Eddington is not based on a true story, but a real-life feud inspired Ari Aster to make the film: Here's how

Ari Aster’s Eddington isn’t rooted in any actual feud or real historical events but emerged from his own lived experience during the early months of the COVID‑19 pandemic. As a self-described hyper- neurotic living in New Mexico during the lockdown, Aster became fixated on social media scrolls, algorithmic bubbles, and the paranoia bubbling across the pandemic.

Conversations with local sheriffs and mayors seeded the film’s fictional showdown between a mask‑refusing sheriff and a progressive mayor. What grew wasn’t a historical retelling, but a feverish allegory —a neo-Western satire crafted from collected dread, digital echo chambers, and political fragmentation. Here's what inspired Ari Aster to make Eddington.

The inspiration behind Ari Aster's Eddington

Eddington's premise appears and feels too real not to be rooted in reality. Director Ari Aster recently spoke to Vulture about how a real-life incident inspired him to create Eddington. According to the helmer, Joaquin Phoenix's character Joe Cross is based on the sheriff of a county who had a feud with the mayor. Opening up on the real-life roots of Eddington, Aster said,

"Many of the characters in the film are modeled on different people I met. For instance, Joaquin's character is based on the sheriff of a vast county with a small population. He had a very passionate, long-standing feud with the mayor... Joe Cross is based on that man, even his wardrobe. I flew back out to New Mexico so that Joaquin could meet him and a few other people that I really liked, and we spent a day just driving around the county with the sheriff. He came to set several times to consult."

He then added how he interacted with different people from different towns to get the premise of the film right:

"When I came back to rewrite the script, I went back out to New Mexico, drove around the state, and went to different small towns to talk to police and mayors. I went to different counties to talk to sheriffs, went to pueblos."

How these real-life instances helped shape Eddington as a brilliant Western satirical comedy

Ari Aster wrote Eddington in June 2020 amid pandemic anxiety, political unrest, and digital paranoia plaguing small‑town New Mexico. Using the Western genre as a frame, he transformed real observations into a sharp satire: smartphones replaced guns, social media fueled ideological chaos, and echo chambers fractured community trust.

In another interview with The New Yorker Radio Hour, Aster said:

“‘Eddington’ is a film about a bunch of people who . . . know that something’s wrong. They just—nobody can agree on what that thing is. My concern is that I don’t know how much of a hunger people have anymore for anything controversial or challenging.”

Drawing from classic Westerns and ensemble comedies like Nashville and Unforgiven, Eddington blends genre tradition with biting modern satire. The film dramatizes how misinformation, conspiracy, and civic confusion spiral into absurdity, offering both laughs and discomfort as Aster distills everything into a surreal portrait of America at its breaking point.