Ari Aster speaks during the "Eddington" press conference at the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on May 17, 2025 in Cannes, France. Sebastien Nogier/Pool/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text [This story contains spoilers for Eddington.] Ari Aster is a good sport. The Eddington writer-director didn't have to entertain The Hollywood Reporter's questions about an embryonic draft of his COVID-19 Western, but he did so anyway, further illustrating how the writing and rewriting process doesn't truly end until picture is locked. The film always introduced its fictional small town setting of Eddington, New Mexico through the perspective of a troubled local vagrant named Lodge (Clifton Collins Jr.), but according to an earlier script, the sequence originally contained a real-life tech billionaire with a notable history on the big screen. Related Stories TV Walton Goggins Responds After Pete Davidson Predicts Fans Will "Turn" on Him Movies Pete Davidson Predicts Fans Will "Turn" on Walton Goggins Similar to Pedro Pascal Oversaturation Backlash As Lodge babbles and walks barefoot back to town, Aster establishes a sign for a proposed data center, which is one of numerous issues that has divided Eddington's sub-3,000 population and the nearby reservation known as Santa Lupe Pueblo. Similar data centers are being built all over the U.S. right now in order to support Big Tech's overwhelming investment in AI infrastructure. However, there have been widespread objections over these facilities' potential resource depletion, particularly water. Meta's own data centers have been in the news due to this very concern, and so it makes sense why Aster once scripted a quick scene involving Meta chairman, Mark Zuckerberg. Lodge once watched the tech CEO emerge from a stretch limousine with a map in hand so he could assess Eddington's offerings. But the appearance was scrapped during ongoing development, never advancing to the point of having to assemble a casting list. "That fell by the wayside a long time before we started making it," Aster tells THR during a recent FYC conversation. "That was an early idea, and it was only one moment." The battle for Eddington's soul is primarily waged by Joaquin Phoenix's Sheriff Joe Cross and Pedro Pascal's Mayor Ted Garcia. The two men have opposing views on just about everything: politics, the aforementioned data complex and COVID-19 safety protocols as of May 2020. Furthermore, they have longstanding personal grievances, mainly involving Joe's wife, Louise (Emma Stone). After a dust-up with Ted over the local grocery store's adherence to the state's mask mandate, Joe impulsively announces his rival candidacy for mayor of Eddington, and tensions eventually boil over to the point of deadly violence. Eddington contains a number of images, story points and themes that struck a chord at the time of its theatrical release in July 2025, but a number of them have proven to be quite prophetic of more recent events within America's fraught political landscape. "I'm pretty heartbroken about where we are. I'm very scared. I feel immense dread all the time. This movie came out of that sense of dread, and I certainly see how the film is prescient," Aster says. "There are things that have happened since [the theatrical release] that the film anticipates, but the film is also the product of me just trying to look unblinkingly at where we are. If I'm not using the world right now for my work, then it's just going to be using me. This is a very, very dark moment, and so I hope that the film feels reflective of where we are." Below, Aster also discusses other adjustments he made to his ever-evolving script, including the substantial dialogue removal during Joe and Ted's duel over the volume of Katy Perry's "Firework." *** The final shot has lingered in my mind since July. My first thought in the theater was, "This is who won, and this is who was always going to win." Is that reading on your wavelength? Yep! (Aster smiles.) I read an early version of the script that does not end with that shot. It ended with invalid Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) and Dawn's (Deirdre O'Connell) unique bedroom arrangement, minus the third party. When did it occur to you that the data center shot should be the exclamation point on the piece? Well, it was in the shooting script before we started production, so you probably read a version that was maybe half a year before we began shooting. But it felt like it came to be a very important part of the film's spine before we began. And now, it's the heart of the film. It's the point of the film. Ari Aster and Pedro Pascal on the set of Eddington Richard Foreman/A24 There have been recent stories about the water-related impact of a Meta data center in Georgia, and that's one of