Filming Beau Is Afraid Gave Director Ari Aster New Respect For James Cameron's Avatar

This post contains very light spoilers for "Beau is Afraid," a movie that is practically impossible to spoil.

"Beau is Afraid" has been swimming around in director Ari Aster's mind for nearly a decade. Before his demonic family film "Hereditary" burst onto the scene and the springtime cult of "Midsommar" welcomed actress Florence Pugh into their ranks, Aster made the short film "Beau" about an anxiety-ridden man trying to escape a terrifying apartment complex to visit his mother. For Aster, his latest feature became a receptacle for a huge amount of ideas about loneliness, paranoia, and repressed Oedipal rage that all ended up pouring out into one, three-hour long epic misadventure.

Aster has truly let his gloriously demented imagination run wild with "Beau is Afraid," and while that can be liberating on the page, it's another thing entirely to capture all those wild concepts and ideas on film when it's time to shoot the actual scene. Without question, "Beau is Afraid" is Aster's most ambitious film yet. It starts in a pre-apocalyptic hellscape that makes Skid Row look luxurious, then moves to a frightening version of the suburbs before entering a dazzling fantasy world where Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) sees his life flash before his eyes. 

Without revealing too much, the movie's ending features Phoenix trapped in a motorboat, forced to face judgment in a sequence that could best be described as Aster's interpretation of Albert Brooks' "Defending Your Life." The sequence required a great deal of post-production and visual effects work that made Aster appreciate the extensive world building that James Cameron's "Avatar" films have to create from the ground up. For Aster to even mention Cameron shows just how ambitious "Beau is Afraid" really is.

During the writing process, Aster's creativity didn't have to think about budgetary constraints or how exactly certain scenes were going to be achieved. The reality of getting as much of the director's vision onto the screen as possible came later. "As far as writing it goes, I was just clickety-clacketing without restraint," Aster joked at a recent roundtable discussion attended by /Film's Lex Briscuso. Asked about the dire ending of "Beau is Afraid," Aster broke down how complicated the finale was to accomplish and why it reminded him of summer tentpoles like "Avatar": 

"I'm in a water tank with Joaquin on a boat, surrounded by just greenscreen everywhere. So all of that was made from scratch in CG. And the process of building that out in CG, that was the most difficult, arduous process I've ever gone through in making a film. It gave me new respect for films like "Avatar" or something, where it's all made from scratch."

With backing by A24, the budget of "Beau is Afraid" is substantial, but obviously nowhere near the mountains of cash that Cameron had at his disposal. "We didn't have quite the amount of money we needed to do what we were doing," Aster admitted. "So we were just stretching the money and we were stretching the artists as far as we could to get to that. It was hard, but we landed in a place that I feel pretty good about."

Being familiar with Aster's previous films, "Hereditary" and "Midsommar," it shouldn't be too surprising to reveal that the ending of "Beau is Afraid" isn't exactly a happy one. For that reason, leaving the theater after Aster's latest may be a little easier than saying goodbye to the engrossing world of James Cameron's Pandora. 

As previously reported, "Avatar" fans legitimately became depressed after leaving the home planet moon of the Na'vi. In contrast, Ari Aster's "Beau is Afraid" deals with an entirely different kind of separation anxiety altogether. Fingers crossed, Aster will always remain firmly planted in arthouse terrain because, personally, I'm not sure if my brain could handle his version of a summer blockbuster. "Beau is Afraid" could end up being Aster's most personal and most ambitious film when all things are said and done; it's hard to imagine a grander exploration of his beautifully twisted neurosis than what's been accomplished here. 

In that sense, this is Aster's "Avatar." In fact, the ending of "Beau is Afraid" isn't the only scene featuring water. Throughout the film, water is a constant motif. Amniotic fluid, water bottles, bathtubs, nature paintings, and vast oceans are all seen at some point. If some film student out there ever wanted to write an off-the-wall essay comparing Aster's film to Cameron's, they could argue both films are really about family, first and foremost.

The difference, of course, is the fact that audiences are depressed when they leave Pandora in "Avatar: The Way of Water." With "Beau is Afraid," it's much more depressing to live inside Beau's tormented inner existence. Both Aster and Joaquin Phoenix go to extraordinary lengths to place the viewer inside the mind and body of the title character, to the point where it might be a little bit of a relief when the lights go up.