When he was teaching up-and-coming film students, Darren Aronofsky preached that moviemaking is all about persistence — or at least a good nine-tenths of the rule — and that any time you do something considered “different,” you’re bound to run into some trouble.
But maybe not trouble in the form of Brad Pitt dropping out of your film and it totally imploding just days before shooting was to begin.
“When you get punched in the stomach enough times, eventually you feel it. But that’s why you surround yourself with good partners and friends that keep your eye on the prize and remind you why you’re doing something,” Aronofsky says, in D.C. recently to discuss his new psychedelic sci-fi love story, “The Fountain.” “Unfortunately, I had to prove it on this one.”
Saying Aronofsky’s movies are different from the norm would be an understatement of exponentially large, mind-altering proportions. His first feature, “Pi” (1998), was an admittedly strange black-and-white movie about God and math, and he followed it with the uber-dark “Requiem for a Dream” two years later, which was perceived initially as just another drug movie and no one wanted to make it.
That had money fall through mere weeks before starting, but “The Fountain” was Aronofsky’s first to be completely shut down.
The story spans 1,000 years and chronicles three different tales, chief among them being a scientist (Hugh Jackman) using animal research to desperately find a cure for his cancer-ridden wife (Rachel Weisz, Aronofsky’s real-life fiancee). That’s the modern one — there is also a Spanish conquistador fighting Mayans for his queen to get to the Tree of Life as well as the seemingly last man on Earth searching for the Fountain of Youth in the future.
“Everyone sort of talks about wanting to live forever and what happens when you die and all the big themes that make us people,” says Aronofsky, who originated the screenplay around New Year’s Eve 1999 starting with the Fountain of Youth, and how its legend stretches from the Bible all the way to “Nip/Tuck” and today’s youth culture. “Paris Hilton kind of represents that, the superficiality of youth. I probably have disdain more for it than anything else.”
But everlasting love and not being able to let something go, be it a pet or a girl, also is a major theme.
“The love that Hugh Jackman’s character has in ‘The Fountain’ is on a very different level than many of us experience,” Aronofsky explains. ” ‘The Fountain’ is very much a fairy tale, so it’s extremely hightened — it’s got a big, big sweeping romance, and that’s why we really pushed it to an extreme.”
In the end, action scenes were cut — a big reason why a reported $45 million was shaved from the budget — and Jackman stepped in for the departed Pitt. Unfortunately, it was a hard road until the second go-round.
How did he survive the trainwreck?
“Breathe very slowly,” he says with a laugh. “When it all fell apart, I picked up a backpack and I traveled around India and China for a while until my head cleared a little bit. I think I had three or four months of depression afterward — the sadness, because suddenly your start date comes up and you’re at home with a beer on the couch going, ‘What the hell happened, dude?’ ”
The questions of love, death, eternal life, God and other big ideas have always been there for Aronofsky, from when he was writing terrible, angst-filled poetry as a 14-year-old (“I had the poet’s soul as an angry teenager”) to his days studying film at Harvard.
“As a little kid, I remember wondering, ‘Who’s God but what is God?’ Just questioning. And I guess I just haven’t changed,” Aronofsky, 36, says. “It went all the way through to college, where I sat on the couch with all my buddies, sober or not sober, talking about the same issues. I always liked a good conversation about philosophy, metaphysics and religion or whatever. I still do.
“There’s a billion answers and there are no answers, and it’s our job in our little time on Earth toask those questions, to wonder about what the hell’s going on,” he adds. “This reality is a very bizarre, bizarre thing and I’ve always been questioning what it is.”
Comic chaos
Before “The Fountain,” Darren Aronofsky was connected to two high-profile comic-book movies. He set up Alan Moore’s “The Watchmen” at Paramount but was booted two weeks in since he wanted to do “The Fountain” first. And he penned an ultra-violent, R-rated script for a Batman movie with Frank Miller but was never officially attached. “They were like, ‘There’s all this blood and my 4-year-old kid’s gotta be able to see it,’ ” he says, ‘and I’m like, ‘Uhh, then let me go make ‘The Fountain.’ ”
