Ari Aster is just asking questions, like "How the hell do we get off this thing?"

I wasn’t writing this from a remove. There are people in my life, who are very important to me, who are living in totally different realities. I can’t really reach them, and they can’t really reach me when it comes to any kind of conversation about what is happening. We all care about the world, we’re all worried about it, but we’re not in agreement about what the problems are, and what the sources of the problems are. That’s heartbreaking to me. I really wanted to make a movie about that environment. To pull back as far as I could and include as many voices from the cacophony as I could, without sacrificing story. The experiment became “Can I make something coherent that is about the incoherent miasma?”

I was listening to a talk that you had with Bill Hader where he says you do the Chekov thing in this movie, which is “not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.” You said you’re trying to include as many voices as possible—were there parts of the problem you weren’t able to include?

Aster: So many! Because there are too many. Part of the problem is that there are so many catastrophes and so many crises that are coalescing all at once. What do you focus on? And so many lies. I’m being cryptic on where I stand, but no matter where you stand, there are lies. Somebody has to be lying, right? On one side or the other. 

I hope it’s clear where my politics are by the end of the film, but part of the project here is to veil that as much as I can, because if I’m making a strictly partisan film, that is extolling the virtues of one ideology while condemning another, that’s only going to reach the choir that I’m preaching to. It’s only going to continue pouring gas on the fire. That would be too narrow. The challenge was how far can I pull back? The film is a satire, which is a dangerous thing to say because that means something different to everybody.

Right, because people then start to search for your angle.

Aster: Exactly. And I do think my stance is clear. If people are able to get to the end, it’s there in the end. Pretty clear. But maybe there can be some solidarity in sitting in a theater and everybody looking back—because it’s a period piece—at the way we were and at the collective insanity of that moment. And maybe the question can come up: “Is this the path we want to be on?” I think most people feel that the answer is “No.” I feel very strongly that we’re accelerating on a path that seems to end at a brick wall, so the question is “How the hell do we get off this thing?”

You talk about solidarity, and Eddington is a movie that I can imagine my uncles watching and enjoying. And we will not be enjoying it for the same reasons, so I’m not sure how we’ll have a conversation about it.

Aster: In the end, it’s a Western. It’s supposed to be fun, as well. But I will say, you’re a little bit closer to having a conversation if you both enjoy it.

At least there’s a common piece of media, compared to the separate bubbles we’re usually in, where you could spend your life trying to rewrite your algorithm to see the stuff on someone else’s feed.

Aster: There’s one clear winner in this film and that’s the important thing to remember: I’ll just say, it’s in the final shot. If somebody asked me “What is the movie about in one sentence?” I’d say “It’s about a data center being built just outside of a small town.”

I was going to say, it’s a comedy, in that all this escalation is ridiculous, but there’s also tragedy in its finality—the people who are lost are lost, and the only ones coming out on top are the technocapitalists. 

Aster: Who have decided our future for us.

That’s certainly the feeling in my industry, the media industry. Is it how it feels in yours?

Aster: Absolutely. Nobody asked for this. Nobody seems to want it, but here it is, it’s coming. And you either adapt or you get driven over. And nobody is warning us about this more than the people who are ushering it in. They keep saying “Yeah, it could be the end of the world. Don’t say we didn’t tell ya.” Okay, well then what are we doing to stop it?! 

One of the biggest things happening right now in the world of AI is this thing called “alignment research.” Making sure that these AI systems align with human values. That brings me to my next question: What the fuck are human values? 

We’ve seen what “human values” are recently in terms of what one of the biggest AIs is aligned with.

Aster: Just look through all of human history. What are human values? How do we align [AI] with our collective values? There are no collective values! We’re living in a soup.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.