The concluding part of Obsessed with Films Black Swan interviews saw us talk to the films director
Darren Aronofsky. He was understated and softly spoken throughout our conversation, certainly when compared with the excitable and effortlessly charismatic Vincent Cassel or the intense and acerbic Mila Kunis both of whom wed interviewed previously that day. As with the earlier interview, we were present at a round-table with other journalists. The transcript is posted below with very few omissions. Q: Both Black Swan and The Wrestler focus on similar characters. What do you find so compelling about performance?
DA: Well, my favourite collaboration is with actors and I feel like what they do has a lot of magic in it, so I guess Im just very curious about it. But I think in this case its about performers that use their body as their art and its just very interesting that theyre doing totally different things but they actually do the same things to their bodies and have very similar pressures on them.
Q: Could you do what they do?
What do you mean? I cant do a plié! Well I could, but I wouldnt be able to stand up.
Q: Would you want to though or are you happier on the other side of the camera?
Oh, be a perfomer? No, Im not interested in performing I mean this is the closest I get to performing. No its not for me. I was always very shy. It wasnt my cup of tea. I think I like to experience through other peoples emotions and try to help them to find places and stuff, witness that and then put it together. Im more of a project guy, I think.
Q: Was your sister involved with ballet?
Yeah, my sister Patti.
Did you see first hand the kind of rivalries and aspirations that are depicted in the film?
Q: Not really, it was completely absent. She did ballet all the way until she was an older teenager and got very serious about it and it was something in her life that was really important that I just never understood. When I started to make features films I thought that would be an interesting world to explore because I never understood what it was all about and when you do a film you get a master class in everything that youre doing for two years, so I thought that would be fun.
Q: So what was the source for what happens in your film?
I had been reading The Double by Dostoevsky, which is about a guy who wakes up and someone is replacing him and taking over his life, and I thought that was a good scary thing the idea that your identity could be taken away from you that a lot of people could relate to. And then I went to see Swan Lake which I had never seen before, and I knew that there were girls in tutus but I didnt know anything about it. But then to see one dancer playing the black swan and the white swan, I kind of had a eureka moment because I thought this is better than a double because she is actually two different characters competing for the love of the prince, so that was a good starting point.
Q: All of your films are about the destructive nature of obsession. Where does that come from for you?
I dont know. I guess uh I dont know. Its just in there. I guess I could go see an analyst about it
Q: In an interview for Requiem for a Dream you talked about feeling obsessed about film but never feeling obsessed about anything until you found film
um. Well I think Ive moved past that, to tell you the truth. I dont feel that obsessive about film anymore. I think working with Mickey Rourke kind of changed my take on film-making because there was no way to really control him. It was more about sticking him in a room with a load of toys and letting him loose and then being in the moment with him and sort of directing in the moment it was almost like by own kind of performance. I had to become a performer to some extent to work with him and I really enjoyed that part of the process. And I kind of now welcome collaboration in a new way where I think its about just setting up a space where you get as many bright focused people together and have a plan but be open to see what happens. And thats especially true with performers and actors, its about creating an environment where they can do what they want to do.
Q: So thats how you approached Black Swan then?
Absolutely. It was funny, when I was working with this junior, just starting out musician named Bruce Springsteen , who did a song for us called The Wrestler for the movie. There was this one line in it have you ever seen a one-legged dog walking down the street? And we were all mixing the movie and Bruce wasnt there and we were saying I can picture a three-legged dog walking down the street and I can picture a two-legged dog walking down the street, but what the hell is a one-legged dog walking down the street? And after he won the Golden Globe for the song we were out and I had a couple of drinks and I was like so Bruce, what the hell is a one-legged dog walking down the street? And he said you know sometimes the poetry is in the mistakes. Not to say that he was making a mistake! Hes Bruce Springsteen: he doesnt make mistakes. But I think what he was saying was that things that dont quite make sense is often where the mystery rises out of and I thought that was really interesting.
Q: It must have been a very intense role for Natalie, how did you help her to cope with the physical and mental demands?
Well the mental demands, I think, we hard. But not nearly as much as the physical element, which I didnt really understand until we got into it. I think she spent a year training for five hours a day and it was really very gruelling. It took a very long time to raise the money and the movie kept pushing back and every time we had to move it back three weeks I had to go and tell her and she was a good sport about it. I didnt know how much pain she was it, but I just recently realized how much pain she was in. Another three weeks of almonds and carrot sticks, Im gonna kill myself! So it was very, very tough for her to pull off. So many of these dancers start dancing when theyre four and their bodies literally transform: their joints hyper-extend and they get a turn out in their hips that is just its own thing so to try and replicate that was really tough. But we tried to surround her with as many quality people, who knew what they were doing and could take care of her, as we could.
Q: Did you ever flirt with the idea of casting a dancer?
No, I had talked to Natalie about this project about eight years ago and for about eight years she has been bothering me about it: Im getting too old to play a dancer! So I never really thought of anyone else. But believe me, there were times when she was training and there was a long road to go down and I thought this may not work, I might have to get a dancer. But then you think, trying to find a dancer who can act as well as Natalie Portman will never happen and trying to find a dancer who is as beautiful as Natalie Portman is going to be really hard to do as well. So it was pretty tough, but I felt she had to be the one.
Q: Youve mentioned that David Cronenberg is an inspiration
sure.
Q: and you can definitely see the echoes of that in the disfiguration of the body in Black Swan. What is it about his work that appeals to you?
Well, coming up as a young filmmaker his stuff was just great. His biological horror stuff is unrivalled and his physiological stuff is fantastic and is always smart and different and unique. Hes an adjective, which is a pretty exciting thing to become.
Q: Clint Mansell does a brilliant job with the score. What sort of direction did you give to him?
One of the major reasons I did the film was for Clint. I was just excited about how you take a masterpiece like Swan Lake and turn it into movie music. Most people in the world know Swan Lake underneath Buggs Bunny and Elmer Fudd hunting Daffy Duck, so I knew it was going to be a big challenge to make it fresh and reinvent it for the film. He just basically took it and listened to it and deconstructed it and then kind of reassembled it and made it scarier. And then we recorded it with an 80-piece orchestra and it became its own thing.
Q: How do you feel about the way his score for Requiem for a Dream has been appropriated by advertising?
It pisses me off more than Clint! Hes a Birmingham Wolves fan and he was in the stadium when they played Requiem as his team came out. So it doesnt bother him as much as it bothers me. It pisses the shit out of me. Because I know that there are kids who will be first exposed to it on the video game for Lord of the Rings and then theyll go this filmmaker is shite. He stole the music from the Lord of the Rings video game. No! Its our music that we did. I think the fascist party in Hungary started using it and we had to send a cease and desist. So Clint loves it, because it supports his fat lifestyle, but I dont make a dime out of it so it pisses me off!
Q: So youre down to direct Wolverine 2?
I dont know what youre talking about
Q: So its top secret?
I dont know what youre talking about. Ive never heard of that. You mean the guy with the claws?
Q: Hugh Jackman says youre going to go very dark with it
Hugh who? You mean the guy from The Fountain? You should have seen that movie.
films right after The Fountain and that kind of rocked my world and I was like wow, thats sort of exciting and fun to do something that naturalistic. And I felt that the first three films, Pi, Requiem and Fountain, were very much a chapter in my life. The three films are related in a lot of ways. So I just wanted to re-invent myself and try something different. Q: Youve said that when you look back at Requiem for a Dream you dont even recognise the guy who made that film
yeah thats true. Thats what happens. I think its a good thing. I think otherwise the energy doesnt exist then. Youve just got to be open to whats going on right now in the moment and sort of create out of that, because if you try to hold onto stuff I just think its dead.
Q: Going back to Black Swan, its a really cathartic and sensitively handled story of what is essentially a female experience. Did you see it as that?
I think the magic of cinema is that you can make a film about a fifty-five year old, dying wrestler and then make a film about a twenty-something year old ambitious dancer, and if the motions are real it doesnt matter what their sexuality is. I think were all people and I dont know whether its a female experience or a male experience: those differences are a lot more slight than we make out they are.
You can see Aronofskys Black Swan, which stars Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel and Winona Ryder, in cinemas today. Also check out our interviews with Vincent Cassel and Mila Kunis published earlier this. You can also read our review of the film HERE.