Dar­ren Aronof­sky: ​‘I try not to hold on to past suc­cess­es and past failures’

To his fans, Dar­ren Aronof­sky is proof that you can make bold, inde­pen­dent, artis­tic films in an indus­try that dis­avows any­thing but the bot­tom line. To actors like Mick­ey Rourke – brought out of the wilder­ness for a lead role in The Wrestler – he’s a kind of spir­i­tu­al heal­er. To aspir­ing film­mak­ers he’s a role mod­el; the geek who rode a $20,000 debut all the way to the top table of Hollywood.

His films, five of them in the last 12 years and each its own pecu­liar strug­gle, have made Aronof­sky one of the most talked about direc­tors of his gen­er­a­tion. And yet he’s one of those rare film­mak­ers whose work speaks for itself. Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Foun­tain, The Wrestler and now Black Swan – all of them are linked by an abra­sive ener­gy and emo­tion­al pres­sure, by char­ac­ters who are strug­gling to con­tain the demons with­in, by death as the road to awe. LWLies sat down with Aronof­sky recent­ly to chat Black Swan, Wolver­ine and Noah’s Ark.

LWLies: Can you tell us how you end­ed up mak­ing Black Swan after The Wrestler when at the time all the talk was about Robo­Cop and a Noah’s Ark project?

Aronof­sky: It’s very hard to make movies so you’ve got­ta throw a lot of things out there and see what sticks. I think my devel­op­ment is always a marathon with projects, you know? They all line up and they all get going and the ones that cross the fin­ish line, often we’ve gone back to them many times to revis­it a scene or a sto­ry or some­thing about them that grabs our fan­cy and allows us to keep push­ing that one clos­er to the fin­ish line. So Black Swan’s been in devel­op­ment for eight or nine years and there was some­thing about it that kept pulling me back to it. I don’t know what it was exact­ly. There were a lot of ele­ments, for instance it was a chance to work with Natal­ie, it was the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a were­wolf movie, but it was a were-swan movie, the fact that it’s about trans­for­ma­tion was excit­ing about it. There were so many dif­fer­ent things that kept pulling me back. The chal­lenge of shoot­ing bal­let and dance and mak­ing it sexy and fun and inter­est­ing. All those things.

Much of Black Swan is about the cre­ation of art and the agony of cre­at­ing art. Who do you iden­ti­fy with the most, is it Leroy (Vin­cent Cas­sel), who is the direc­tor who push­es and push­es for the cre­ation, or is it Nina (Natal­ie Port­man) who is the cre­ator of the art itself?

I don’t know, I think I iden­ti­fy with all the char­ac­ters. I think you have to as a direc­tor. That’s your job – to be able to put your­self into each character’s shoes, point shoes, what­ev­er they may be wear­ing, and chan­nel their emo­tion. It’s kin­da like if you’re play­ing a chess game, you have to play both sides of the table hon­est­ly and truth­ful­ly and for­get which side you’re on because each char­ac­ter needs to be played from a truth­ful and pos­i­tive place. I’m clear­ly very inter­est­ed in per­for­mance – my last two movies were about per­for­mance – and that’s prob­a­bly because my biggest col­lab­o­ra­tion, or the one I enjoy the most, is with my actors. That work fas­ci­nates me – how they do it – so I think that’s me think­ing about act­ing and actors.

Anton Cor­bi­jn said recent­ly that he was going to make three films and then fig­ure out what kind of film­mak­er he was. Does that ring true to you – do you look back over five movies and think, ​‘I nev­er knew that this is who I was’?

Yeah, you know, I guess the only way I can com­ment on that is that just recent­ly they did a Blu-ray ver­sion of Requiem for a Dream, and the stu­dio was great, they went back to the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive and re-canned it and then my team came in and updat­ed the sound design and all that. You know, I didn’t real­ly want to get involved but I watched the final prod­uct just to make sure it was fine and I could not recog­nise the young man who had made that film. I def­i­nite­ly couldn’t have made that film today; it was a dif­fer­ent per­son who had made that. And so that was kind of inter­est­ing, how much you change. And to allow your­self to change is impor­tant, to allow your­self to grow. I think that’s what I’m try­ing to do is not hold on to past suc­cess­es and past fail­ures but to just live it and see what’s fas­ci­nat­ing about the present and try to do some­thing in the present.

It’s an impor­tant thing to be able to do. In your twen­ties the idea that as an old­er guy you might not recog­nise your younger self kind of fills you with scorn. You hate the idea of grow­ing old­er. But to be able to look back and acknowl­edge that you’ve changed and be com­fort­able with it is an impor­tant thing.

Yeah I wasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly look­ing down on myself I was just real­ly curi­ous who that per­son was. I couldn’t remem­ber the mind-space of the per­son who had done that, so that’s what was inter­est­ing. And I think, you know, one of my men­tors told me, ​‘Nev­er watch your films when you’re done’, and I’ve kin­da sub­scribed to that. I’ll prob­a­bly see Black Swan twice more and that’ll be it. I’ll see it on DVD when it comes out to make sure it’s okay, and I’ll prob­a­bly see it once in the the­atre when it first opens just to see what an audi­ence, what a non-fes­ti­val audi­ence, reacts to. And that’ll be it. I think if you do stay con­nect­ed to the films it can mess you up, you have to let them go and enter the world and dis­ap­pear for a while.

Some­body who sat down and watched these five films of yours back to back might won­der if you were some kind of fatal­ist because almost all of them end either in death or the inti­ma­tion of death or some sort of muti­la­tion as a path to puri­ty or what­ev­er. What would you say to that?

I think there are con­nec­tions between them even though the sub­ject mat­ters are rad­i­cal­ly all over the place. But I’m not a film the­o­rist, I just make ​’em as I feel ​’em, and the char­ac­ters I push to cre­ate just come out of me. So I haven’t real­ly analysed what it’s all about. I’m not inter­est­ed in that, I think it’s about the work and you just tell those stories.

You just try to be instinctive?

Absolute­ly. I mean, you know, it’s weird, for some rea­son I was attract­ed to Swan Lake but at the end of Swan Lake it’s a dual sui­cide; the prince and the white swan leap off a cliff. So I knew the film was going to end like that, it just was what it was. The Wrestler, there was no oth­er way to deal with that – he was going off the top rope. That was the whole idea. So I don’t know if it’s pure­ly because I’m dri­ving the ship there or coin­ci­dence but clear­ly I’m attract­ed to these char­ac­ters and sto­ries. The char­ac­ters I’m attract­ed to are not dif­fer­ent from the char­ac­ters you nor­mal­ly see in a film. They’re char­ac­ters in extreme cir­cum­stances, under extreme pres­sures, either com­bat­ing… in very chal­leng­ing worlds and try­ing to find some form of peace or love or happiness.

As you make more movies and you accu­mu­late rep­u­ta­tion, per­haps awards, maybe even wealth…

Wealth hasn’t come. The Wrestler, I got paid scale. Black Swan I did a lit­tle bit but I nev­er get own­er­ship. The prob­lem is that all these films, no one on the plan­et ever wants to make them. It’s only me and my team that are push­ing it for­ward, and we always have to find that one investor who either wants to break into the busi­ness or, you know, under­stands the vision and then they always pay an incred­i­bly low amount of mon­ey and all the mon­ey ends up on the screen. So unfor­tu­nate­ly that hasn’t happened.

Do you think that’s why peo­ple get so pro­tec­tive about you as a film­mak­er, and get so vocal when you announce new projects – because they’re so aware that there is no one else like you and if you don’t make these great, kamikaze films that you’re mak­ing then we’re robbed of them because no one else will do it?

You’ve got­ta tell that to the world so they give us money.

What is it that gets you out of bed on a cold, dark, ear­ly morn­ing and gets you onto a film set? What keeps the fire burning?

Usu­al­ly it’s char­ac­ter. There’s some­thing about the char­ac­ter that I like and I want to explore and see. It’s also, you know, respon­si­bil­i­ty and duty. When you set up all this mon­ey and a team to do some­thing, you do it. In a very British way, just get­ting things done. I have that instilled from my par­ents, but I think the thing that allows me to for­get about the pain that is going to come while shoot­ing a movie is the excite­ment of telling a sto­ry and explor­ing a char­ac­ter. And that’s it. You have to be in love with your char­ac­ters and your sto­ry if you’re going to do these films because it’s just going to be that much hard­er, as you say, to get out of bed. And for some rea­son I always seem to shoot in the win­ter, which is a freakin’ night­mare. It’s just a night­mare. I’d love to shoot some­thing in the Bahamas with biki­nis at some point because it’d make my life much easier.

How does the pain of film­mak­ing man­i­fest itself?

The pain of film­mak­ing – it’s real­ly hard because it’s a grind. It’s long days, very intense days. I mean, they’re fun and you get to do a lot of great stuff but there’s just a lot of chal­lenges and a lot of pres­sures and that’s just in the cre­ative work. Then there’s all the pres­sures of not enough mon­ey, not enough time, what are we going to do, how do we fix this? It’s a real hustle.

Talk­ing about genre, there’s the psy­cho­log­i­cal side to Black Swan, but it’s a very phys­i­cal film too. There’s a real old-fash­ioned hor­ror film in there.

I don’t think we were ful­ly con­scious of it. We, you know, I don’t real­ly make genre films very well – I’m def­i­nite­ly genre bend­ing. If you think back to Pi, maybe sci-fi, I don’t know what it was. Requiem I guess is a drug movie if that’s a genre, but it was def­i­nite­ly sur­re­al. I’d pay any­one if they could tell me what genre The Foun­tain was. The Wrestler I guess is a pret­ty straight­for­ward dra­ma to a cer­tain extent. But once again Black Swan is… We knew we were play­ing with cer­tain gen­res. We were into the old-school hor­ror film, not what hor­ror has become in today’s world. This idea that, we knew we were going to be doing these gags and we were excit­ed by it. I mean, I was a lit­tle scared because they were just gags where you make the audi­ence jump and scare the hell out of them. But I kind of took it as a chal­lenge to fig­ure out a way to do them in a fresh way and to sur­prise peo­ple and to scare them.

And then there’s some clas­sic scares, like when the double’s knocked out and her eyes pop open. I mean, that’s just about as old and cheap a shot as you can get. But it works! It works on what­ev­er 20 per cent of the audi­ence and you can’t be ful­ly inven­tive on all of them. We knew there were going to be mir­ror gags through­out the film because mir­ror gags, you can­not do a bal­let film with­out the mir­ror because bal­leri­nas are con­stant­ly star­ing at their line and their com­plex­ion and their body shape, and so we knew mir­rors were a big part. And of course because of the dop­pel­gänger ele­ments, the reflec­tion was going to be a big deal, but the mir­ror gag in hor­ror films is the old­est gag in the world, you know? You open up the med­i­cine cab­i­net and you put it back and – baaaam! – somebody’s there. So the chal­lenge was, ​‘How do we do some of those gags but not fall into the same old trap and do some inter­est­ing stuff?’ So, you know, we used a lot of dig­i­tal effects to remove some of the reflec­tions of the cam­era and crew so we could put the cam­era in impos­si­ble places and then we did a lot of one-way mir­rors and a lot of real­ly crazy, fun stuff. So we tried to push it.

Every­thing you said about your­self as a film­mak­er seems to hit a brick wall in the shape of Wolver­ine 2, in that it’s a stu­dio film, decent bud­get, com­ic-book genre movie. It took a lot of peo­ple by sur­prise. Some­one said that even if you make the great­est Wolver­ine 2 movie there could pos­si­bly be, it still will look like a black mark on your lega­cy. What’s your take on that?

I have an inter­est in doing one of these films. I’ve been look­ing for one and I’ve been hunt­ing for one. The rea­son being, I kin­da want to make a film that oth­er peo­ple want to make for once. I kin­da just want to have that expe­ri­ence and, you know, I think it could be a lot of fun to check it out and have the sup­port of the stu­dio as opposed to fight­ing and fight­ing and fight­ing, and spend­ing 14 months try­ing to make mon­ey and just go out and make a film. So I’m open to it. We’re look­ing for the right expe­ri­ence and we’ve been read­ing a lot of those to try to fig­ure out which would be the one.

Do you feel in a way as though your audi­ence is too pre­cious about you? That they’re hold­ing you to a high­er stan­dard? Why shouldn’t you go out and do this?

Exact­ly. The real­i­ty is, I just want to keep doing stuff that’s dif­fer­ent and chal­leng­ing and for myself, and me tak­ing on a big Hol­ly­wood stu­dio film would be a big chal­lenge to try to deliv­er some­thing like that which could work.

There’s still per­haps a feel­ing that if you were going to do that, there must be prop­er­ties out there that show more promise than Wolverine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we’ll see what hap­pens. The rea­son I was inter­est­ed is because of Hugh Jack­man, who was a delight to work with, so that’s where we got to.

Do you have a dark side? A mir­ror image, evil you?

That can come out? I don’t know. I think, you know, with­in all of us we have the dark and light, and that’s why we can con­nect to char­ac­ters that are all over the map and that have all dif­fer­ent types of feel­ing and emo­tions. For­tu­nate­ly or unfor­tu­nate­ly what makes us peo­ple is that we’re com­plex crea­tures with the capac­i­ty for good and evil.