Earlier today, we were talking about the traditional April Fool’s day pranks, which tend to range from genuinely irritating to “Actually kind of clever and cool!” Every once in a while, though, you get the best kind of pranks: The ones that actually make something new, or at least as-yet-unseen, and then surprises people with the excitement of getting to experience it out of the blue. The kind that Hereditary director Ari Aster unleashed on an unsuspecting audience today, who were expecting to see a screening of Aster’s 2019 film Midsommar—and instead were treated to a full preview of his new movie, Beau Is Afraid, a month before it’s supposed to be out
Aster pulled the prank on an audience at New York’s Alamo Drafthouse, who were then shown the full version of the three-hour Joaquin Phoenix-starrer. (Looking around online, it looks like several theaters showed the “Midsommar director’s cut” today.) In an after-movie Q&A, moderated by Emma Stone, Aster talked about the film’s creation—including revealing an anecdote in which Phoenix collapsed on set during a scene with Patti LuPone:
There was a scene that was very intense for Patti and it was a shot that was on Patti, it was not on him and all of a sudden he fell out of frame. I was really pissed ’cause it was a really good take. It felt confusing so I went around the corner and he was collapsed. I knew it was bad because he was letting people touch him and people were tending to him and he was allowing it. The point is that he fainted in somebody else’s take, he wasn’t on camera and he was helping them, he was in it for them to the point where he collapsed. It’s very poetic that he collapsed in somebody else’s shot.
Plot details about the film—which is due out on April 21, for those of us not lucky enough to get pranked in this particular way—are scant, although Phoenix reportedly plays “a paranoid man [who] embarks on an epic odyssey to get home to his mother.”
