CraveOnline talks to Darren Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky: It was a very long process. Brad got really interested at the beginning, and that gave it a lot of fuel.  I always wanted a big movie star for it because I knew when I started this film, I was really inspired by science fiction novels and graphic novels, in the sense that you’ll be reading a science fiction novel and, for the first 100 pages, you really don’t know what the hell’s going on. Then, suddenly, a few words show up and all these clues, and the world opens up and you’re smack in the middle of Neal Stephenson’s world and it suddenly all makes sense.  I wanted to give that similar experience with The Fountain, so the first 20 minutes of the film, you’re afloat, and then, suddenly, you meet Rachel and the world starts to come together, and you realize that all those scenes actually do mean something and it does add up to something.  My hope was that, by putting a movie star into it, it could hook the audience and help them get through that 20 minutes.  So, when Brad expressed interest, it was great.  It started it all going.  And then, we got really close, and then there was the much publicized shaving of the beard, and then it basically fell apart.  There was $18 million against it and a lot of spilled blood.  There was really no chance that anything would ever happen.  I tried really hard to clean my palette and start something new.  All the stuff we actually started new is probably what we’re going to do next, so that time didn’t go to waste.  But then, one night, I just couldn’t get it out of my system and I just started to write again.  Not having to write for a studio or for an actor freed me up to return to what was really important. 

CO: Brad was ultra scruffy. Did you change that look for Hugh?

DA: That look is in the film.  He was growing the beard for the Conquistador sequences.  It took a long time to get to set.  I don’t know how much longer it was than Hugh’s beard in the battle scene.  I think it was probably pretty similar.  Hugh had a big thing.  Brad had a big issue about prosthetic beards.  He wanted to grow it.

CO: Did you build it in that every timeline is related by elements existing in all three? Did you add that in later in post?

DA: It’s all pre-planned.  With the budget that we had, which was extremely low, and the limited amount of time, which was extremely short, to do something like this, it was all about homework.  So, all those connections were made beforehand.  Of course, things came up where we realized, “Hey, we could stick that here.”  Things happened on set, but I’d say 95% of all decisions are beforehand.  When you get to set, no matter how much two-dimensional work you do, meaning storyboards, shot lists, script work, as soon as you get into a three-dimensional space with real live actors and real physical equipment, nothing ever works out, so you have to be able to adapt.  But, having done all that homework allows you to know what you absolutely need, so you can get pretty close to getting everything you want.  But, all the shots were pre-planned.  All the star fields that are going on throughout the film, in space, of course, and then the candles all hanging down, once you throw them out of focus, they’re a star field, the Christmas lights behind Rachel on the rooftop are star fields.  We worked with darkness and light in the same way, where Hugh’s character is in the black and Rachel’s character is in the light.  Hugh’s never really fully lit until the end of the film, and Rachel’s lit all the time.  That was always planned, 10 months before we ever got to set.

CO: Was it Hugh’s idea to cast Rachel for this?

DA: Yeah.  I wasn’t into the idea because I had a personal relationship with Rachel and it’s a gamble.  Either the relationship was going to be over or the relationship would be fine, so why risk something like that.  Hugh suggested the idea.  I wasn’t open to it.  He said, “Well, let’s at least meet.”  And so, we had dinner at a vegan restaurant.  Actually, it wasn’t vegan, it was macrobiotic, but I don’t know the difference.  And, they just completely connected and it was electric.  It was one of those things, as a director, you hope happens in a casting room, which rarely ever happens, where you see two actors look at each other and understand each other.

CO: Did directing Rachel exceed your expectations?

DA: She’s amazing.  I describe her as a cauldron of emotions.  You just turn up the heat and things start boiling over.  She’s one of those actors that you can get four or five different emotions from, in one choice.  To me, that’s amazing.  When she talks about  the guy who was buried and grew up into the tree, that’s one take.  Very, very few actors out there can hold an extreme close-up for 40 seconds.  Originally, I cut it up like crazy.  The first time we cut the film together, it was in pieces.  I took the best from here and the best from there, and it worked, but then, I said, “We should go through the material once again,” and then we stumbled on that piece, which just worked all the way through.  You’ve got to let an actor shine when they do something like that. 

CO: You originally called the script The Last Man. What changed from that to The Fountain first draft to this Fountain?

DA: The Last Man was always The Fountain 1.0.  That was just a secret title.  I’m a pretty paranoid guy, so we just called it The Last Man.  It was always called The Fountain.  That was just a false title.  Somehow the script got out there and it got leaked, and it became The Last Man, but it was never The Last Man. It was, actually, a working title for us, at the very beginning.  One of the big inspirations for the film was this short story about a prisoner who was in this brand new prison in a town in Latin America, and there was a volcano and everyone in the town was wiped out except for the guy who survived in the new prison cell.  There was something about immortality and being alone that captured what we were going for.  That’s basically what morphed into what we made, which is interesting how a little seed of an idea can become something else.  So, The Fountain 1.0 is available.  You can see it in the graphic novel, out in hardcover and soft cover by DC Vertigo, available now.  It’s very, very similar.  There’s a few differences.  There was a huge battle scene at the beginning of The Fountain 1.0, but it was in a post-Gladiator, pre-Peter Jackson landscape.  I was very excited by what Ridley [Scott] had done in Gladiator.  I was like, “Wow, this is exciting.  We could make a really exciting battle scene.” But then, I went through my trials and tribulations, and The Lord of the Rings came out, and I was like, “Well, our Mayan Conquistador battle will never go to that level of fantasy and extremity, so why even do it.”  And then, of course, Troy came out and King Arthur.  All these huge battle scenes had happened.  Hollywood had done it.  I realized that audiences were yawning when they saw it, so I was like, “This scene is written for Izzi by Tommy.  What’s the story?”  The story is one man overcoming incredible odds, so it very, very much got down to, eventually, Hugh Jackman against the Mayan army, and that’s all I really needed.  The simplicity of that liberated me because then I suddenly realized I didn’t need $20 million to shoot it.  I could do it for a lot less.  That was a budget thing. 

CO: Had you seen Hugh Jackman in something that led you to believe he could do such an emotional role?

DA: How many male actors have you actually seen do emotional work like that?  I’ve been in 15 cities in the last two or three weeks, and a lot of women have said to me, “I’ve never seen a man that vulnerable, on or off screen.”  I didn’t really know what he could do.  When I first started this, he wasn’t on my list because he had just done Wolverine, which he was fantastic as and became a star off of, which is an amazing, difficult thing to do, if you’re a fan.  Just to step into that role, out of nowhere, and actually pull it off was a big accomplishment.  But, I had seen nothing else.  Then, when I saw The Boy From Oz, I just saw an incredible amount of talent.  It was undeniable.  Outside of what he did in The Fountain, the guy can sing and dance. [Laughs]  It’s really kind of upsetting.  It’s just remarkable, what he did in this movie, and it’s overlooked somewhat.

CO:  So far, all three of your films have been somewhat open to interpretation.  At one point, you were attached to do a Batman- -

DA: I wasn’t ever attached to do Batman. Batman was a writing gig.  It was about coming off of Requiem for a Dream, dreaming about doing The Fountain, realizing that was going to cost a decent amount of dime and, seeing how the studio probably perceived me as the guy who just did a $4 million drug movie, when they offered me the chance to do something on Batman and I realized that I could work with one of my heroes, Frank Miller, I was like, “If I develop this, it might actually open up their perception of me to do The Fountain.” But, I was really trying to make The Fountain for the last six years.

CO: Would you do something more linear like that, or will you continue to have this sort of vision for your films?

DA: I’m just going to make them weirder and weirder and weirder.  We’ve always been trying to push the envelope of what you can do in cinema.  Matty, my DP, always says we’re Wild Style filmmakers.  Wild Style was that crazy, graffiti writing style, but you could recognize who wrote what all the time, by the style of the letters.  And, I think we’re always trying to put a visual language into a film that helps tell the story that you’re doing, but is incredibly unique and, hopefully, interesting for people.

CO: Your first film was about God and math, and this film is spiritual, in an agnostic way.  What’s your take on God?  Are you religious?  Do you believe in God?

DA: I think the themes of The Fountain, about this endless cycle of energy and matter, tracing back to the Big Bang, the Big Bang happened, and all this star matter turned into stars, and stars turned into planets, and planets turned into life.  We’re all just borrowing this matter and energy for a little bit, while we’re here, until it goes back into everything else, and that connects us all.  The cynics out there laugh at this crap, but it’s true. [Laughs] The messed up thing is how distracted we are and disconnected from that connection, and the result of it is what we’re doing to this planet and to ourselves.  We’re just completely killing each other and killing the planet, and it’s a state of emergency right now, I think.  All of my charity work has always been about the environment.  There are 15,000 species on the endangered species list.  Mercury poisoning is my new thing. [Laughs] We’re doing it to ourselves.  The fact that there’s mercury poisoning in the breast milk of indigenous people in the North Arctic is all coming from us, and Alzheimer’s is on the rise.  What are we doing to ourselves?  It’s a complete disconnect.  To me, that’s where the spirituality is.  Whatever you want to call that connection, some people would use that term God.  That, to me, is what I think is holy.