April Fool’s Day was a little quiet this year, with little in the way of high-profile, outlandish pranks. But one Manhattan audience were victim to a good kind of ruse. As per Deadline, moviegoers at the Alamo Drafthouse in Lower Manhattan who were expecting to see a repertory screening of Ari Aster’s Midsommar were instead treated to his latest opus. That film is Beau is Afraid, the director’s much-anticipated follow-up to his nightmarish folk horror hit. They also learned that the film runs an 179 minutes — one hour shorter than what was originally reported.
Details remain scant about Beau is Afraid, but we do know it stars Joaquin Phoenix as “a paranoid man [who] embarks on an epic odyssey to get home to his mother,” according to the press release. Aster, meanwhile, has compared it to The Lord of the Rings. Joining the Oscar-winning actor are Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Kylie Rogers, Denise Ménochet, Parker Posey, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Richard Kind, Hayley Squires, and Michael Gandolfini.
During a post-film Q&A with Aster that was moderated by no less than Emma Stone, the filmmaker told a story about when Phoenix collapsed during a take. “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,” Aster told the crowd. “I was really pissed ’cause it was a really good take. It felt confusing so I went around the corner and he was collapsed.”
He went on: “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.”
You can watch a behind-the-scenes look at Beau is Afraid below. It hits theaters on April 14.
(Via Deadline)