The film-maker Ari Aster was born in New York City in 1986 and grew up in New Mexico after a short stint in Chester in the UK, where his father ran a jazz club. A horror buff, Aster studied film in Santa Fe and completed a master of fine arts degree at the American Film Institute Conservatory. His feature debut was Hereditary, the 2018 horror-drama starring Toni Collette. He followed this up a year later with the folk-horror Midsommar, which the Guardian called an “outrageous black-comic carnival of agony”. Now he’s back with Beau Is Afraid (out 19 May), in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a lost soul trying to get home to his mother.
1. Comic book
Eightball is a series of comics that ran between 1989 and 2004. Fantagraphics has just put out every issue (bar the final one) in a single volume. I think it’s one of the most important works of art of the 20th century. Clowes’s humour and worldview were so indelible to me growing up. I wanted to make films that felt like Eightball. It’s very hard to describe Clowes’s style, because he’s drawing from so many influences, but he’s metabolised all of them. The only other artists I’d compare him to would be the Coen brothers.
2. Film
No Bears (dir Jafar Panahi, 2022)
This is the latest film by Jafar Panahi, who was living for years under house arrest in Iran. He continued making and smuggling out films since his arrest and they’ve all been really brilliant and invigorating, but this strikes me as the best he’s made. It’s basically two parallel stories: the film he’s making while under arrest, and his uneasy relationship with the village in which he’s living. It’s about as damning a film about Iranian life as I’ve seen. The ending has been haunting me for months. It’s a really frightening and beautiful and endlessly painful film.
3. Music
Tenório is a Brazilian musician based in Rio who I’ve been listening to a lot recently. He’s very prolific and has made theatre and cinema soundtracks as well as releasing his own solo work. A friend of mine recommended his music, specifically a piece that samples noises from pornography. He creates these soundscapes and musical environments that I just love living in. It’s ambient, avant garde, very idiosyncratic, and his latest album is great in all the ways that his work is great.
4. TV
This is a funny, strange meta-comedy that’s mean-spirited in a very interesting way. The director Jason Woliner was approached by this guy, Paul T Goldman, who had a story that he thought should be a TV show. It’s about him meeting a woman who he felt was conning him and it mushrooms into something very weird. Woliner said: “Yeah, let’s do it, and let’s have you play yourself, re-enacting these moments from your life.” It’s a pretty great impulse to follow through on. I’m only a few episodes in, but I love it.
5. Book
Levé was a French writer who killed himself aged 42. Autoportrait, written in 2005, is a book of facts. Every paragraph is a self-contained revelation, but there’s an impishness about whether what he’s writing is true or not. In some ways, he reminds me of [the Portuguese writer] Fernando Pessoa in his playfulness. It’s a very painful book, especially knowing that he killed himself not long after writing it, but also very funny. Reading him, you always feel the thrill of experimentation.
6. Documentary
This Much I Know to Be True (dir Andrew Dominik, 2022)
This is the second documentary that Dominik has made with Nick Cave, after One More Time With Feeling, which is, I think, one of the most vivid and beautiful artist portraits mixed with a concert film. The first one was made not long after Cave’s son died, and so it’s very much about grief. This one, made while Cave was recording Carnage with Warren Ellis, is just as cinematic, but there’s more joy here. I like Cave’s music, but I’m especially a fan of what these two have been doing together.
