The Exchange with Ari Aster and Gregory Crewdson: “You’re a master of the eerie”

Ari Aster, celebrated auteur of such gut-wrenching films as Hereditary and Midsommar, has been a great fan of Gregory Crewdson’s since childhood. “I would study your book, I would study photos, and try to figure out how you achieve what you’re doing,” he told Crewdson on Thursday night, describing the artist’s influence on his own work. “There’s something ineffable about your work that I was obsessed with as a kid, and just felt like something I was interested in really chasing.” 

The two met in conversation at David Zwirner’s tiny Upper East Side gallery, where the audience of about two dozen included members of both Aster’s crew and Crewdson’s immediate family. The occasion was A24’s new limited edition print, which Aster had personally invited Crewdson to shoot on the set of his latest film, Eddington, a dark comedy starring Joaquin Phoenix as small-town sheriff. The resulting image features the leading man standing at the centre of a barren New Mexico street, laden with the uncanny desolation Crewdson is best known for. 

Over the course of half an hour, the two spoke of their mutual admiration and shared “beautiful blurring of reality and fiction,” as Crewdson put it. Below are the highlights from their exchange.

Ari Aster: I couldn’t believe that you accepted the plea. I just thought, like, “Ah, fuck it. It’s worth a try.” But I’m so thrilled that you did this. It represents the film so well. It also just is a Crewdson. It’s thrilling to have sets for my movie in a Crewdson photograph. I think it really captures Joe Cross’ loneliness in a really beautiful way…

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That was part of the thrill of you doing this; I got to actually see how you work. I was just really excited to get a peek behind the curtain.

Gregory Crewdson: I really don’t do this kind of thing. Partially because I feel something towards it, and feel connected to the vision and the sensibility. The other really interesting thing is, I never got a single note about – or questioned even – what the picture would be, which is very unusual. So there was zero expectation in terms of the content or the form of the picture, which was kind of terrifying, because I just made one picture.

This is very much out of my comfort zone, because it’s a very different landscape to what I’m used to. My process always begins with location scouting, and that’s usually a product of months and months of going around in circles, looking for a landscape that feels like it could be meaningful. So, when this opportunity came up – this challenge – my first question to myself was, what the fuck am I going to do? You know, this alien landscape. 

I literally started working from my home in my studio, looking at Google Maps, and I came across this street. That was the first encounter I had with the street. I really loved the gun shop, which I thought was a real gun shop because it was already on Google Maps. I don’t know how that happened.

AA: They must have taken a photo recently. This was a closed down restaurant that we turned into Gunther’s Pistol Palace.

GC: And little did I also know that the climax of the whole movie is on that street. I had no idea when I set out to make it.

AA: Yeah, I was excited that you chose the street. That makes sense to me, it felt fortuitous…

GC: I chose it because of the architecture and the space and the timelessness of the wires and the gun shop. 

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GC: I feel like there’s a kind of interesting overlap. A cross-connection,  bringing two worlds together;the world of your movie and the world of my photographs collide.

AA: When I think about your work, I think you’re a master of the eerie. There’s that book by Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie. He says that the ‘eerie’ is when there’s a space that’s missing something that’s supposed to be there. And the ‘weird’ is when there’s something there that isn’t supposed to be there. With that in mind, there’s a real eeriness to all of your work. I trace what you’re doing back to filmmakers more than other photographers. For instance, to Lynch, or John Waters or Douglas Sirk. The suburban is your thing. We were talking about alienation, and there’s this loneliness to your work. When I was younger, I would study your book, I would study your photos, and try to figure out how you achieve what you’re doing. Of course, seeing you do it, and understanding a lot of your process, which I won’t demystify, I see how I never actually could have figured it out.

It was like, okay, so what is it? Is it the space? Is it lighting? Yeah, well, it’s lighting… but it’s also what you’re doing with exposure. The point is, there’s something ineffable about your work that I was obsessed with as a kid, and it just felt like something I was interested in really chasing. It just feels right that you came to Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, which is where we shot this film. It is set during Covid and is eerie. The town is eerie because it’s dead, it’s shut down. It’s a town that is still functioning, but not really. It’s this liminal thing that’s happening. I remember when we first found Truth or Consequences – It was the first place that we found in New Mexico when we started scouting, but it wasn’t a realistic place to shoot a film. It was clear to me and the production designer that this would be great, but we weren’t going to do it because it’s two hours outside of Albuquerque, which means it’s so much more expensive to shoot here to put everybody up. So we thought we’d keep going, but that it was a good reference for what we want to find. And we just went all around New Mexico and found nothing at all that could match this. We came back and I remember saying as we were walking around the town, things like “this looks like a Crewdson”.

GC: Particularly in this movie, there’s a really beautiful blurring of reality and fiction, and that’s really involved in my own work. I’ve been working in the same towns for over 25 years, and they bring together real places, real people, real locations, and also bring my own psychological anxieties and fears and my own aesthetic to what makes this weird coming-together. I feel that very much in this movie. I think this movie is so beautifully made. When I’m talking about the form of the film – the various lighting, the production design, camera work, useful score, the great attention to life, the interior and exterior space – these are all things that I relate to and feel connected to. I just want to congratulate you on the formal level of making the work. To me, that’s what also makes it transcendent. I think it would be unbearable to watch the film if it wasn’t so visually striking.

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GC: Photographers are a strange lot in general, and I include myself in that. Maybe filmmakers are the same. In terms of alienation, I think there’s a reason photographers are drawn to the medium, because it’s an act. It’s an act of separation from the world. It’s an act of mediation. So, I think that sense of dislocation is deeply personal, it goes beyond an aesthetic. I think that photographers share that tendency of being both there and not there at the same time. 

AA: You impose a real artifice onto spaces that are real. You kind of infuse your spaces with something that isn’t already there. I know that most of your work is done around your home. Where does this feeling come from that’s so pervasive in your work?

GC: I’m drawn to various sorts of locations that feel like an ordinary and familiar part of the American landscape. I want them to feel outside of time, and they need to be beautiful first and foremost. Light is at the core of it, but the psychology underneath the picture –  like the anxiety that’s sitting underneath, or the fear, or the kind of tension – that’s the part that just happens. That’s the part that I don’t really want to know a lot about, because I want it to remain a mystery to myself. 

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AA: Your work is very painterly. There’s a tension between a sort of minimalism, and also, I’m not sure the word is maximalism, but it’s not unlike a Hollywood production, the way you work.

GC: I want everything to be perfectly still. I don’t like any movement in my pictures, because I don’t want any reminder that what you’re looking at is a photograph. Everything is sort of still, because I’m also looking to have the moment on set when everything comes together. We use fog machines, and we have our lights and cranes and stuff, so it all comes down to a moment when it all comes together. It becomes very still and peaceful.