Hereditary Director Was Told To Stop Writing His Own Movies After This Huge Flop

Writer and director Ari Aster tells some seriously disturbing stories about deeply dysfunctional families in his films, and it's almost enough to make audiences wonder what's going on with his own family. After all, this is a man who made one of the most unsettling short films out there with the incest horror "The Strange Thing About the Johnsons" and has gone on to make feature films almost exclusively about damaged families. In an interview on WTF with Marc Maron, Aster opened up and revealed that while his family isn't nearly as unstable as the ones he depicts onscreen, his father did have some strong criticism for him after his biggest flop. In fact, Aster's father told him that maybe he should stop writing his own movies. Ouch. 

The flop in question was Aster's intentionally divisive and confrontational dark comedy "Beau is Afraid," which starred Joaquin Phoenix as the titular Beau, a middle-aged man on a quest to get to his mother's funeral. It's a dark, weird, aggressive movie that runs just shy of three hours, so it's not a huge shock that some fans of Aster's horror films weren't as ready to jump on board. While "Beau is Afraid" got decent reviews from critics, it only made about $12 million at the box office globally, with an estimated budget of $35 million, which is an absolute flop by any standards. We know that Aster didn't take his father's advice because he went ahead and wrote his next film, "Eddington," but how did he react to being told by his own father to give up writing and just direct? 

On the podcast, Aster explained that after "Beau is Afraid" did poorly, his dad told him, "Uh, maybe you shouldn't write the next one." Aster has written all of his movies, and honestly, audiences have probably come to expect that his stories are going to have divisive or controversial elements. While "Hereditary" and "Midsommar" were both hits, they're also not your average horror movies, and Aster's unique perspective helped establish him as a filmmaker to watch (and maybe even an auteur?). While he says that his dad "might've been right," he wrote the early pandemic-set satire "Eddington" anyway and caused even more controversy than he did with "Beau is Afraid." It seems like even if Aster knows that his movies aren't going to necessarily succeed at the box office, he's still going to just do what he wants. Controversy is almost a part of his brand, and a movie he didn't write would surely lack that sense of absurd danger.

Aster's mother, however, apparently stands by her son's work. He told Maron: "She's very supportive. I think, you know, certain things she likes more than others." It's not hard to imagine that she might like some of his films more than others, especially given the absolutely hellacious mothers at the center of both "Hereditary" and "Beau is Afraid." If I were Aster, I might have had Mom skip those two...

The films of Ari Aster are all disturbing in some way, playing with our deepest fears and wants as human beings. Aster's favorite scene in his debut feature, "Hereditary," is also by far its most horrific, depicting the aftermath of a terrible accident with a dread-inducing slow reveal that's among the most unsettling scenes in horror history. Not to be outdone, the opening sequence of "Midsommar" revealing Dani's (Florence Pugh) dead family is some pretty emotionally wrecking stuff. Aster doesn't just try to scare you with gore and death, but instead digs into the human elements of grief, guilt, and loss, making each horror feel that much worse. Aster's writing, like it or not, is vital to his filmmaking, and it's hard to imagine separating the two. 

While "Eddington" has only further divided audiences and critics and definitely hasn't earned Aster any points on the box office front, he's still making art that feels true to himself, and that's kind of the point of the whole thing. There are plenty of other filmmakers who can direct more commercial work written by others, but please let Aster and the other little weirdos keep doing their thing. That's cinema, baby.