Happy 34th Birthday, Ari Aster! Born today in 1986, this American screenwriter and filmmaker is just about the hottest director working in film right now, notably with his first two features of which are already bona fide cult classics.
Aster was born in New York City, New York to his father, a musician and his mother, a poet.
Aster had recalled going to see his first movie when he was four years old.
This was the 1990 American action/crime film 'Dick Tracy'. It featured a scene where a character fired a tommy gun while a wall of fire was behind him.
As a child, Aster became obsessed with horror films, frequently renting them from local video stores: "I just exhausted the horror section of every video store I could find ... I didn't know how to assemble people who would cooperate on something like that ... I found myself just writing screenplays".
In 2004, Aster enrolled at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico, where he studied film.
After graduating in 2008, Aster was accepted into the 2010 class of fellows at the illustrious AFI Conservatory graduate program where he earned a Master of Fine Arts with a focus in Directing.
At both the College of Santa Fe and the American Film Institute, Aster met many of his future collaborators.
Aster's debut film was the short film 'Tale of Two Tims', which he wrote at College of Santa Fe and submitted to the American Film Institute.
This garnered him a fellowship into the graduate directing program at the AFI Conservatory.
Aster followed up with several AFI cycle films, along with comedic shorts made with industry friends like his two-minute 2011 American comedy short film 'TDF Really Works'.
While studying at the American Film Institute's graduate school in California, Aster's thesis film was the twenty-nine-minute 2011 American independent/drama short film 'The Strange Thing About the Johnsons'.
The film premiered at the 16th Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. This was before it leaked online in November and went viral.
Ivan Kander of the website Short of the Week wrote that the comments on YouTube had "everything from effusive acclaim to disgusted vitriol. In terms of the internet, that means it's a hit."
In the late 2010s, Aster made his breakthrough hit with the American independent entertainment company A24.
This was in writing and directing the first film of which he is best known. This was the 2018 American supernatural horror/drama film 'Hereditary'.
The film was acclaimed by critics, with Toni Collette's performance receiving particular praise, and was a commercial success.
Writing for Rolling Stone, American film critic, journalist and television presenter Peter Travers called it the scariest film of 2018.
On a budget of $10 million, 'Hereditary' grossed $80.2 million at the box office. To date, the film has become A24's highest-grossing film worldwide.
Between 2011 and 2018, Aster wrote and directed five more short films, often teaming with his AFI Conservatory friends Alejandro de Leon and Pawel Pogorzelski among others.
The following year, Aster's next production with A24 was the 2019 American folk horror/drama film 'Midsommar'.
On a budget of $3 million, the film grossed $47.9 million at the box office.
It received positive reviews from critics, with many praising Aster's direction and English actress Florence Pugh's performance.
After releasing 'Midsommar' on July 3, 2019, Aster also had a director’s cut released, clocking in at almost three hours.
Jordan Peele ('Get Out') said that the film had "the most atrociously disturbing imagery I've ever seen on film" and "usurps The Wicker Man as the most iconic pagan movie to be referenced".
While Aster hasn’t announced specific details for his next movie, he said in a recent interview with the Associated Students Program Board at UC Santa Barbara — via Slash Film — that it’s going to be a four-hour-long “nightmare comedy.”
Aster has been given incredible creative freedom, so it’s no surprise that his next film, or whatever shape the project takes, could end up being that long.
Aster has been active from 2011–present.
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