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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Hereditary’

The director Ari Aster narrates a scene from his horror film.

Hi. I’m Ari Aster, and I am the writer/director of “Hereditary.” This is the opening shot of the film. We are opening on an image of the treehouse, which is a significant monument in the film. When we were on set we were actually shooting a green screen outside of this window, because that treehouse is actually a plate because we built the entire set on a stage. So the entire house was built from scratch. We’re panning away now to reveal that we are inside Annie’s workshop. Annie is a character played by Toni Collette. And in this space she builds miniature replicas of spaces in her life. And the miniatures always sort of served as a metaphor for the family’s situation in this film, which is that they are people with no agency and they’re revealed to be like dolls in a dollhouse being manipulated by outside forces. So now we have landed on the Graham house miniature. And this is meant to basically function as a replica of the house that we are in right now. And so we needed to design everything well in advance of shooting so that we could get a miniaturist, Steve Newburn — who also did our prosthetics — to replicate everything by the time we were ready to shoot it. So we were replicating things before they were built in the first place. And here we actually had to use tracking markers on the miniature room and shoot a separate plate of Peter’s actual room with the wall removed. And then we had the wonderful VFX artists at Brainstorm. They did a beautiful job of seamlessly incorporating that plate into this shot so that it looks as though Peter’s actual bedroom is a miniature.

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Hereditary’

By Mekado MurphyJune 7, 2018

The director Ari Aster narrates a scene from his horror film.

Recent episodes in Anatomy of a Scene
Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.
Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.

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