From The New York Times.

Things come to a boil between a sheriff and a mayor in a small town during this scene in Ari Aster’s pandemic satire “Eddington.”

The sheriff is Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who has long had a rivalry with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Cross is now running for mayor and has said some damaging things about Garcia. At this moment, Cross arrives to address a noise complaint at a fund-raising party Garcia is throwing.

The party — an outdoor, masked event complete with bottles of Purell and infrared thermometer guns (since the movie takes place in mid-2020) — includes music playing on a loudspeaker: the Katy Perry song “Firework,” which Cross turns down. The scene primarily consists of an extended Steadicam shot.

“One thing I like about long unbroken takes is that you can follow the actors around and really just allow them to like live in a space,” Aster said during an interview in New York. “I find Joaquin’s body language here really great, especially when you’re just on his back for so long. Joaquin’s one of those physical actors where, sometimes his back tells you even more than his front.”

Although the song “Firework” blares through the scene and becomes a telling soundtrack to the narrative, it wasn’t the director’s first choice of music for this moment.

“The original song that we tried to get was ‘Empire State of Mind’ by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys,” Aster said. “I found that to be a very funny song to be playing here, given that it’s a fund-raiser in a small town in New Mexico, and that is a New York anthem. It felt like exactly the kind of song that this character, Ted Garcia, who’s kind of a dweeby politician, would be playing. But ‘Firework’ also works in that regard. I just needed the song to really sound like the culture.”

A standoff between the two characters ultimately leads to a moment in which Garcia slaps Cross.

“Pedro was nervous about the slap, he didn’t want to hurt Joaquin. And [Pascal] also had a bad shoulder at the time of shooting this,” Aster said. “And so the first couple of takes, he kind of went easy on Joaquin. Then Joaquin confronted him saying, ‘[expletive] hit me!’ And so this is one of the takes where Pedro is giving it.”

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