering effects of trauma.
Beau is Afraid wasn’t a horror movie but nonetheless carried on the latter theme, so it shouldn’t be a shock that Aster found himself inspired by another renegade auteur who built their career on the back of doing whatever they wanted, regardless of how far it could potentially fall into the realms of bad taste.
That’s not to say Takashi Miike has been defined entirely by his forays into stomach-churning horror, but they have become his most well-known and infamous contributions to the medium. The prolific filmmaker has dabbled in action, period pieces, comedy, and family films during his decades in the business, but Aster was won over at an early age by his gnarlier offerings.
In an interview with Financial Times, Aster singled out one Miike movie in particular, prefaced by a sentiment most people are already well aware of. “I was probably more drawn to provocation than anything else,” he said. “One film I loved as a teenager was Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q, which felt truly transgressive and exciting.”
An erotically-charged and occasionally off-putting thriller, the 2001 film follows an unusual family unit that includes a perverted filmmaker of a father, a bullied son, and a prostitute daughter. One particularly bizarre scene finds the patriarch enlisting the help of his kin to help extricate him from a sticky predicament that unfolds after having sex with a dead body.
For better or worse it’s right up Aster’s street, with the filmmaker’s appreciation of Miike driven by the fact “he’s just like a punk” who actively rebels against the conventions of cinema. While talking about Visitor Q, he praised it “especially because it’s so transgressive and so stupid and brilliant, there are images here that have never left me”. That’s certainly one way of putting it, and he’s far from the only one to feel that way, either.
