Andy Serkis and Sir Ben Kingsley to star in Young Washington
The trio have joined the presidential origin story that is being developed by Wonder Project and Angel Studios.
The movie - which is being directed by Wonder Project's Jon Erwin - stars the previously announced William Franklyn-Miller as a young George Washington and chronicles the beginnings of the first American president.
After he makes a tremendous mistake that triggers the French and Indian War, the ambitious 22-year-old Washington must face up to his failures and find the courage to become a leader who will forge a nation.
Kingsley will play Robert Dinwiddie, the strong-willed Virginia Governor who entrusts Washington with his first command, with Serkis starring as General Edward Braddock – an overconfident British officer who gives the defeated Washington another shot at military glory.
Smallbone portrays William Fairfax, a cunning friend and romantic rival to Washington who moves effortlessly into the world of the British upper class to which the future president aspires.
The film has been written by Erwin, Tom Provost and Diederik Hoogstraten and is due to enter production later this summer.
In an unusual move, Angel Studios have made tickets available last month on its own platform – even though the movie is not being released for another year and not a single scene has been shot yet.
Serkis is best known for his role as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy but confessed previously that starring in the epic fantasy franchise didn't hold much appeal to him at first.
He told a Fan Expo San Francisco panel last year: "When I was first approached to play the role, it was explained to me by my agent when I first spoke to them on the phone about it.
"They said, 'Look, they're making this little film down in New Zealand called Lord of the Rings, and they want to see you for a voice for a digital character.'
"And I was like, 'What? There must be a dozen good roles in that movie.'
"Can you not get me up for something decent?' And they said, 'Well, it is Gollum.' And I said, 'That's a decent role. Yeah, okay, alright, I'm listening.' "
Serkis thought that he would just be voicing Gollum until director Sir Peter Jackson introduced him to motion capture technology.
The 61-year-old actor said: "But originally, it was explained to me that it was just going to be the voice. And then when I met Peter Jackson and auditioned, he explained that they were just on the verge of trying out this new technology called motion capture, and that he wanted an actor to be on set to act with the other actors. Because up to that point, many CG characters were only represented by a tennis ball on a stick, and the actors had to pretend that they were having a relationship with it.
"Gollum, as many people know, drives a lot of the scenes and drives the wedges between Frodo and Sam, and it's all about the interaction. He wanted an actor to play that character.
"Motion capture aside, I just approached it like any other role, getting into the psychology and the physicality and then the voice."
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News.com.au
19 minutes ago
- News.com.au
Senior Trump officials struggling to figure out how to deal with South Park mocking them
Top officials in the Trump administration can't quite figure out how to deal with the mockery they're copping from the notoriously ruthless comedy show South Park. President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have all been parodied, to quite brutal effect, across the two episodes that have aired so far in the long-running show's newest season. The wisest response might have been to ignore the show entirely, depriving it of oxygen. Instead the White House, Mr Vance and Ms Noem have flitted between at least three distinct and conflicting reactions, seemingly unable to settle on one. In episode one, Mr Trump was portrayed as an echo of the show's Saddam Hussein character, with a high-pitched voice, thin skin, tiny genitalia, and a tendency to threaten lawsuits against anyone who noticed said smallness. He was also in a romantic relationship with Satan, who in South Park's universe is actually quite a nice guy with an unfortunate tendency to fall for toxic boyfriends. The episode ended with an AI generated video of a naked Mr Trump walking through a desert, and yet another joke about his equipment. For whatever reason, Mr Trump's staff chose to engage with it. A spokeswoman for the White House, Taylor Rogers, argued the show had become irrelevant. 'Just like the creators of South Park, the left has no authentic or original content, which is why their popularity continues to hit record lows,' said Ms Rogers. 'This show hasn't been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread, with uninspired ideas, in a desperate attempt for attention. 'President Trump has delivered on more promises in just six months than any other president in our country's history, and no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump's hot streak.' A few things made that stance less-than-viable. One: if South Park is so irrelevant, why is the media team for the President of the United States, the most powerful man on the planet, bothering to issue statements about it? There's a glaring contradiction at the heart of the message. Two: the show's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, had just signed a new deal with Paramount, worth well over a billion dollars, to deliver 50 episodes. Hardly sounds like they're 'hanging by a thread'. Three: the show's ratings are strong. Roughly 430,000 Americans viewed the first episode when it aired on the Comedy Central network, and the figures rose to almost six million once viewers who streamed it on Paramount+ were added. We don't have the streaming figures for episode two yet, which aired after the White House's statement, but the initial cohort who watched it live almost doubled to 840,000. So yes. The 'South Park hasn't been relevant for 20 years' thing was never going to fly. Mr Parker and Mr Stone were asked about the White House's response during a Comic-Con panel, held between the two episodes. 'We're terribly sorry,' Mr Parker deadpanned. Anyone who failed to pick up on his sarcasm would have been corrected by the second episode, which shifted its focus to two targets: Mr Trump's crackdown on immigrants, and the influence of right-wing media grifters. Ms Noem, who as the Secretary for Homeland Security oversees America's immigration enforcement agency ICE, featured heavily. She led a couple of ICE raids, one on a Dora the Explorer concert and then another on Heaven, where she instructed agents to only arrest 'brown' angels. In a rather cruel extended dig at her cosmetic overhaul during the MAGA years – you can read a bit about it here, if you care about such things – Mr Parker and Mr Stone showed Ms Noem's face repeatedly drooping and falling off. And the character also kept shooting dogs, about half a dozen throughout the episode, perceiving them as mortal threats. That was a reference to the time the real Ms Noem shot her family's dog in a gravel pit after she grew tired of its behaviour. Yes, true story. It became a problem for her last year, when she was a contender to become Mr Trump's vice presidential nominee. The man who actually went on to become Vice President, Mr Vance, had a brief cameo towards the end of the episode, which took place at Mar-a-Lago. Mr Trump and a miniature Mr Vance were portrayed as parodies of characters from the TV series Fantasy Island. Little J.D. got kicked around a bit by Mr Trump, but the most insulting joke poking at his subservience to the President saw him offer to, ahem, prepare Satan for sex. I shan't get any more descriptive. Mr Vance and right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk, who was mocked for considering himself a 'master debater' in the episode's B-plot (I'll leave you to interpret the pun), adopted the same approach in their response to the episode. 'Well, I've finally made it,' Mr Vance posted on social media, sharing the image of him above, and leaving it at that. Mr Kirk posted a clip of the character Eric Cartman parodying him. 'Not bad, Cartman,' he wrote, adding a couple of laughing emojis. He also changed his profile picture to a shot of Cartman dressed up like him. Not bad, Cartman 😂😂 — Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) August 7, 2025 About as harmless a reaction as you can offer, there, from Mr Vance and Mr Kirk. Ms Noem, however, was not quite so deft. She initially responded by slamming South Park for going after her looks. 'It's lazy to constantly make fun of women for how they look,' she told podcaster Glenn Beck, adding that only 'extremists' and 'liberals' (that means 'progressives' in the United States) 'do that'. Apparently Ms Noem has missed the many, many times Mr Trump has mocked women for their appearance. Many times. 'If they wanted to criticise my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly they can't. They just pick something petty like that,' Ms Noem said. You must acknowledge there is a kernel of a fair point in there, though South Park tends to mock the appearance of everyone, not just women, so it would probably be better to accuse it of being overly rude, rather than sexist. And as for the other part of the quote, the episode's plot involved a heap of implicit criticism of the way Ms Noem is doing her job. But Ms Noem claimed not to have watched it. Anyway, that response apparently didn't land quite as well as the Secretary had hoped, because a day later she reversed course and tried to copy Mr Vance and Mr Kirk. Ms Noem posted a screenshot of her South Park avatar with glowing red eyes – the same thing Joe Biden's staff used to do when they were trying to make 'Dark Brandon' happen – and changed her profile picture to it. — Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) August 8, 2025 The Department of Homeland Security reposted it, declaring in all-caps: 'THE DEPORTATIONS WILL CONTINUE.' Both posts included a link to ICE's online recruitment page. The incoherence of Ms Noem's response – first getting agnry, before doing a 180 and trying to own the joke – summed up the Trump officials' struggles rather nicely. They are genuinely unsure how to handle the situation. They could have just ignored it! But now it's too late for that. And you get the sense South Park is far from done mocking them.
Sky News AU
an hour ago
- Sky News AU
America's oldest living astronaut dies aged 97
America's oldest living astronaut Jim Lovell has passed away at the age of 97. He was the commander of NASA's failed 1970 mission to the Moon that inspired the hit movie Apollo 13. Hawker Britton co-founder Bruce Hawker labelled Mr Lovell a 'quiet American hero'.
The Advertiser
7 hours ago
- The Advertiser
Eddington was meant to be divisive but the critics came out all guns blazing
A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?" A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?" A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?" A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?"
