AVC: Had he done film work before that you'd seen and liked?
DA: Two years ago, he won one of those scientific, technical Oscars. So he's known, but the last time his stuff had been used in a film, he did some of these really basic cloud-tank effects for 1978's Superman. So it's been a long time. But the thing is, he's been honing it and developing it, and doing new stuff. And back in Superman, they didn't have computers to help them shape that stuff. Now we can take that stuff and actually do neat things with it.
AVC: Was the petri-dish technique something he had already developed, or did he create it for this film?
DA: He has been shooting stuff through a microscope, the stuff inside a petri dish, for years now. For different reasons—more as an artist. He's been just shooting imagery that he thinks is beautiful. So that's how it worked out.
AVC: In an interview earlier this year, you talked about how The Fountain's camera movements were shaped like a crucifix, moving in the four cardinal directions. At what point did that camera language occur to you? In planning, during the shoot, or afterward?
DA: The whole visual language of the movie is developed way before we get to set. Especially when you're doing visual effects and you don't have a lot of money to mess around, which we didn't, you have to really preplan everything. Pretty much every shot in the film was figured out months before we got to set.
AVC: So how did the crucifix idea occur to you?
DA: It comes out of the character, really. I looked at the scene and the character, and I started to realize that the Hugh Jackman character is constantly on the march. So I have a character who's constantly moving forward. And a lot of ways people show movement is, you let the character move from the left side of the screen to the right side, almost like a profile. That's the normal way of shooting it. Then the next level would be following him and tracking back with him. So suddenly, I had a cross. But then when we started to work with the character in space, we're dealing with zero-G. I realized the characters actually have an "up." So it suddenly added another dimension. It's more of a cruciform than a crucifix.
AVC: Do your other films have similar shapes in your mind?
DA: Every film had its own grammar. And it's your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story. For The Fountain, we threw out everything from Requiem and Pi that we had worked on. Requiem and Pi were really about subjective filmmaking. Also expressionistic filmmaking—making the audience feel like they were inside the characters' heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.
AVC: What sort of experience are you trying to give them? How do you see the camera movements as contributing to that experience?
DA: I think that there's an infinite amount of places where you can stick a camera. There's an infinite amount of choices of what could be going on. There's an infinite amount of places for so many things, so you have to figure out how to do your job. The only way I know as a director is to figure out what the film is about. And out of the theme and the sense of what the film is about, all those decisions start to make sense. But to find that truth within it, you have to limit your possibilities and limit your choices. That's where this visual language grows out of.
AVC: Requiem came out of a novel, and the IMDB says you're working on a film version of the comic book Lone Wolf And Cub. Are stories you originate more personal to you than stories you adapt?
DA: Sure, though there's always something in that material that I somehow must be responding to. That's the only way I know how to work, is if I'm somehow connected to the material.
AVC: What about Lone Wolf And Cub interests you?
DA: There's a lot of hype out there, so don't believe everything you read. We were actually never able to acquire the rights for that.
AVC: Is it a dead project?
DA: I don't know. I think people are still trying. The problem is, it's kind of like Japan's Mickey Mouse. It's one of their great titles made by one of their great masters, so I think studios here have been trying and failing to get the rights to it for a long time.
AVC: How involved were you on the production of Below?
DA: Not at all involved. I wrote a screenplay. When I was doing Pi, I thought it might give me a shot at making another film, so I wrote a genre film, which was a horror film set on a sub. Me and a college roommate wrote it while we were cutting Pi. And then when Pi came out, we sold it. Then Pi did better than I ever could have imagined, and they said, "Well, what do you want to make?" I said, "I want to make Requiem For A Dream." I wasn't interested in Below; I wasn't involved any more. Dimension owned it, so they made it.
AVC: If Pi hadn't gone over well, you might have made Below yourself instead?
DA: Yeah. I was just trying to protect myself, to have a job. Pi was a weird black-and-white film. I thought a genre film would give me another shot at directing.
AVC: If Pi had bombed, or if you hadn't gone into filmmaking at all, what do you think you would have done with yourself instead?
DA: I have no idea. It's the impossible question. I'd probably be a teacher. I like teaching. Hopefully film, I would teach. Or storytelling. But I have no idea.
AVC: What's the best part of filmmaking for you?
DA: Probably working with actors is the most exciting and the most creative end of it.
AVC: Mark Margolis and Ellen Burstyn are both in The Fountain; you've worked with them both several times before. Are you interested in developing a stable of actors?
DA: I love the idea of that. A lot of the actors that were in Pi were in Requiem. The Fountain has such a small cast that I only found a place for Mark. But yes, absolutely. I love working with the same actors over and over.
AVC: Your films all focus on very obsessive, very intense people. Is there a particular reason for that?
DA: I don't know. I'm a pretty driven guy myself, but… I don't know.
AVC: Do you see a natural through-line in your films, or a similarity between them?
DA: I don't. At all. I think they're… Well, of course, in some way they're all things I've worked on, so that's why… I mean, this is a very stupid thing to say, but for me, the connection is that I've worked on all of them, I've bled on all of them, I've given them all my love and passion. But it's hard for me to comment on what they're about.
AVC: Your films also tend to play with time, going back and forth through time, or speeding time up and slowing it down. Is there a particular reason for that interest?
DA: Film is a great tool to do stuff like that. That's something you can't experience in real life that you can experience on film, and it takes you to a different place.
AVC: What's Harvard's film program like? What was your experience with that?
DA: I think a lot of it is based on documentary. Especially the personal documentary. Ross McElwee was a teacher there, the guy who did Sherman's March. It's a big movement. It's a type of documentary where the person filming is somehow involved with the subject. So it's mostly a documentary program, They were very, very free when I was down there, and they basically let you do what you wanted. For me, that's a very good environment. They give you the camera and a budget, and they say, "Go have fun." To me, that was great, because I was good at sort of putting together my own team and just going for it.
AVC: Were there specific things you couldn't learn in a film program, that you had to find out for yourself in Hollywood?
DA: I think it's all there in microcosm. There are politics. You might not be fighting with the head of a studio, but you're fighting with the guy that controls the cameras. So there's always the politics going on.
AVC: You tend to work with collaborators in writing your screenplays. Is there any one specific thing you get from the collaboration process that's the same, regardless of who you're working with?
DA: That's a very good question. I think there's something in collaboration—the fact that you can sit there and bounce ideas off of someone. It definitely matters who the person is, because certain people… The act of collaboration, where you can talk to someone, hang out, get ideas going, there is something in that. That's similar between everyone. But I think every individual collaborator is different, because they have different brains and emotions and ways of working, so it changes. Definitely.
AVC: You've said in interviews you think each one of your films is better than the last. Are you talking about something more than technical prowess? Do you think each of your films is progressively richer?
DA: That's your hope, is that you're going to continue to make more and more challenging work that's going to come out more and more interesting. I don't know if that will always continue to happen, but every one of these films has definitely been a progression as far as complexity of narrative, character, and plot. I think that these three films in particular have had a growth to them.
AVC: Does developing your skills make you look back at your old work and wish you could have done it differently?
DA: I don't look back at them. I haven't watched Requiem since it was released. It's a weird form of self-hatred and narcissism to look at your old films. It's like looking in the mirror, not just to brush your teeth. There's something weird about it.
AVC: Are you concerned at all about genre ghettos? Could making genre films limit your career?
DA: Well, what genre is The Fountain?
AVC: It seems like it's being advertised as a science-fiction movie.
DA: Yeah, but what genre is it?
AVC: Excellent question. You tell me.
DA: I don't think it's a genre film. I don't think I make genre films. Pi wasn't sci-fi. And Pi wasn't a thriller. And Pi wasn't a drama. It was an indie film, so maybe you could stick it there. Requiem For A Dream, I guess you could stick in "indie film" too. It's not really a drug movie. It's got a lot of other things, too. I don't think I make genre films. I think studios try to sell films as genres because they know how to do that. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't know what I make. It's sort of a pot roast, all my films.
AVC: Is Flicker your next project?
DA: Don't listen to that stuff. It's all nonsense. Flicker's not my next movie. Lone Wolf And Cub's not my next movie. I'm not talking about the next thing yet.
AVC: When will you?
DA: As soon as I know which one they let me make. There's a really big idea, and there's a really small idea. If the big idea's too complicated, I'm just going to go and make a small idea. I don't want to sit around for another five years trying to get a film made. Just keep moving.
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