Martin Scorsese is known not just for making incredible films, but also for backing and supporting emerging filmmakers. The past few years, Scorsese has executive produced films by the Safdie Brothers, Joanna Hogg, Alice Rohrwacher and more. He also seems to be fond of Ari Aster, as he penned a new introduction for a special collector’s edition Blu-Ray of Aster’s sophomore feature, “Midsommar.”
The news comes from EW, where the entire introduction for the Blu-Ray of Aster’s directors cut of “Midsommar” can be read. “A couple of years ago, I watched a first film called Hereditary by a director named Ari Aster. Right from the start, I was impressed,” Scorsese wrote. “Here was a young filmmaker that obviously knew cinema. The formal control, the precision of the framing and the movement within the frame, the pacing of the action, the sound — it was all there, immediately evident.”
“But as the picture went on, it started to affect me in different ways,” he continued. “It became disturbing to the point of being uncomfortably so, particularly during the remarkable family dinner scene after the sister has been killed. Like all memorable horror films, it tunnels deep into something unnameable and unspeakable, and the violence is as emotional as it is physical.”
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This is not the first time Scorsese wrote about Aster’s films, as he complimented the filmmaker in a New York Times op-ed last year. Likewise, during a Q&A at the New York Film Festival last year, Scorsese described “Hereditary” as a “remarkable film.”
A24‘s director’s cut Blu-Ray of “Midsommar” is available now.