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| Interview: Darren Aronofsky--Three Stories In "The Fountain" |
by Peter Sobczynski
As anyone who has seen Darren Aronofsky's mind-bending, time-tripping and wildly romantic sci-fi epic "The Fountain" knows, it is a film that inspires a lot of questions. Here, Aronofsky sits down to answer a few of them.
After years of waiting and numerous false starts, “The Fountain,”Darren Aronofsky’s long-awaited sci-fi epic, has finally arrived and it is exactly the kind of mind-bending experience you would expect from the director of “Pi” and “Requiem For A Dream.” Once again, he explores the notion of people trying to attain a higher plain of knowledge or existence and the ways in which they destroy themselves in the process. Here, Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz play star-crossed lovers in a trio of interconnected stories revolving around the myth of the Fountain of Youth and the notion of everlasting life. In the 1600's, Jackman plays a conquistador charged by his Queen (Weisz) to seek a tree, heavily guarded by Mayan tribes, whose sap contains miraculous life-preserving qualities. In the present day, Jackman is a medical researcher desperately searching for a cure for cancer before his beloved wife (Weisz) succumbs to it and comes across a substance, derived from mysterious South American tree bark, that may well hold the secret. Finally, the film leaps forward to the 26th century and has Jackman as an astronaut hurtling through the cosmos with the now-dying tree while haunted by the ghost of his late wife. Those expecting a action-oriented sci-fi film along the lines of “Star Wars” should look elsewhere–this is a science-fiction film that focuses more on the ideas than on the hardware that merges the physical, emotional and spiritual into a riot of sound and vision (especially in its awe-inspiring finale) of a kind not seen in a large-scale genre project since Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Recently, Aronofsky sat down to discuss the themes of “The Fountain,” the six-year journey that he undertook to bring it to the screen (including one well-publicized false start with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett that fell apart just before it began production) and even speaks out about what happened to his rumored involvements with “Lost” and “Batman.”
The three films that you have made to date all have a similar central theme recurring through them. Each one deals with the notion of individuals striving to achieve what most people would consider to be impossible–“Pi” has a man using mathematics to beat the stock market and discover proof of the existence of God, “Requiem For A Dream” has people trying to achieve some kind of transcendence through the use of drugs and “The Fountain” deals with the idea of figuring out a way to cheat death and gain everlasting life–and becoming undone during the course of their respective journeys. What is it about this particular theme that interests you as a filmmaker?
Wow, you’re the first one to ever put it together. People have said that the films are very different or some have said that they are similar but they can’t figure out how to fit “Requiem” in with the others. I guess my subconscious is trying to scream something out to the world because I don’t think that you go consciously into that kind of underlying story. When I finished “Pi,” people were saying “Oh, what a relief–an independent film that isn’t autobiographical” and of course it wasn’t autobiographical–I’m not a math genius–but I realized, once I got some separation from it, that the character living alone in a room and depressed, obsessive and paranoid had some emotional things to it that were very authentically me. I’m not far enough away from “The Fountain” to know how much I am like the Tom character, although people have joked that him finishing it is a lot like me trying to finish the film for the last six years. When you are the writer of the material, you end up putting personal things inside of it but I think that it is unconscious. All I can say is that you have tapped into something that a lot of people haven’t.
I remember sitting around in college with friends–sober and maybe sometimes not so sober–talking about all the big questions. That has always fascinated me, those questions about why we are here and what happens when we die. I think that in our short trip on this planet, a big part of what we do is wonder what the hell is going on. It is a very strange reality that is constantly shifting and changing and trying to make sense of what it is has always been a big focus of mine. I guess you could go clubbing with Paris Hilton–I had friends who did that–but I was one of those who was sitting around reading Sartre and trying to figure out what life was all about.
When “The Fountain” screened at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, reports of wildly mixed audience receptions were widely reported in the press. When you set off to make a personal film like this, do you give much thought to the notion of simply pleasing the potential audience?
Absolutely. My mentor is this guy named Stuart Rosenberg–he directed “Cool Hand Luke” and “The Pope of Greenwich Village”–and he always said that you needed to have a sign on your desk that said “Where is my audience now?” I have that sign on my desk and I think about it all the time. The number one job of a director is to entertain the audience but “entertain” can mean a lot of different things–you can make them laugh or cry or scare the shit out of them. I think I worked really hard to create an experience for people and the best compliments I’ve gotten from people who have seen it is when they say “That wasn’t a movie–that was an experience.” When “Requiem” came out, the lines were drawn and there was blood on the floor. There were a lot of people who really didn’t go for it and hated it. No one went to see it in theaters–it only made $3 million. It was a dud. The funny thing is that the linear narrative is there–there are a lot of different ways in which it can be intended and understood but we had a very clear view of what that line was. We wanted that because we are dealing with big fucking questions that people have been asking since we have been asking questions and there is no way to answer those questions. The victory is that we are just talking about them.
How did the story of “The Fountain” develop? Did it all come to you at once or was there one particular image or idea that popped into your mind?
It all started with the Fountain of Youth. I’m sure there were some “Twilight Zone” episodes involving the Fountain of Youth but no one has really done a feature film about it. From Genesis to “Nip/Tuck,” it is this theme that has been a myth in our culture for a very long time. It started with that but my starting process is kind of strange. Usually, I describe myself as more of a tapestry maker who takes things from different places that I think are cool and weave them together–which came first, the chicken or the egg, can be hard to figure out. I had a long interest in Mayan history and culture, just because I had been down there for a few times and that was in my head. At the same time, I was reading “The Conquest of Spain,” which is the story of a foot soldier to Cortez who witnessed the conquest of the Aztecs. This was also right after “The Matrix” and as a fan of sci-fi, I thought this was every cool sci-fi idea of the 20th century wrapped up into one cool package–it had William Gibson’s cyberpunk and Phil Dick’s paranoia. Now that everyone had those ideas, what do you do now as a fan of sci-fi? I was also thinking about David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity” and I was definitely trying to bring that to life in a certain way.
As for the present-day stuff, the guy who I created a lot of that stuff with was a college roommate who had just gotten his Ph.D from NYU in neuroscience and had been doing research involving monkeys. He was always the smartest guy in our roommate group–whenever we were fighting about how something worked, we’d call Ari [Handel] and he would tell us. He was basically done with academia and I started talking with him about this idea, so that is where all the neuroscience stuff came in. It is hard to say where it all begins and how it all evolves–it is like you are a samurai with all this steel and you are just working on your blade for years and years in order to make it sharper.
There are a lot of different spiritual traditions in there. For me, I have always been interested in the fact that at the core of all these different religions and cultures and traditions is a spirituality that connects all people. In the larger sense, you have the Judeo-Christian-Islamic texts that have the Tree of Life. You have Adam & Eve and this tree and through their sacrifice, they are kicked out of the Garden of Eden and reality is created. That is one story but then you have the Mayans, who have their own rich culture, and they’ve got the story of a First Father–essentially the first man–who has to sacrifice his own life to create life and to create this Tree of Life. Here you have these two cultures that are separated by maybe tens of thousands of years and yet they have the same spiritual core in which sacrifice has to occur in order for creation to begin. To me, the fact that there are these connections between all these religions through this communal spiritual is an amazing thing. I’ve always wanted to celebrate that and that is probably the humanist nature of myself–what connects us is more interesting than what separates us.
Over the six-year period that it took to bring “The Fountain” to the screen–a process in which the film was almost launched as a $70 million epic with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, scuttled just before the commencement of photography and revived years later as a $35 million film with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. Did your conception of the film change in any significant way over that time other than the reductions in scale brought upon by the budget cuts?
Ultimately, this is the same movie with the same themes. The bottom line is that your film winds up being your lead actors, in the sense that when people are watching it, they are watching the faces of Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz for 90% of the time, so that becomes the movie and the emotions. As far as the themes, they remained very much the same. The old version is now in graphic novel form, so you can compare the two. I like that because it is completely related and has the same themes. It was done by this artist named Kent Williams who completely did it on his own–he read the script and would send some art. I would give some feedback but it is really his own. Artistically, it looks completely different from the movie.
We met with a lot of young people who were dying before their time and talked with them and their caretakers and doctors. Most of the heart of the film comes from those conversations. They told us that as these young people come closer to death, they often get somewhere where something amazing happens to them and they find the grace to die but because they have no education or vocabulary about how to think about it or talk about it, it becomes difficult for them to express this. Their families often actually go in the opposite direction–they do what Tommy does and say that they have to fight it–and what often happens is that you end up with these people dying even more alone because they can’t explain or reach out to others to tell them what is going on. For me, that is the heart of the film–it is a human thing that we end up dying alone and sometimes we make the people dying around us suffer more than they need to.
Each one of the three different plot strands has a different type of narrative thrust. The conquistador stuff is more visceral, the modern element is more emotional and the futuristic stuff is more spiritual. In terms of putting a film like this together–one in which the three plot lines weave in and out of each other throughout–how long does it take you to find the proper balance and rhythm for all of the different storylines to blend together properly?
The shooting script was very similar to the final product. In the editing room, we would try different things but we ended up drifting back to the script. I think that most of the time that we spent in the editing room was because Hugh and Rachel are so open to experimenting that they were willing to do any type of emotion that I wanted to try. I had a lot of different options about what the performance could be. We spent a lot of time cutting those performances together to see how the emotions impacted the film.
You have worked with many of the same crew people over the course of your three films. How much do they contribute to what eventually turns up in the film when you first discuss a project with them?
It is a growing process. In the story phase, which in this case was me and Ari and Eric Watson, my producer, it was usually Ari and I walking around and when we would come up with something, we would take it to Eric and he would give us questions and notes. Clint [Mansell] would come in town for a weekend–we’d go out and I’d tell him the story and he’d get all psyched up. Back in 2000, I was out in L.A.–I was probably out there promoting “Requiem”–and I remember walking down Sunset Boulevard and telling him the story and he went home and wrote some of the music. Usually, I will give him a script and he will write some music even though it doesn’t really relate that much to the final product. Although with “Requiem,” he wrote some music when he first read the script but when the film was being cut, he wrote some new stuff that just wasn’t working. He was down in New Orleans and I went down there and he was really struggling. We decided to listen to that first stuff that he did and that big riff of “Requiem”–the one that Peter Jackson ripped off–was this little phrase in one of the songs. We cued that up to several parts of the film and he took that and built on it.
When I was talking about the visual effects, I was telling them that I didn’t want any CGI or anything created in a computer–we needed to find people who could create the effects chemically or by photographing things. That stuff didn’t exist when the script was around so we had no idea what it would look like. Then we started to see stuff and we just worked with it. There are some filmmakers who preconceive everything but me, I just try to be open to stuff and pick the best things as they come along.
Your previous films have developed very loyal cult audiences in the years since they were released. Do you worry at all about having to top yourself with each new work or how fans of your previous films will react to them?
No. There are a lot of “Requiem” fans who aren’t going to go for “The Fountain” because they want see “Requiem” again and feel that experience and this isn’t that experience. If I did that, there would be people complaining that I was doing the same thing over and over again. It is weird for the first time to have my films compared to each other with people saying which one they liked better. I think the only thing I can do is stay in the moment and remain truthful to the stories that I want to tell and just tell them. I am definitely going to be making another film soon. I have two things–one which is very small that can go right away and something that is really big that might take longer. If the big one can’t go right away, I’ll go to the smaller one.
Weren’t you asked to do an episode of “Lost” at one point?
I asked to do it–I called them up. While I was shooting “The Fountain,” I was watching the first season as a distraction and it was great. Then I was going to be having a baby and it became ridiculous to go–Rachel was seven months pregnant–and I couldn’t do it.
There was also talk at one point that you were going to do a “Batman: Year One” project in the days before “Batman Begins.” How close did that come to actually getting off the ground?
That was a lot of hype, that and “Watchmen.” “Watchmen” was a film I was on for about two weeks and I was on “Batman” for a little while longer. When I started doing “The Fountain,” they [Warner Brothers] came to me about working on “Batman” and I thought I would get into their good graces. I had just done a $4 million drug movie and had no idea how I was going to get “The Fountain” made, so I thought that if I did their biggest franchise, they would perceive me as a bigger filmmaker. Also, I was interested in doing a R-rated and really violent take on “Batman,” so I started working on it while also working on “The Fountain.” Very quickly, it became clear to them that I preferred to do “The Fountain” and they got behind it, mostly because Brad Pitt got involved. It was always about “Pi,” it was always about “Requiem” and it was always about “The Fountain.” A lot of that stuff was Internet hype and it kind of bothers me because it became bigger than anything else that I had actually done.
“The Fountain” is the kind of film that does not exactly fall in easily within the apparatus of contemporary studio marketing techniques–it is a film about ideas and films about ideas are notoriously hard to sell. What are your thoughts on how Warners has been trying to sell the film to the masses?
I think the ideas of wanting to live forever and the notion of the Fountain of Youth are among our oldest stories and are interesting to people. They are ideas but they are interesting. I also think that the love story between Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz may keep women from dragging their feet and I’m hoping the guys will come along to see a little action as well. You get three genres in one with “The Fountain”–the action-adventure of the Mayan stuff, the sweeping love story between Rachel and Hugh and the psychedelic futuristic stuff–so I think that there is enough to see to bring people to the film. It is a different type of experience for people–we aren’t selling a normal romantic comedy or a sci-fi laser-gun movie–but I think that people will respond to it being different. The same thing happened with “Requiem”–people thought it was weird and cool and different and it made people want to go see it.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2022
originally posted: 11/24/06 18:52:41
last updated: 11/24/06 18:58:12
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