The Director of Hereditary on Family, Kids and Other Horrors
Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen
PRX
4.6 • 675 Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2018
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, critics have called Hereditary the scariest movie of the year — perhaps even the scariest movie since The Exorcist. It’s a supernatural film starring Toni Collette about a family dealing with horrifying, unspeakable trauma.
It’s the first feature film by writer and director Ari Aster. “It was very important to me that [Hereditary] functioned first as a vivid family drama,” he tells Kurt Andersen. “And then all the horror elements grow out of their situation, as opposed to the people serving as devices for the horror.”
Aster also talks about the movies that influenced the making of Hereditary and working with Milly Shapiro, who plays Toni Collette’s creepy young daughter, Charlie. “While we were shooting, [Millie] was asking, ‘Is it creepy? You think I’m gonna creep people out?’”
This podcast was produced by Studio 360's Sam Kim.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From PRX. |
| 0:07.5 | This is Studio 360. |
| 0:09.8 | I'm Kurti Anderson. |
| 0:13.7 | When Ari Aster was a student at the American Film Institute Conservatory, |
| 0:18.3 | the elite Hollywood school, |
| 0:20.7 | he decided to make a movie that would |
| 0:23.6 | unsettle people there as much as possible. That became the strange thing about the Johnson's, |
| 0:29.6 | a genuinely shocking short film from 2011, about incest. It became kind of a viral online sensation. |
| 0:38.9 | Am I just this abusive monster and you're some sad, helpless victim? |
| 0:43.5 | Or does it take two to Tango? |
| 0:45.8 | Because I think it does. |
| 0:47.4 | And if I've done anything, you've done it with me. |
| 0:50.2 | His debut feature film is also about a family |
| 0:53.3 | going through horrifying, unspeakable trauma. |
| 0:56.3 | It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, |
| 0:59.3 | and critics are calling it either the scariest film of the year |
| 1:03.1 | or the scariest film since The Exorcist, |
| 1:06.0 | which means the scariest film, I guess, the last 45 years. |
| 1:09.3 | The movie is called Hereditary. |
| 1:12.9 | First, light the candle, then choose an item that belonged to grammar, then read this out loud. |
| 1:20.5 | It's to make things start. |
| 1:22.9 | Ari Aster wrote and directed Hereditary, which he is here with me now to talk about. |
... |
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