Darren Aronofsky may have his faults as a filmmaker, but lack of ambition has never been one of them, and his striking vision has turned heads from the start. His feature debut, 1998's Pi, and its follow-up, 2000's Requiem For A Dream, were both overwhelmingly intense, quirky, unusually textured films that earned mixed critical responses but resonated well with audiences; his latest project, The Fountain, is an epic-scaled but surprisingly personal film, in which Hugh Jackman and Aronofsky's wife Rachel Weisz interact in three parallel stories, set respectively in the past, present, and future. Made entirely without computer-generated images, it's nonetheless a visually dense wonderland and a psychedelic experience. Aronofsky recently sat down with The A.V. Club in Chicago to discuss reaction to the film, how it was made, and how he narrowly escaped making a horror movie set on a submarine.
The A.V. Club: The Fountain got some bad press coming out of the Venice and Toronto festivals. What kind of experiences have you had showing the film since then?
Darren Aronofsky: I'm not sure what you're talking about. My experience in Venice was, we had a première and we had a 10-minute standing ovation afterward. In Toronto, we were one of the first films to sell out. We had this huge applause at the end as well. There were some divisive reactions in the press screenings, but it wasn't really properly a report of what had happened.
AVC: Do you think the press isn't indicative of how the film is actually being received?
DA: No. If you read the reviews on the Internet—Premiere magazine gave us a four-out-of-four-star review this month. Playboy gave us six bunnies out of six. So I don't know. The trades were very, very hard on the film. Which is exactly what happened with Requiem For A Dream. Todd McCarthy of Variety said I shouldn't be making films, I should be in therapy. It's the same thing with The Fountain, but the stakes are bigger now, because a lot of people have heard of Requiem For A Dream, and they've been waiting to see this film.
AVC: Do you think this will be a film where word of mouth has to fight against the critics' reviews?
DA: No, because I think the critics haven't weighed in. The only critics that have weighed in are the trades and the Internet. And the Internet reviews… If you look at Ain't It Cool News, a lot of them are love letters. This one woman in Variety wrote about how I was booed in Venice, which is not what happened. Half the audience whistled at it—which is what they do—they don't boo, they whistle—and half the audience applauded. The two sides started debating—they had to clear the theater, and people were screaming at each other afterward. That's what happened. I was in Spain two days ago and this came up, and I said, "Was anyone here at that press screening?" And a guy raised his hand, and I said, "Give him the mic." And I asked, "Who was louder, the people clapping or the people whistling?" He said it was the same. That's the story. And I've got no problem with that. That, to me, is a good thing.
AVC: Why have the screenings been contentious?
DA: The woman who wrote the article in Variety really, really, really does not like me for some reason. If you read the review, which you should, it's a complete character assassination. But the opening line is, "The film was booed in Venice." Which made it sound like our première was booed, which it wasn't; we had a 10-minute standing ovation. That's what I witnessed. And in Toronto, applause. And I just watched the film in Spain, and afterward, they swarmed us. It was insanity. It was embarrassing, the response. I had to get out of there, because I didn't know how to handle it. I think that there is this… I don't know. When I said this at a press conference in Spain, I was like, "Why doesn't anyone write about what actually happened at Venice? No one's written that story." And the next day, an English newspaper wrote that I was defending the film. I'm not defending the film: The film is divisive. Many, many people are going to hate it. Many people are going to love it. Exactly like Requiem For A Dream. Exactly like it. And that is good. I like that. I want people to… I like films that make you feel in a strong way. And definitely, The Fountain does it, in a very different way than Requiem, but as divisive.
AVC: Do you consciously set out to make provocative or divisive films?
DA: Not at all. I try to make things that are entertaining. The thing is, I think time is… I've met with a lot of journalists recently who sit there and talk about how divisive The Fountain is, and they're saying, "Yeah, but Requiem was…"—making it sound like Requiem went great. And I've met with some journalists who actually killed Requiem when it came out. I remember what they wrote about it back then, but now they're all saying that they liked it. And I'm like, "What are you talking about?" And I think we've done something with The Fountain that's very, very different than what is out there in the marketplace. And I think a lot of people are caught off-guard by that. Some people want to see Requiem For A Dream again, and some people want to see a science-fiction film. And it's not really… It's a lot of different things, but it's really a very different experience for people.
AVC: You've been working on this project in various forms for a long time. Where and when did it actually originate with you?
DA: It started in 1999, while I was cutting Requiem. We started to think about what was next. We started to read some scripts. None of them really worked for us. So we started to try and come up with something new. So that's how The Fountain began.
AVC: When you say "we," who do you mean?
DA: I have a team, the same team of filmmakers I worked with on Pi and Requiem. Which is my cameraman, and my composer, and my producer. We've all worked together for three films now.
AVC: There was an early, higher-budgeted version of the film in progress at one point, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Is the film now hitting screens significantly different from the film you had in mind back then?
DA: Ultimately, a film is 95 percent looking at the actors' faces. So if I was a painter, it's the colors I've chosen. So the film is very much Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. That's the movie you watch, and you're watching their emotions. If it were any other actors, it would have been a very different film.
AVC: But in terms of the story?
DA: It's the same story.
AVC: Same script?
DA: No, no, no. It evolved. It went from, for me, I saw it like a humble samurai-sword carver, and I just kept honing it and honing it and sharpening it and making it a better weapon as the years went by.
AVC: What about the graphic-novel version you released earlier?
DA: The graphic novel's slightly different, but ultimately, it's the same. There are a few scenes that are different in scope, but basically, at the core, it's the same exact feature.
AVC: Were there things you couldn't do because of the budget change?
DA: Sure. There were things I developed that were different. When I first started working on The Fountain, it was post-Braveheart and Gladiator, but pre-King Arthur and Troy and Lord Of The Rings, so people hadn't done these huge battle scenes. So I was very interested in trying my hand at taking all this new stuff that you could do with movies and making an awesome battle sequence. But then Peter Jackson comes along and makes several of the greatest battle scenes ever made. So it wasn't interesting to me any more. So basically, I went from making that opening scene, that big battle scene, to really what the core of the scene is about, which is one man against incredible odds.
AVC: This version of the film had half the budget of the Brad Pitt version, but it's still a huge increase over your previous films. Did you actually end up feeling that budget change as a significant thing?
DA: It's not that much of a difference. Basically, your job is the same as a film director. It's a triangle between creativity, money, and time. But they don't really change. You're ultimately trying to get the most creativity and time with the money that you have.
AVC: There's been a lot of press about The Fountain's special effects. You didn't use CGI at all?
DA: There's no CGI. Computers were used. CGI means, just to be clear, creating any type of image with a computer. Basically, starting off with nothing, or with images and manipulating them. The way we did it, everything was actual photographed images. A lot of that stuff was shot through a microscope of chemical reactions, yeast growing, lots of weird things, by Peter Parks. We put it into a computer and collaged it, manipulated it. Meaning we digitally shaped it to fit with other images. But there was no computer-generated imagery at all.
AVC: So when we're seeing the tree in a giant bubble, that's an actual bubble on a petri dish?
DA: We photographed soap bubbles and used their textures. We built the tree on a stage. We also built a model that was about six feet tall. And we used that as well for certain shots. We went back and forth.
AVC: Why did you decide to go that route with your effects?
DA: Because I feel that so many sci-fi films and films in general have just become really dependent on and addicted to CGI, and that some of the big CGI films of the summer, you see these effects that look like crap. You don't know if you're watching a cartoon or something that's real. And I didn't want to fall into that trap. I really thought there was a way to use a lot of these old techniques to do some new and really neat stuff.
AVC: If you had decided that you wanted it to be a primarily CGI movie, you probably would have gone to an independent CGI house and said, "This is the effect I want, I'm contracting you to create this effect for me." Working with older techniques, though, how did you manage that? Did you go back and research special effects in older films? Did you work with veteran filmmakers?
DA: Definitely that. We looked at a lot of stuff; we did a lot of research. The guys that did the effects for Pi and Requiem, we formed a visual-effects design company, and we worked very closely together to search for people that could help us. Early on, when we talked about not doing any CGI, we said, "There's got to be someone out there who's photographing explosions and chemical reactions…" And sure enough, as we started to ask people, we found Peter, hanging out in his garage in Oxford.
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