PHOTOGRAPHS BY GABOR KOTSCHY / COURTESY OF A2422 SUMMER 2019 MOVIEMAKER.COM
HOW THEY DID IT
PEAKS AND
VALLEYS AND
SH A DOWS
OF DEATH
Seamless stunt work, smartly
drawn shot lists, and sun-soaked
lighting fueled the morbid
mountaintop sequence of writer-
director Ari Aster’s Midsommar
BY ARI ASTER,
AS TOLD TO CALEB HAMMOND
N MIDSOMMAR—my sopho-
more feature about a codepen-
dent couple whose doomed fate
leads them to a nightmarish
summer solstice celebration
among an ancestral Swedish cult called the
Hårga—there are two movies happening
at the same time, from beginning to end.
The first movie is a folk horror film, and
that’s the sort of movie our male characters
are living in. The second is a wish-fulfillment
fantasy—a modern fairy tale that our leading
lady Dani (Florence Pugh) is inadvertently
taken through.
Our first major set piece, introduced
halfway through the film, is significant in
the context of each of these “two movies.”
The scene depicts ättestupa—a ritual in which
every elder of the Hårga, having reached the
age of 72, commits suicide by cliff-jumping
as the rest of the members watch from the
valley below. Dani’s boyfriend Christian
(Jack Reynor) and his friend Josh
(William Jackson Harper) are both anthropol-
ogy PhD students, and once they witness this
shocking ritual, they enter into a competition
to do their respective theses on the Hårga.
They see this moment as an opportunity to
advance their academic careers, so the worse
their time at the midsummer festival gets, the
more exciting it becomes. For Dani, seeing the
ritual forces her to relive the trauma she en-
dures at the outset of the film, when her sister
and parents die tragically in a murder-suicide.
And as one of the members of the Hårga ex-
plains the philosophy and motives behind the
ritual, Dani begins to reframe her perspective
on what happened to her and her family.RAMPING UP TENSION
Scouting for this sequence proved to be
a difficult task. We saw every possible loca-
tion in Hungary throughout pre-production,
looking for a valley that would include some
sort of cliff top, but this was the one location
we could never find. We finally found one thatwould’ve been great... if only there was a peak
from which our stunt actors could jump.
The problem was that although our hilltop
was high enough that it could kill somebody,
it still wasn’t visually impressive. We realized
that in order to make this work, we were
going to have to build a 30-foot green screen
ramp, which we would later replace with
a CG mountaintop in post-production.
It also became clear that building this ramp
was going to cost us hundreds of thousands
of dollars, so a lot of our budget went toward
reinforcing it. But green-screening the ramp
was worth the investment, as it was crucial
in giving our FX artists something they
could easily cut out in post.JUMPING-OFF POINT
When it comes to stunts, something can
always go wrong, so you try to take as many
precautions as you can. For certain shots,
we minimized risk by avoiding having our
stunt actors jump simply for our main actors’
benefit when it wasn’t required. In these in-
stances, I would clap my clapboard in order
to give our main actors the correct timing of
the jump—at which point they would react.
When it came time to get more complicated
shots of the sequence, the ramp also enabled
our main actors to react to something real,I
“
THERE’S NO HOPE OF
EVADING 100 PERCENT
OF CONTINUITY LAPSES
IF YOU’RE SHOOTING
ON A TIGHT SCHEDULE
OUTDOORS EVERY DAY.
”