The movie that made Ari Aster desperate to work with Joaquin Phoenix: “A heroic artistic gesture”
There is perhaps no one more in demand than Joaquin Phoenix, with the Hollywood daredevil striking a nerve through his gritty performances and knack for fleshing out the darkest characters articulated on screen. From the haunting portrayal of repressed trauma in You Were Never Really Here, his enigmatic collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson on The Master and his chilling interpretation of the Joker, the actor continues to be a force to be reckoned with, confidently treading his own path and defying the traditions of an often predictable and stifling industry.
As a result, he seems like the perfect choice to work with the fellow rebels and revolutionaries of Hollywood, forming unique partnerships with directorial oddballs such as Lynne Ramsay, Spike Jonze, Mike Mills and Gus Van Sant.
However, perhaps the most fabled and disturbing of his recent projects is his work with A24 darling Ari Aster, first joining for Beau is Afraid in 2023 and currently promoting their next project, Eddington. It seems as though the pair are a match made in heaven, with the director discussing the early roots of this relationship and the performance that made him fall in love with the actor.
Aster first rose to fame through his 2018 horror Hereditary, breaking through with global audiences and sparking a long-lasting fascination with twisted parental relationships, particularly focusing on the dynamic between mother and son.
From this point onwards, he continued his odyssey in the world of nightmarish cinema, doing so with his 2019 film Midsommar, starring Florence Pugh as a young woman who becomes trapped in the antics of a Swedish cult, marking the beginning of her meteoric rise to fame and takeover of Hollywood.
Since then, many people speculated over his next project, with his 2023 film Beau is Afraid become one of the most highly anticipated from his body of work after the announcement that Phoenix would star in the film, marking a shift in his career as he enlisted A-list actors to help realise his twisted ideas.
While Phoenix has played many controversial and troubled characters, Beau Wassermann takes this to the next level, with the film existing as a surrealist exploration of one man’s mother issues while he embarks on a quest through increasingly strange worlds. It feels like a mix between A Serious Man and Alice in Wonderland, following what is quite piossibly, the worst day in Beau’s life as he attempts to find his mother.
When discussing the casting process for the film, Aster said, “When it came time to really think about who could play Beau, it felt like, ‘Oh, we have to try Joaquin first.’ If anything, there are very few actors who are that vulnerable, who are that physically and emotionally committed, and I also just figured he had a great sense of humour. I think he’s so funny in The Master. I think he’s been so funny in so many films, but especially, I remembered what he did in I’m Still Here, which I thought was not only a brilliant comic performance but a really amazing and suicidal gesture. What he was doing with his own name was, to me, kind of heroic and dangerous. I remember seeing that and thinking, ‘I want to work with this guy.’”
His work in I’m Still Here is nothing short of genius, attempting to destroy his own name and poke fun at celebrity culture through the satirical retelling of his own time in the spotlight. As a result, he made for the perfect addition to Aster’s universe, with many fans eagerly awaiting their next collaboration.
