Posted 17 minutes agoSubscribe to Screen Time NewsletterCaret DownI Can't Watch "Eddington" The Same Way After Learning These 17 Facts"The movie that Twitter wrote" is streaming now and crying out for a rewatch.by Colin GorensteinBuzzFeed ContributorFacebookPinterestLink Ari Aster knows that we haven't fully metabolized what happened in 2020. His latest film, Eddington, uses the COVID-19 pandemic - what he considers a major inflection point in modern American society - to examine the tribalism, disinformation, and general dystopia that still lingers today. I watched this film in theaters back in July and admired many of the big swings it took. But I also left with a ton of questions - which, invariably, sent me down some deep, dark internet rabbit holes. Here are a handful of facts I discovered in the months since I first saw the film that opened my third eye (like Emma Stone's character in the film, Louise Cross - except I've actually vetted all the information here) and might just change the way you watch Eddington, now that it's available to stream on HBO Max. [Eddington spoilers below!] 1. While filming that memorable tracking shot with Katy Perry's "Firework," the song playing on set was actually "Empire State of Mind." A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection "The first song we tried to get was 'Empire State of Mind,'" Aster told Kevin McCarthy. "Once we did not get the rights to that, then it became 'Firework.'" 2. The first cut of Eddington was three hours and 10 minutes. Richard Foreman /(C) A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection "I didn't show it to the studio at that length," Aster told Sam Fragoso on Talk Easy. "I showed it to them at two hours and 44 minutes. I get it. You're alienating people when you're that long." The final runtime was two hours and 25 minutes." 3. There's a beheading - or traumatic head injury - in all four of Ari Aster's film. In Eddington, it's both literal and metaphorical. A24 "I like to take a head off," Aster told Sean Fennessey on The Big Picture. "That's not going anywhere. The more that I think about it, that really does feel like a relevant image right now - an exploding head. Everyone's head is exploding in this movie." 4. The art department had an elaborate mural painted across the bar that depicted the history of Eddington, New Mexico and the Garcia family. However, due to how dark the film ended up being, it's barely visible. A24 "I just didn't anticipate how dark all the scenes would be," Aster told Vanity Fair. "That's some work that just kinda went out the window." 5. In that same bar, Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix share their first scene together. Evidently the two had such good chemistry that they couldn't stop giggling. A24 "This scene was difficult to get through because, for whatever reason, they were very giggly," Aster said. "They were making each other laugh all night and it was a tight night. So that was fun...for a little bit." 6. Aster believes that Eddington is actually a comedy. Richard Foreman /(C) A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection "It's a dark comedy. [...] It's something of a satire," he told Next Best Picture. "It's dangerous to use the word 'satire' because that means something different to everybody," 7. The film's biggest influence wasn't any particular film, but, rather, the internet. A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection "What I wanted the movie to feel like was the internet," Aster told MovieWeb. "The big influence on this film is the internet and Twitter." He added in his interview with Semafor: "It's the movie that Twitter wrote," which was met with groans. 8. While writing Eddington, Aster made a bunch of different profiles on Twitter and "put each into a different algorithm." Jacopo Raule / Getty Images He said this process was very useful to get a sense of the internet siloes that are depicted in the film. 9. Ted Garcia's mayoral campaign videos were shot in two hours before production had officially started. Richard Foreman / (C) A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection "If you see those videos, they're not hard to parody. They parody themselves," Aster said. 10. Aster tried to get Eddington made eight years before Hereditary - though that initial script looked completely different. Ian Langsdon / Getty Images "It was just this, sort of, contemporary Western that I lost interest in," Aster told Bill Hader on the A24 podcast. "Because it needed something else. Like, it was missing something. And I realized I could take the basic structure and world of that script and then use that as a thing to hang all of these other ideas from." 11. We often hear about directors who avoid phones and texting in their films because they find it un-cinematic. Aster actually wishes he could have included more screens (and scrolling) in Eddington. Richard Foreman /(C) A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection "I find that that's pretty much the heart of the film," Aster said. 12. Once the film builds to the big shootout sequence, we don't see screens anymore. That was a deliberate cho