I don’t think anybody’s metabolized what happened. We’re living in the consequences of it; we’re still all in different realities. I wanted to make a film where everybody’s alienated from each other and has lost track of a bigger world outside of themselves. They only see the dimensions of the small world they believe in, and distrust anything that contradicts this small bubble of certainty.
I’m absolutely guilty of this as well. I wanted to pull back and describe what that feels like, while creating a scenario where the bubbles of people living in different worlds start to collide. At the same time, it’s a genre film. On the most basic level, I wanted to make a good Western.
I like how you’ve described Eddington elsewhere: a Western with phones instead of guns.
I’m interested in the Western because it’s the national genre. It’s very much about the dream of America—and, at its best, it’s contending with the reality of America as well. I wanted to make a film that functioned as a traditional Western while being inflected by this modern realism. People now are so paralyzed by history. We’re all using it to shore up our specific beliefs, but, at the same time, we’re incredibly conscious of America’s cultural past.
Joe Cross would have seen a lot of Westerns. He sees himself as a classic small-town sheriff. He cares about his community, loves his wife; he’s a man of action, and he’s also very sentimental. That’s another way of saying that he is not really looking at his life: He’s very sentimental about his life. He’s also 50 years old, and he would have grown up with action movies in the ’80s and ’90s. That’s an important part of his imagination. At the end, he gets to live in an action movie, right? That goes for another character, without giving anything away, who’s younger; at the end, he’s living in a video game.
We’ve all been trained to see the world through certain windows, but those windows have just become stranger and stranger. Look at what’s happened with the internet. It used to be this thing that we went to, but now it’s something we carry on us. We live inside the internet now.
