Ari

When actor Cooper Hoffman pops up on a Zoom window for a joint interview, Andrew Barth Feldman practically bursts with joy.

“Oh my God,” Feldman exclaims. “Look at the buzz!”

The two friends, each in their own apartments in New York City, have not seen each other since Hoffman recently returned from Italy where he was shooting a role in Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming movie about the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, his hair styled in a severe, dark buzz cut.

The pair immediately launch into a spirited, rhythmic back-and-forth, playfully bouncing around ideas, making jokes and finishing each other’s sentences. It is similar to the nonstop banter between their duo in “Poetic License,” which has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival tonight.

The first feature film directed by Maude Apatow, best known for her role on TV’s “Euphoria,” the film stars Apatow’s mother, Leslie Mann, as Liz, a woman who recently moved to a college town after her husband (Cliff “Method Man” Smith) joined the faculty there. Auditing a poetry class, Liz meets Ari (Hoffman) and Sam (Feldman), two awkward yet compellingly charming best friends who soon find themselves competing for her attention and affection.

Written by Raffi Donatich, the film is the first from Jewelbox Pictures, Apatow’s production company founded with her friend Olivia Rosenbloom, and comes into the festival still seeking distribution. (Keeping things in the family, the debuting director’s father, Judd Apatow, is a producer on the film as well.)

Via email, Maude Apatow spoke about the challenge of finding two actors who could not only play their individual roles, but also capture the speedy dynamic between them.

“A lot of the movie relies on the chemistry between Ari and Sam, so finding the perfect combo was massively important to me,” Apatow, 27, said. “After auditioning countless other boys, Andrew and Cooper were at the top of my list. … They were electric.”

Hoffman, 22, the son of late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and director-producer Mimi O’Donnell, first burst to attention with his starring role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 “Licorice Pizza.” He can also be seen in the new Stephen King adaptation “The Long Walk,” which opens next week, and he has a role in Gregg Araki’s upcoming “I Want Your Sex.”

Feldman, 23, stepped into the title role of “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway at age 16, younger even than the adolescent title character. He also starred opposite Jennifer Lawrence in the 2023 comedy “No Hard Feelings,” in which his torchy showstopping performance of Hall & Oates’ bouncy ’80s “Maneater” has since racked up more than 18 million views on YouTube.

My conversation with the two actors took place on Labor Day. The following day Feldman began his nine-week run in the Tony-winning musical “Maybe Happy Ending.” Though playing the role of a robot, his casting, replacing the half-Filipino actor Darren Criss, sparked controversy and conversation around Asian representation on Broadway.

“It’s been the most vulnerable time of my whole entire life,” said Feldman of the response to his being cast in the show. “And I have much I want to say and for now the only place I really can is the show. I’m saying everything that I want to say, everything that I believe, I’m pouring my whole heart into the show itself. And I’m thankful that the conversation that’s been happening is happening. And I think this is my way of being part of it.”

“And one day we’ll have a much bigger conversation about it,” he adds, carefully. “But right now, I’m more excited to be talking about ‘Poetic License’ and anything would be reductive to the conversation to talk about it in this context. I don’t think it’s up to me to try to change any minds about it, only to do the best job I possibly can at uplifting this gorgeous, perfect story. Everything that I have to say for the time being is in the show. The show holds all of it.”

Feldman will miss three performances of the show over the weekend due to being in Toronto for the premiere of “Poetic License.”

Did the two of you meet making Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night?”

Andrew Barth Feldman: Boy, did we.

Cooper Hoffman: We also got this job [“Poetic License”] on “Saturday Night.”

Feldman: So here’s the story. We’ve been preparing to tell it for so long. And this is what happened: We became really fast, really close friends on “Saturday Night” and that was a huge cast of a lot of people who are still huge parts of both of our lives. But we clicked really instantly.

And I was taping for this movie and Cooper was taping for this movie, and we both loved the script and, especially on that set, everyone was taping for all of the same things all of the time. So I got a call from my agent that they were asking me to chemistry-read with Cooper and since we were in the same place, might as well be convenient if we just do it in the same place on Zoom. Cooper was on his way to hanging out with me at Dylan O’Brien’s Airbnb. I was already there and Cooper’s on his way. So I called him, told him that this was happening. That’s how he found out that we were chemistry-reading together. And I think both of us said, “Oh, we got the job.” Like, that’s it. As soon as they see what we do when we’re alone together and how insane it is, we’ll have this job. And that’s how it happened.

Hoffman: It’s so true. We ended up running the lines with Dylan O’Brien playing — I don’t know why we keep using his full name — but Dylan playing Leslie Mann’s character. Dylan played Liz.

Feldman: He was really good. I was kind of hoping he would do it.

Andrew Barth Feldman, attending the London premiere of “No Hard Feelings” in 2023.

(John Phillips / Getty Images for Sony Pictures)

Why do you think the two of you just clicked like this?

Feldman: Why do you love who you love? I think there are a lot of real similarities to us. We both had losses of parents really early on in our lives. And that I think instantly brought us to a level of vulnerability with each other that we didn’t necessarily have with other people. But in terms of the candor and the rhythm that we have with each other, it’s just kind of feels like one of those universe once-in-a-lifetime things.

Hoffman: I would very much agree. It was one of those weird things where, as we had to play best friends, we were kind of figuring each other out. Andrew was always someone that I felt very comfortable talking to about things. We rarely would talk about the movie. It was much more about life and other things. And I feel very privileged to have shot this movie with Andrew, actually.

There is something really fresh about your dynamic. The best I can describe the movie is that it’s an adult coming of age rom-com of male friendship.

Hoffman: I would say that’s better than anything that we would say. To me, the thing is that I love a male friendship. I love a male friendship that almost feels like they’re dating, they’re one step away from being married. And what does that bring? What happens when you rely on someone so heavily?

Cooper Hoffman arrives at 2022’s Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills.

(Evan Agostini / Invision / AP)

Feldman: I feel like we both had relationships growing up that you’re basically zero degrees away from romance. It is a romantic relationship. And that is — or was, I guess? — formerly maybe more taboo. There are more expectations of masculinity around that. But I think especially in our generation and especially as people who have decided to do art with our lives, there’s really no taboo around it at all. And in fact, something to be really celebrated. It is kind of the healing factor for young men right now: male relationships that you can be really vulnerable in.

And besides being Sam and Ari’s relationship, it was — and is — Cooper’s and my relationship. We couldn’t shut up really. I mean, that’s important to note is that we never, ever stopped talking. We would be talking and talking and then somewhere during our conversation we would hear action be called and we would just keep talking until we found our way into the scene. Kind of the way we did the whole movie was just trying to tell as much truth as possible because we knew that our relationship was all that really needed to be there to make the relationship of the characters work.

Hoffman: I also just had a thought that this interview’s going to be so annoying to read because it’s literally just going to be me and Andrew complimenting each other for however long. You should have never put us on a call together.

Feldman: This is our first interview about this.

Cooper Hoffman in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 movie “Licorice Pizza.”

(MGM/UA)

How did the two of you find working with Maude? On the one hand, this is her feature directing debut. On the other hand, she’s been on movie sets her whole life.

Feldman: She was really good. In all of those moments of improvisation and exploring, she was a massive collaborator in that. And was pushing both of us to places that I wouldn’t have gone initially, risky places in these scenes. Every time we would shoot something, we’d do it, go away and talk about it for 10 minutes and just be inventing and zip-zap-zopping across the three of us, and then just be like, OK, let’s go get another one. It was this really creative process that for me as a young person coming up in this industry, I haven’t really had permission to participate in up until working with somebody like Maude. She’s not too much older than us. We’re all coming at this as collaborators as opposed to hierarchically.

Hoffman: The thing with Maude is there was a real level playing field in which we were all figuring out this thing together. And Maude just has inherently very good instincts as a director. She was grounded and she knew what she wanted, but she was much more open for us to go, “Hey, we don’t know what this is. Can we figure this thing out?” And it was debatably the most collaborative set I’ve been on. Which was really great that Maude allowed for that space to happen.

Cooper, do you see your character here as an extension of what you were doing in “Licorice Pizza”? It’s this guy who outwardly has a lot of game, but then inwardly is struggling. Did it feel that way to you as you were performing the role?

Hoffman: No. And here’s the reason for that, I’m not opposed to that convo but I think a real fear of an actor is that you’re doing the same thing every time. And so I think I’m inherently going to jump to being like, “No, this is a completely different person.” And the thing is, I don’t think Ari has game. I never wanted to play it like that. I think he’s extremely confident, but, not to bring up Dylan O’Brien again but Dylan O’Brien used a very good metaphor, which is you’re like a duck. It’s calm on the surface, paddling vigorously underneath. And it does feel like that for Ari.

Andrew Barth Feldman with Jennifer Lawrence in a scene from “No Hard Feelings.”

(Macall Polay / Sony Pictures)

Andrew, you have your own background in musical theater, but you also had your rendition of “Maneater” in “No Hard Feelings.” Do people now always want you to do a number in a movie? Was there any discussion of you doing a number in this one?

Feldman: There was very briefly a discussion of me doing a number in this movie. I think I was talking to Raffi early on and she was like, “Oh my God, I had this idea, what if you actually sing this thing?” And I was like, I can’t do another one. Not right now. It’s too soon after “Maneater” and “Maneater” is still a really huge part of my life. I want to give that moment its moment.

What do you mean, that “Maneater” is still a big part of your life?

Feldman: People ask me to sing it all the time.

Hoffman: What do you mean? It’s a masterpiece. I watched it on a plane the other day. I cried. I literally cried. I love that scene so much. I love that movie so much.

Guys, thank you for your time. I can’t even imagine how this would’ve worked if I’d interviewed you separately.

Feldman: We wouldn’t have done it.

Cooper: I would’ve just talked about Andrew the whole time. By the way, if you would’ve gotten us in the room together, this interview would’ve never ended. It would’ve been physical bits. It would’ve been a whole thing.

Feldman: We talked on set so much about these moments — that we would get to eventually do press together and talk about the movie because we really were, from the beginning, giving one performance of these two characters together.

Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is such a superb social satire about contemporary America that I want to bury it in the desert for 20 years. More distance will make it easier to laugh.

It’s a modern western set in New Mexico — Aster’s home state — where trash blows like tumbleweeds as Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) stalks across the street to confront Eddington’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whom he is campaigning to unseat. It’s May of 2020, that hot and twitchy early stretch of the COVID pandemic when reality seemed to disintegrate, and Joe is ticked off about the new mask mandate. He has asthma, and he can’t understand anyone who has their mouth covered.

Joe and Ted have old bad blood between them that’s flowed down from Joe’s fragile wife Louise, a.k.a. Rabbit (Emma Stone), a stunted woman-child who stubbornly paints creepy dolls, and his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), a raving conspiracist who believes the Titanic sinking was no accident. Dawn is jazzed to decode the cause of this global shutdown; there’s comfort in believing everything happens for a reason. Her mania proves contagious.

Bad things are happening in Eddington and have been for decades, not just broken shop windows. Joe wears a white hat and clearly considers himself the story’s hero, although he’s not up to the job. If you squint real hard, you can see his perspective that he’s a champion for the underdog. Joe gets his guts in a twist when a maskless elder is kicked out of the local grocery store as the other shoppers applaud. “Public shaming,” Joe spits.

“There’s no COVID in Eddington,” Joe claims in his candidacy announcement video, urging his fellow citizens that “we need to free our hearts.” His earnestness is comic and sweet and dangerous. You can hear every fact he’s leaving out. His rival’s commercials promote a fantastical utopia where Ted is playing piano on the sidewalk and elbow-bumping more Black people in 15 seconds than we see in the rest of the movie. Ted also swears that permitting a tech behemoth named SolidGoldMagikarp to build a controversial giant data center on the outskirts of the county won’t suck precious resources — it’ll transform this nowheresville into a hub for jobs. Elections are a measure of public opinion: Which fibber would you trust?

Danger is coming and like in “High Noon,” this uneasy town will tear itself apart before it arrives. Aster is so good at scrupulously capturing the tiny, fearful COVID behaviors we’ve done our best to forget that it’s a shame (and a relief) that the script isn’t really about the epidemic. Another disease has infected Eddington: Social media has made everyone brain sick.

The film is teeming with viral headlines — serious, frivolous or false — jumbled together on computer screens screaming for attention in the same all-caps font. (Remember the collective decision that no one had the bandwidth to care about murder hornets?) Influencers and phonies and maybe even the occasional real journalist prattle on in the backgrounds of scenes telling people what to think and do, often making things worse. Joe loves his wife dearly. We see him privately watching a YouTuber explain how he can convince droopy Louise to have children. Alas, he spends his nights in their marital bed chastely doomscrolling.

Every character in “Eddington” is lonely and looking for connection. One person’s humiliating nadir comes during a painful tracking shot at an outdoor party where they’re shunned like they have the plague. Phones dominate their interactions: The camera is always there in somebody’s hand, live streaming or recording, flattening life into a reality show and every conversation into a performance.

The script expands to include Joe’s deputies, aggro Guy (Luke Grimes) and Bitcoin-obsessed Michael (Micheal Ward), plus a cop from the neighboring tribal reservation, Officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) and a handful of bored, identity-seeking teens. They’ll all wind up at odds even though they’re united by the shared need to be correct, to have purpose, to belong. When George Floyd is killed six states away, these young do-gooders rush into the streets, excited to have a reason to get together and yell. The protesters aren’t insincere about the cause. But it’s head-scrambling to watch blonde Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) lecture her ex-boyfriend Michael, who is Black and a cop, about how he should feel. Meanwhile Brian (Cameron Mann), who is white and one of the most fascinating characters to track, is so desperate for Sarah’s attention that he delivers a hilarious slogan-addled meltdown: “My job is to sit down and listen! As soon as I finish this speech! Which I have no right to make!”

The words come fast and furious and flummoxing. Aster has crowded more pointed zingers and visual gags into each scene than our eyes can take in. His dialogue is laden with vile innuendos — “deep state,” “sexual predator,” “antifa” — and can feel like getting pummeled. When a smooth-talking guru named Vernon (Austin Butler) slithers into the plot, he regales Joe’s family with an incredulous tale of persecution that, as he admits, “sounds insane just to hear coming out of my mouth.” Well, yeah. Aster wants us to feel exhausted sorting fact from fiction.

The verbal barrage builds to a scene in which Joe and Dawn sputter nonsense at each other in a cross-talking non-conversation where both sound like they’re high on cocaine. They are, quite literally, internet junkies.

This is the bleakest of black humor. There’s even an actual dumpster fire. Aster’s breakout debut, “Hereditary,” gave him an overnight pedigree as the princeling of highbrow horror films about trauma. But really, he’s a cringe comedian who exaggerates his anxieties like a tragic clown. Even in “Midsommar,” Aster’s most coherent film, his star Florence Pugh doesn’t merely cry — she howls like she could swallow the earth. It wouldn’t be surprising to hear that when Aster catches himself getting maudlin, he forces himself to actively wallow in self-pity until it feels like a joke. Making the tragic ridiculous is a useful tool. (I once got through a breakup by watching “The Notebook” on repeat.)

With “Beau Is Afraid,” Aster’s previous film with Phoenix, focusing that approach on one man felt too punishing. “Eddington” is hysterical group therapy. I suspect that Aster knows that if we read a news article about a guy like Joe, we wouldn’t have any sympathy for him at all. Instead, Aster essentially handcuffs us to Joe’s point of view and sends us off on this tangled and bitterly funny adventure, in which rattling snakes spice up a humming, whining score by the Haxan Cloak and Daniel Pemberton.

Not every plot twist works. Joe’s sharpest pivot is so inward and incomprehensible that the film feels compelled to signpost it by having a passing driver yell, “You’re going the wrong way!” By the toxic finale, we’re certain only that Phoenix plays pathetic better than anyone these days. From “Her” to “Joker” to “Napoleon” to “Inherent Vice,” he’s constantly finding new wrinkles in his sad sacks. “Eddington’s” design teams have taken care to fill Joe’s home with dreary clutter and outfit him in sagging jeans. By contrast, Pascal’s wealthier Ted is the strutting embodiment of cowboy chic. He’s even selfishly hoarded toilet paper in his fancy adobe estate.

It’s humanistic when “Eddington” notes that everyone in town is a bit of a sinner. The problem is that they’re all eager to throw stones and point out what the others are doing wrong to get a quick fix of moral superiority. So many yellow cards get stacked up against everyone that you come to accept that we’re all flawed, but most of us are doing our best.

Joe isn’t going to make Eddington great again. He never has a handle on any of the conspiracies, and when he grabs a machine gun, he’s got no aim. Aster’s feistiest move is that he refuses to reveal the truth. When you step back at the end to take in the full landscape, you can put most of the story together. (Watch “Eddington” once, talk it out over margaritas and then watch it again.) Aster makes the viewer say their theories out loud afterwards, and when you do, you sound just as unhinged as everyone else in the movie. I dig that kind of culpability: a film that doesn’t point sanctimonious fingers but insists we’re all to blame.

But there are winners and losers and winners who feel like losers and schemers who get away with their misdeeds scot-free. Five years after the events of this movie, we’re still standing in the ashes of the aggrieved. But at least if we’re cackling at ourselves together in the theater, we’re less alone.

The day before our interview, cinematographer Darius Khondji tells me he went to see a Pablo Picasso exhibit in uptown New York City. And though he would never compare himself to the Spanish painter, Khondji says he found a kinship in the way he described his artistic practice.

“About his style, he said that he was like a chameleon, changing completely from one moment to another, from one situation to another,” Khondji, 69, recalls via Zoom. “This is exactly how I feel. When I’m with a director, I embrace that director completely.”

Backlit, with natural light coming from the large windows behind him on a recent afternoon, Khondji appears shrouded in darkness, at times like an enigmatic silhouette with a halo of sunshine around his fuzzy hair. The Iranian-born cinematographer speaks animatedly, with hand movements accentuating every effusive sentence.

“Sometimes I talk in a very impressionistic way,” Khondji says, apologetically. “I might be confusing but I try to be just honest and say what I feel.”

Khondji’s eclectic resume flaunts an exceptional collection of collaborations, some of the best-looking movies of their moments: David Fincher’s gruesome but gorgeous “Seven,” Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s darkly whimsical and richly textured “Delicatessen” and “The City of Lost Children,” Michael Haneke’s unflinching love story “Amour,” James Gray’s old-school luxurious “The Immigrant,” the Safdie Brothers’ nerve-racking and kinetic “Uncut Gems,” and now Ari Aster’s paranoid big-canvas pandemic saga “Eddington,” in theaters Friday.

Khondji stands simultaneously as a wise member of the old guard and a hopeful champion for the future of film. Sought in decades past by the likes of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Bernardo Bertolucci, he’s now lending his lensing genius to a new generation of storytellers with ideas just as biting.

“Darius understands the human soul and he masters the tools to express it,” says filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu via email. “All the technical choices — framing decisions, uses of color and lighting techniques — he is able to apply them, but always subordinated to the director’s vision and, most importantly, to the needs of the film itself.”

Khondji, left, with director Alejandro González Iñárritu on the shoot of 2022’s “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.”

(SeoJu Park / Netflix)

Khondji earned his second Oscar nomination for his work on the Mexican director’s surrealist 2022 film “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.” The motion picture academy first acknowledged his artistry with a nod for Alan Parker’s sumptuous 1996 musical “Evita.”

“Darius is kind of a poet — everything is feeling-based with him,” says Aster via video call from Los Angeles. “He is an intellectual but he is also decidedly not.”

If you were to dissect the pivotal memories that shaped Khondji’s creative mind, the array of touchstones would include a photograph of Christopher Lee as Dracula that his brother would bring him from London. Also in prime of place: an image of his older sister, Christine, whom he considers an artistic mentor.

You would also find the intense orange color of persimmons squashed in his family’s garden in Tehran during winter — the only sensory memory he has from his early childhood before his family moved to Paris when he was around 3 1/2 years old in the late 1950s.

“Sometimes I look at my granddaughter and grandson and say, ‘OK, they are 3, almost 3 1/2, so this is the amount of language I had, but it was probably mostly in Farsi,’” he says. Khondji returned to Iran only once, as a teenager in the early 1970s, with a Super 8 camera in hand.

He has been watching movies since infancy. His nanny, an avid moviegoer, would take him to the cinema with her. And later, his father, who owned movie theaters in Tehran and would source films through Europe, brought him along to Parisian screening rooms as a kid.

“These are all stories told to me and a mix of impressions and feelings of things that I remember,” Khondji explains. That visceral, heart-first way of perceiving the world around him might be the defining quality of his approach to image-making. It’s always about how something feels.

“Cinema is a strong force,” he says. “You cannot limit it only with aesthetic taste or things that you like or don’t like or rules. You just have to go with the flow and give yourself to it. You need a lot of humility.” At that last thought, Khondji laughs.

Cinematographer Darius Khondji, photographed in France in 2021.

(Ariane Damain Vergallo)

When he started making his own Dracula-inspired short films on Super 8 as a teenager, Khondji had little idea about the distinct roles of a film production. Slowly, he started noticing that the directors of photography for the movies he liked were often the same artists.

“I was discovering that some films looked incredible — they had a very strong atmosphere,” Khondji recalls. “Then I found that the same name of one person was on one movie and then another movie, and I thought, ‘OK, this person really is very important.’” He mentions Gregg Toland, the legendary shooter of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”

But it wasn’t until Khondji attended NYU for film school that he dropped his aspirations for directing and decided on becoming a cinematographer. His film exercises leaned more toward the experiential than the narrative. He refers to them as “emotional wavelengths.”

“It’s really the director and the actors that trigger my desire to shoot a movie,” says Khondji. “The script is, of course, a great thing, but once I want to work with the director, I really trust them.”

Hearing Khondji speak about directors, it’s clear that he puts them in a privileged light — so much so that he makes a point of creating what he calls a “family” around them to ensure their success. This means he ensures the director feels comfortable with the gaffer, the dolly grip, the key grip, so that there’s no one on set that feels like a stranger.

With Aster, for example, their bond emerged from a shared voraciousness for film. The pair had several hangouts together before a job even entered the equation. Khondji is a defender of the polarizing “Beau Is Afraid,” his favorite of Aster’s movies. “Eddington” finally brought them together as collaborators for the first time.

“Ari and I have a common language,” he says. “We discovered quite early on working together that we have a very similar taste for dark films, not dark in lighting but in storytelling.”

Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in the movie “Eddington.”

(A24)

While scouting locations in Aster’s native New Mexico, he and Khondji came across the small town where the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” was filmed. And though they both revere that arid 2007 thriller, they wanted to get away from anything tied to it, so they pivoted again to the community of Truth or Consequences.

Khondji recalls Aster describing his film, about a self-righteous sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) in a grudge match against the mayor (Pedro Pascal), as “a European psychological thriller on American land.” For the cinematographer, the movie is “a modern western.”

“We wanted the exterior to be very bright, like garishly bright, like the light has almost started to take off the color and the contrast a little bit because it’s so bright, never bright enough,” explains Khondji about shooting in the desert.

For Khondji, working Aster reminded him of his two outings with Austria’s esteemed, ultra-severe Michael Haneke, with which the cinematographer made the American remake of “Funny Games” and “Amour,” the latter on which he discovered a “radically different kind filmmaking” where “everything in the set had to have a grace of realness.”

“‘The color is vivid in a way that it isn’t in any of his other films,” says Aster about the quality that Khondji brought to “Amour,” Haneke’s Oscar-winning film.

Still, after working with some of the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers on features, music videos, commercials and a TV show (he shot Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2019 “Too Old to Die Young” and became infatuated with the San Fernando Valley), Khondji prefers to be reinvigorated by younger artists challenging the rules.

“‘Uncut Gems’ was like turning a page for me in filmmaking,” he says, calling out to Josh and Benny Safdie. “These two young filmmakers were making films in a different way. And the fact that I could keep up with them — they are in their 30s — psychologically, it gave me a lot of strength.” Khondji also shot Josh Safdie’s upcoming “Marty Supreme,” out in December.

Is there a visual signature that defines Khondji’s work? Perhaps, even if he doesn’t consciously think of it. A lushness, a preference for olive greens and blacker-than-black shadows. An intense fixation on color in general. There are also aesthetic preferences that Aster noticed from their work on “Eddington.”

“Darius and I hate unmotivated camera movement,” Aster says. “But there are certain things that never would’ve bothered me compositionally that really bothered Darius, and now they’re stuck in my head. For instance, Darius hates it when you cut off somebody’s leg, even if it’s at the ankle. A lot of Darius’s prejudices have gone into my system.”

Khondji concedes to these particularities, yet he doesn’t think in rigid absolutes.

“You have a rule, and then you decide this is the moment to break the rule,” he says, citing the rawness of the films of French director Maurice Pialat or how actor Harriet Andersson looks directly into the camera in Ingmar Bergman’s 1953 “Summer with Monika.”

He recently watched Ryan Coogler’s box-office hit “Sinners” without knowing anything about its premise beforehand. “People who know me know that I don’t like spoilers,” he says. “I’m very cautious with film reviews. They are very important, but at the same time, I don’t want to know the story.”

Khondji had never seen one of Coogler’s films, but was impressed. “I really enjoyed it,” he says. “After I watched it I wanted to know who shot the film, but I enjoyed the actors so much and I love just being a real member of the audience.”

It might surprise some to learn that Khondji’s initial interest in seeing a film is unrelated to how it looks or who shot it.

“When I watch a film people say, ‘Oh, did you notice how it was shot?’ And I don’t really go for that,” he says. “I mostly go to watch a film for the director.”

These days, his wish list includes the opportunity to shoot a proper supernatural horror film (Aster might be handy to stay in touch with) and for a company to make a modern film-stock camera. Khondji is not precious about format but believes shooting on film should stay an option as it is the “natural medium” of cinema.

He tells me how much he loves going to the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. “It’s really like a shrine for me,” he says, recalling seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” there on true VistaVision.

“It was an incredible emotion,” he adds. “Like the emotion I had when I grew up with my dad, when they would take me to see big films in the cinemas where the ceiling had stars to make you dream even before the film started.”

That dream is what Khondji is still chasing, in the cinema and on set.

CANNES, France — “The sun is my mortal enemy,” Ari Aster says, squinting as he sits on the sixth-floor rooftop terrace of Cannes’ Palais des Festivals, where most of the screenings happen. It’s an especially bright afternoon and we take refuge in the shade.

Aster, the 38-year-old filmmaker of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” wears a olive-colored suit and baseball cap. He’s already a household name among horror fans and A24’s discerning audiences, but the director is competing at Cannes for the first time with “Eddington,” a paranoid thriller set in a New Mexican town riven by pandemic anxieties. Like a modern-day western, the sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) spars with the mayor (Pedro Pascal) in tense showdowns while protests over the murder of George Floyd flare on street corners. Too many people cough without their masks on. Conspiracy nuts, mysterious drones and jurisdictional tensions shift the film into something more Pynchonesque and surreal.

In advance of the movie’s July 18 release, “Eddington” has become a proper flash point at Cannes, dividing opinion starkly. Like Aster’s prior feature, 2023’s “Beau Is Afraid,” it continues his expansion into wider psychological territory, signaling a heretofore unexpressed political dimension spurred by recent events, as well as an impulse to explore a different kind of American fear. We sat down with him on Sunday to discuss the movie and its reception.

I remember what it was like in 2018 at Sundance with “Hereditary” and being a part of that first midnight audience where it felt like something special was happening. How does this time feel compared to that?

It feels the same. It’s just nerve-wracking and you feel totally vulnerable and exposed. But it’s exciting. It’s always been a dream to premiere a film in Cannes.

Have you ever been to Cannes before?

No.

So this must feel like living out that dream. How do you think it went on Friday?

I don’t know. How do you feel it went? [Laughs]

I knew you were going to turn it around.

That’s what everybody asks me. Everybody comes up saying [makes a pity face], “How are you feeling? How do you think it went?” And it’s like, I am the least objective person here. I made the film.

I know you’ve heard about those legendary Cannes premieres where audiences have extreme reactions and it feels like the debut of “The Rite of Spring.” Some people are loving it, some people are hating it. Those are the best ones, aren’t they?

Oh, yeah. But again, I don’t really have a picture of what the response is.

Do you read your reviews?

I’ve been staying away while I do press and talk to people. So I can speak to the film.

Makes sense. I felt great love in the room for Joaquin Phoenix, who was rubbing your shoulder during the ovation. Have you talked to the cast and how they think it went, or were they just having a good time?

I think that they’re all really proud of the film. That’s what I know and it’s been nice to be here with them.

Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in the movie “Eddington.”

(A24)

In the context of your four features, “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” “Beau Is Afraid” and now “Eddington,” how easy was “Eddington” to make?

They’re all hard. We’re always trying to stretch our resources as far as they can go, and so they’ve all been just about equally difficult, in different ways.

Is it fair to say that your films have changed since “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” and now they’re more accommodating of a larger swath of sociopolitical material?

I am just following my impulses so I’m not thinking in that way. There’s very little strategy going on. It’s just: What am I interested in? And when I started writing, because I was in a real state of fear and anxiety about what was happening in the country and what was happening in the world, and I wanted to make a film about what it was feeling like.

This was circa what, 2020?

It was in June 2020 that I started writing it. I wanted to make a film about what it feels like to live in a world where nobody agrees about what is happening.

You mean no one agrees what is happening in the sense that we can’t even agree on the facts?

Yes. There’s this social force that has been at the center of mass liberal democracies for a very long time, which is this agreed-upon version of what is real. And of course, we could all argue and have our own opinions, but we all fundamentally agreed about what we were arguing about. And that is something that has been going away. It’s been happening for the last 20 something years. But COVID, for me, felt like when the last link was cut, this old idea of democracy, that it could be sort of a countervailing force against power, tech, finance. That’s gone now completely.

And at that moment it felt like I was kind of in a panic about it. I’m sure that I am probably not alone. And so I wanted to make a film about the environment, not about me. The film is very much about the gulf between politics and policy. Politics is public relations. Policy is things that are actually happening. Real things are happening very quickly, moving very quickly.

I think of “Eddington” as very much a horror film. It’s the horror of free-floating political anxiety. That’s what’s scaring you right now. And we don’t have any kind of control over it.

We have no control and we feel totally powerless and we’re being led by people who do not believe in the future. So we’re living in an atmosphere of total despair.

During the lockdown, I was just sitting on my phone doom-scrolling. Is that what you were doing?

Of course. There was a lot of great energy behind the internet, this idea of: It’s going to bring people together, it’s going to connect them. But of course then finance got involved, as it always does, and whatever that was curdled and was put on another track. It used to be something we went to. You went to your computer at home, you would maybe go to your email. Everything took forever to load. And then with these phones, we began living in cyberspace, so we are living in the internet.

It’s owned us, it’s consumed us and we don’t see it. The really insidious thing about our culture and about this moment is that it’s scary and it’s dangerous and it’s catastrophic and it’s absurd and ridiculous and stupid and impossible to take seriously.

Did that “ridiculous and stupid” part lead you aesthetically to make something that was an extremely dark comedy? I think “Eddington” sometimes plays like a comedy.

Well, I mean there’s something farcical going on. I wanted to make a good western too, and westerns are about the country and the mythology of America and the romance of America. They’re very sentimental. I’m interested in the tension between the idealism of America and the reality of it.

You have your western elements in there, your Gunther’s Pistol Palace and a heavily armed endgame that often recalls “No Country for Old Men.”

You’ve got Joe, who’s a sheriff, who loves his wife and cares about his community. And he’s 50 years old, so he grew up with those ’90s action movies and, at the end, he gets to live through one.

Let’s step backward for a second about where you were and what you were doing around the time you started writing this. You were finishing up “Beau Is Afraid,” right? What was your life like then? You were freaking out and watching the news and starting to write a script. What was that process like for you?

I was New Mexico at the time. I was living in New York in a tiny apartment, but then I had to come back to New Mexico. There was a COVID scare in my family and I wanted to be near family. I was there for a couple months and just wanted to make a film about what the world felt like, what the country felt like.

Were you worried about your own health and safety during that time?

Of course. I’m a hyper-neurotic Jew. I’m always worried about my health.

And also the breakdown of truth. What were the reactions when you first started sharing your script with the people who ended up in your cast? What was Joaquin’s reaction like?

I just remember that he really took to the character and loved Joe and wanted to play him, and that was exciting to me. I loved working with him on “Beau” and I gave him the script hoping that he would want to do it. They all responded really quickly and jumped on. There was just a general excitement and a feeling for the project. I had a friendship with Emily [Emma Stone, whom Aster calls by her birth name] already and now we’re all friends. I really love them as actors and as people. It was a pretty fluid, nice process.

I haven’t seen many significant movies expressly about the pandemic yet. Did it feel like you were breaking new ground?

I don’t think that way, but I was wanting to see some reflection on what was happening.

Even in the seven years since “Hereditary,” do you feel like the business has changed?

Yeah, it is changing. I mean, everything feels like it’s changing. I think about [Marshall] McLuhan and how we’re in a stage right now where we’re moving from one medium to another. The internet has been the prominent, prevailing, dominant medium, and that’s changed the landscape of everything, and we’re moving towards something new. We don’t know what’s coming with AI. It’s also why we’re so nostalgic now about film and 70mm presentations.

Do you ever feel like you got into this business at the last-possible minute?

Definitely. I feel very fortunate that I’m able to make the films I want to make and I feel lucky to have been able to make this film.

There’s a lot of room in “Eddington” for any kind of a viewer to find a mirror of themselves and also be challenged. It doesn’t preach to the converted. Was that an intent of yours?

[Long pause] Sorry, I’m just thinking. I’m just starting to talk about the film. I guess I’m trying to make a film about how we’re all actually in the same situation and how similar we are. Which may be hard to see and I’m not a sociologist. But it was important to me to make a film about the environment.

I was asked recently, Do you have any hope? And I think the answer to that is that I do have hope, but I don’t have confidence.

It’s easy to be cynical.

But I do see that if there is any hope, we have to reengage with each other. And for me, it was important to not judge any of these characters. I’m not judging them. I’m not trying to judge them.

Ari Aster, left, and Pedro Pascal on the set of “Eddington.”

(Richard Foreman)

I love that you have a partner in A24 that is basically letting you go where you need to go as an artist.

They’ve been very supportive. It’s great because I’ve been able to make these films without compromise.

Do you have an idea for your next one?

I’ve got a few ideas. I’m deciding between three.

You can’t give me a taste of anything?

Not yet, no. They’re all different genres and I’m trying to decide what’s right.

Let’s hope we survive to that point. How are you personally, apart from movies?

I’m very worried. I’m very worried and I am really sad about where things are. And otherwise there needs to be another idea. Something new has to happen.

You mean like a new political paradigm or something?

Yeah. The system we’re in is a response to the last system that failed. And the only answer, the only alternative I’m hearing is to go back to that old system. I’ll just say even just the idea of a collective is just a harder thing to imagine. How can that happen? How do we ever come together? Can there be any sort of countervailing force to power? I feel increasingly powerless and impotent. And despairing.

Ari, it’s a beautiful day. It’s hard to be completely cynical about the world when you’re at Cannes and it’s sunny. Even in just 24 hours, “Eddington” has become a conversation film, debated and discussed. Doesn’t it thrill you that you have one of those kind of movies?

That’s what this is supposed to be. And you want people to be talking about it and arguing about it. And I hope it is something that you have to wrestle with and think about.

CANNES, France — In Cannes, the weather changes so fast that you can enter a theater in sandals and exit in desperate need of rain boots and a scarf. On Friday, I ran to my room to grab a warmer shirt for an overcast outdoor party. I checked the window and added a jacket, then checked the window again and was stunned to see the sun. By the time I raced back down the Croisette (in something sleeveless), the cocktail hour was over. C’est la vie.

The mutability is a lovely parallel for the filmgoing itself. At the end of a great movie, you feel like the world has changed. And when a film is bad, the director suffers the shock of their forecast being dramatically upended. Before the premiere, they were chauffeured around in festival-sponsored BMWs and now their friends are stammering how much they like their shoes.

Harris Dickinson, the young British actor who convincingly dominated Nicole Kidman in last year’s “Babygirl,” seemed a tad flustered introducing the premiere of “Urchin,” his directorial debut. Jacket and tieless with his dress shirt’s sleeves rolled up lopsidedly, he hastily joked, “I’m nervous, but I hope you enjoy it — and if you don’t, tell us gently.”

That barometric pressure is especially intense in Cannes, but onscreen (so far, at least), the wind is only blowing one way: south. Almost every film so far has been about a character braving a storm — legal, moral, political, psychological — and getting dashed against the rocks.

Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in the movie “Eddington.”

(A24)

“Eddington,” Ari Aster’s twisty and thistly modern-day western, is set in New Mexico during that first hot and crazy summer of the pandemic. To his credit and the audience’s despair, it whacks us right on our bruised memories of that topsy-turvy time when a new alarm sounded every day, from the social-distancing rules of the coronavirus and the murder of George Floyd to the rumors that Antifa was rioting in the streets. With “Hereditary,” Aster made horror trauma hip; now, he’s shifted to satirizing our shared PTSD.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as Joe, a sheriff with a soft heart and mushy judgment, who rejects the mask mandate of Eddington’s ambitious mayor (Pedro Pascal), arguing that COVID isn’t in their tiny rural town. Maybe, maybe not — but it’s clear that viral videos have given him and everyone else brain worms. Joe’s wife (Emma Stone) and mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) are fixated on conspiracies involving everything from child trafficking to the Titanic. Meanwhile, Eddington’s youth activists, mostly white and performative, are doing TikTok dances advertising their passion for James Baldwin while ordering the town’s sole Black deputy (Micheal Ward) to take a knee. No one in “Eddington” speaks the truth. Yet everyone believes what they’re saying.

Phoenix’s Joe watches Henry Fonda movies and wears a symbolic white hat. Yet, he’s pathetic at maintaining order, pasting a misspelled sign on his police car that reads: Your being manipulated. Having lived through May 2020 and all that’s happened since, we wouldn’t trust Aster anyway if he’d pretended a savior could set things right. Still, there’s no empathizing with hapless, clueless Joe when he whines, “Do you really think the power is with the police?”

Well, one person in a Cannes film does: the lead of Dominik Moll’s “Dossier 137,” a single mother named Stéphanie (Léa Drucker), who just so happens to be a cop herself. Once, Stéphanie investigated narcotics. Now, she gathers evidence when her fellow officers are accused of misbehavior. An inspired-by-a-true-story detective movie set in the aftermath of the 2018 Paris demonstrations, the film’s central case involves a squad of undercover officers who allegedly shoot a 20-year-old protestor in the head with a rubber bullet, shattering the front of the boy’s skull.

Moll has made the kind of sinewy procedural that makes your palms sweat. “I have no personal feelings,” Stéphanie insists, even as her ex-husband and his new girlfriend, also police officers, accuse her of being a traitor. More precisely, she allows herself no visible emotions as she questions both the accusers and the accused. It’s impressive to watch the meticulous and dogged Stéphanie put together the pieces and make the liars squirm. But she’s the last person in the movie to see the big picture: No matter how good she is, she can’t be a hero.

Aleksandr Kuznetsov in the movie “Two Prosecutors.”

(Festival de Cannes)

Sergei Loznitsa’s Stalin-era drama “Two Prosecutors” lugs its own protagonist along that exact same journey; it’s affixed to cynicism like a train on a track. Here, the ill-fated idealist is a recent law student (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) who wants to interview a prisoner that the government would rather remain disappeared. The voices that once boldly spoke out against the Soviet regime have long since been silenced. Now, the Great Purge is locking up even the Russians who swear they love their leader.

Methodical and dreary, the film’s key image is of Kuznetsov (who coincidentally-but-on-purpose has a nose that appears to have been busted around) walking down endless dismal hallways. He’s polite and stoic, but we all know he’s not getting anywhere. The film plays like a sour joke with an obvious punchline. I respected it fine, but slow and inevitable don’t make great bedfellows. The jet-lagged stranger next to me nodded off for a nap.

Snores weren’t a problem at “Sirât,” a nail-biter that had its midnight crowd wide awake. The fourth Cannes film by the French-born Spanish director Oliver Laxe, it’s about dirtbag ravers who’ve gathered in a barren stretch of Morocco for a stunning party: orange cliffs, neon lights, thumping EDM beats and dancers thrashing in the dust like the living dead. The only sober attendees are a father (Sergi López) and his young son (Bruno Núñez) who are hoping to find the boy’s sister, a bohemian swept up in the relentless rhythm of this road-tripping bacchanalia. But when the party gets busted up by the police, this fractured family joins a caravan headed in the vague direction of another fest. Next stop, disaster.

An image from the movie “Sirât,” directed by Oliver Laxe.

(Festival de Cannes)

The small ensemble cast looks and feels like they’ve already lived through an apocalypse. Two of his actors are missing limbs and nearly all are flamboyantly tattooed. As these battered vans hurtle through the desert, it’s obvious that “Sirât” believes the age of “Mad Max” has already begun. But Laxe’s cadence of death is nasty and arbitrary and delightful. He’s unconvinced that we can form a community able to survive this harsh world. At best, he’ll give us a coin flip chance of success. I’ve got to watch the film again before I decide whether (a) it’s a comedy and (b) it has anything deeper to say. But a second viewing won’t be a hardship. Even if “Sirât” proves half-empty instead of half-full, witnessing another audience gasp at its mean shocks will be sweet schadenfreude.

Which finally brings us back to Harris Dickinson. His film “Urchin” is good. Great, even. The last time he was in Cannes, it was as the lead in Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness,” but he’s a real-deal director. It’s high praise to his acting that I don’t want him quitting his day job just yet.

“Urchin” lopes after a drug-addled boy-man named Mike (Frank Dillane, fantastic) who’s been sleeping and scavenging on the London streets for five years. Yes, Dickinson has gone 21st-century Dickensian; Mike pesters people for ketamine, vodka and spare change like Oliver Twist begged for porridge. But this isn’t a pity piece. “Urchin” is energetic and filled with life: funny asides, tiny joys, stabs of recognition and flourishes of visual psychedelia.

Mike is given multiple chances to change his fortunes. Yet, he’s also stubbornly himself and we spend the running time toggling between being scared for him and being scared of him. Dickinson, who also wrote the film, wants us to know not just how easy it is to slide down the social ladder but what a small step forward looks like, even if his tone is ultimately more Sisyphean than self-help.

After the movie, I ducked into the drizzle, then into a cafe. A man was monologuing to an acquaintance about his career change from tech to film and this is my favorite place to eavesdrop.

“I was rich and successful but I had to look for something more jazzy,” he explained, stabbing at the other person’s plate of charcuterie. He’s now broke, he said, and divorced. But somehow, he seemed content. He’d emailed his script to Quentin Tarantino. Maybe next Cannes, he’ll be the one getting fêted and chauffeured. Maybe the wind would start blowing his way. A great movie really can change your life.