Intervju s Aronofskym s tri dijela, drugi dio je najvise o Wrestleru
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Interview: Darren Aronofsky - Part 1
Posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 12:30 am by: Peter Sciretta
Darren Aronofsky is the director of Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain. His latest film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and was bought by Fox Searchlight the morning after it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival (You can read my review here). Earlier this week, I was granted the chance to sit down with Aronofsky for a half hour interview. Below is the first part of the interview. We will be running the next part tomorrow, and the third part on Friday. Enjoy.
Peter Sciretta: There was a very long period of time between Requiem [for a Dream] and trying to get The Fountain off the ground. And now The Wrestler is being billed almost as a come back film…
Darren Aronofsky: Oh, that’s silly…
Peter Sciretta: So why was there such a long break?
Darren Aronofsky: Well, as you know, I had to make the Fountain twice. The first incarnation with Brad Pitt was much publicized and then it fell apart. I had to basically rewrite it and put it back together with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. So basically it was about 6, 7 years for the whole thing from start to finish. So for me it was almost like making two different movies. We were at seven weeks out from shooting the first Fountain 1.0 when it fell apart. It was fully story-boarded and shot listed, and…
Peter Sciretta: All the sets were built?
Darren Aronofsky: They were 60 or 70 percent built. We had 120-foot tall Mayan pyramid constructed. We had 150 Mayans about to board plane to Queensland, Australia. We were 20 million dollars in, or something…
Peter Sciretta: That must have been heartbreaking.
Darren Aronofsky: Oh, it was disastrous for me, but… I had been through heartbreak in my career before, in film school, so I was kind of prepared and I kind of just tried to take it as positively as I could. I grabbed a backpack, literally a knapsack, with one change of clothes and I went to China and India for a few weeks and cleared my head, because I was over in Australia for five months. I then spent about six to eight months trying to get something else going. I developed a few other projects and actually the beginnings of The Wrestler.
Peter Sciretta: So you developed The Wrestler?
Darren Aronofsky: The Wrestler was my idea. When I graduated film school in ‘92 / ‘93, one day I wrote a list of ten ideas for films in my diary. And one of them was called The Wrestler. When The Fountain shut down the first time I started to think about it. I knew I wanted to do a wrestling picture. I teamed up my producer on this film, Scott Franklin, who was a wrestling fan, a bigger wrestling fan than me, and he loved the idea. He’s also a writer.
Peter Sciretta: You come from New York and so [wrestling] must have been all over the place?
Darren Aronofsky: I wasn’t a huge fan as a kid. I went to one match at Madison Square Garden with my best friend and my dad. I remember we all lost our voices from screaming so loud. Hulk Hogan was a bad guy and I remember Tony Atlas lifting up Hulk Hogan and dropping him on his balls on the top rope. We went crazy, it was great. I think I went to a couple of other little matches at veterans halls. So it was in my head a bit, but I was never a crazy fan. It was like a small window, and it was before the Hulk-mania, so it wasn’t so big. It was still kind of in the early 80’s. So it wasn’t quite the phenomenon that it became. And by the time Hulkmania came out, I wasn’t interested in it. But I thought that the boxing movie is a genre film, and there’s been thousands of boxing movies - who knows how many. But no one has ever done a serious wrestling film. No one has ever done a serious film about a wrestler.
Peter Sciretta: Every fictional film so far treats it as if it were a real sport…
Darren Aronofsky: Yeah, and all the Barton Fink jokes, which we were aware of… “Aronofsky, what are you going to do? A wrestling picture?” You know. [laughs] And some people picked up on it. In fact, at the Venice Film Festival, they asked for a director’s quote, and I sent in a quote from Barton Fink. But no one had ever done a serious film and I always wondered why. I think that’s because most people think wrestling is a joke. It’s really looked down upon by a lot of people, but the more research I started to do into that world, the more complex, and the more tragic I found it to be. The mortality rate of these guys is just staggering. And the fact that it’s not at all really examined is really curious. And the fact that it’s so popular. It’s like one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America and no one’s studied it in any way. We realized pretty quickly when we started to work on it that me being the type of film maker I am probably trying to do something with the WWE and having creative freedom wasn’t going to happen so I couldn’t really do something contemporary so originally we started to think about me and Scott to do something as a period piece, be it pre-WWF because then we wouldn’t have to deal with it. But then we realized this was a low-budget movie, so we figured we had to do something contemporary. We started to look at the backwoods wrestling matches that go on, all over New Jersey and everywhere in the country. They’re going on and I saw a lot of these veterans there and that kind of triggered the idea of an older time guy, and…
Peter Sciretta: Well, it’s also interesting that your film is the first wrestling film not to have the promoter as the villain…
Darren Aronofsky: [laughs]
Peter Sciretta: Or you know, the it’s like you don’t really have a villain…
Darren Aronofsky: I don’t think I’ve ever had a villain in any of my movies. If you really think about it, or at least a traditional villain. I haven’t made a film like that. I just wanted to tell a true story of a character going through this and what that lifestyle was like, the lifestyle as they call it.
Peter Sciretta: I think you pretty much nailed it. Before, when I was younger I was really into wrestling and the behind the scenes aspects really interested in and I think you’ve nailed that aspect of it. This is also a departure from your last project, and it was made for considerably less.
Darren Aronofsky: The Fountain was thirty million dollars and this is six, so it’s a fifth - 20 percent of the budget. After I spent two years in post on all the visual effects on The Fountain, about a year and a half of post work, and a lot of it was technical work. I love that work, but for me the most exciting aspect of filmmaking is working with actors. I just was craving to work with actors so my mandate after that time spent in post was like, I just want to do a quick piece with actors. I just want to work with actors, I want to work with actors. So I looked at my list of projects and I saw The Wrestler thing and I just started to think about it. And that’s kind of when I ran into Robert Siegel, who wrote the final screenplay. Rob was originally one of the first writers of the Onion, and wrote this great script which made the rounds around Hollywood. Actually he just directed it by himself independently. It was such a great script. I met with him and I just started telling him about sort of things I was working on and I told him about the script that Scott had written about The Wrester, and how he didn’t nail it, and he said “Wrestling? I love wrestling!” And so then he started from scratch. And basically, about the same time is when the idea of Mickey came up, and I can’t remember how the idea of Mickey came up immediately, but as soon as I met with him it was just clear that this was the man for the job.?
Peter Sciretta: But when the project was first announced, well obviously Nicholas Cage was attached, what happened?
Darren Aronofsky: There was a window where it was very very hard. Basically no one wanted to make it with Mickey Rourke. We couldn’t get money to do it. Just because of how independent films get sold now is on foreign value, and Mickey just doesn’t have enough for what we needed. So there was a brief flirtation with Nic Cage because Nic really liked the script. Nic was a complete gentleman, and he understood that my heart was with Mickey and he stepped aside. I have so much respect for Nic Cage as an actor and I think it really could have worked with Nic but… you know, Nic was incredibly supportive of Mickey and he is old friends with Mickey and really wanted to help with this opportunity, so he pulled himself out of the race. Then an executive producer named Jennifer Roth came on. She is great at doing independent films and she was like, “What if that’s the amount of money you got, let’s just figure out a way to do it.” So we just did it. So we did things which actually work with the style. Instead of getting a thousand extras we worked with these different wrestling promotions and actually put on live promotions and then stuck Mickey smack in the middle of it. It added to a whole new flavor to it and we got the authenticity that came with that as well.
Interview: Darren Aronofksy - Part 2
Posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 5:00 am by: Peter Sciretta
Darren Aronofsky is the director of Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain. His latest film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and was bought by Fox Searchlight the morning after it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival (You can read my review here). Earlier this week, I was granted the chance to sit down with Aronofsky for a half hour interview. You can read the first part of the interview here. We will be running the final part tomorrow. Enjoy.
Peter Sciretta: How was your experience with the wrestling fans? I can imagine…
Darren Aronofsky: They were fantastic. They were hilarious. Look, I’ll tell you a funny story. We went out to shoot that final Ayatollah match. And this was set after Mickey sliced his thumb [in the story timeline]. One time we forgot to put the tape on and someone from the audience screamed that he forgot the tape on his thumb. “You forgot the tape!” And I heard it. And I was like, “Oh shit, we’ve got to tape him”. So the whole audience started screaming, “You fucked up!” Then Mickey came out and did that big heart-felt speech. I didn’t tell the audience it was going to happen. I just sent Mickey out there, because I just wanted to see what would happen with the audience. I was into this “live thing”. But the audience was shouting responses and they were stepping all over his lines. They didn’t show any respect to it. So I went out there and I was like “You guys, this is a heart felt moment. This is a man at the end of his career who you love and you respect…” And then they all started screaming. “We fucked up. We fucked up.” So they were great! The Ring of Honor audience was great. The CZW audience were obviously very rowdy and cursing us out. There’s that YouTube video where they attack us. But they loved it. They couldn’t help themselves but to be rude. And then the first match, that first match for Afa’s promotion, WXW was much more controllable.
Peter Sciretta: This is the first film you didn’t write? Were you involved part of the writing process?
Darren Aronofsky: me and my team at Protozoa did a lot of development, and really worked with Rob a lot. And that’s why I took a producing credit, which I’ve never done before. The structure and the bones of it was a collaboration between us and Rob. But Rob also added the humor. He wrote the Passion of the Christ line and he wrote the great Kurt Cobain line. He brought details that were just fantastic in the project.
Peter Sciretta: Did the budget dictate the style or was that a choice you specifically made?
Darren Aronofsky: I kind of wanted to do the project, wanting to free myself from the technical work I had been doing in The Fountain. And actually I should say, for me, Pi, Requiem and The Fountain were really a trilogy. I kind of call it like my mind, body, spirit trilogy. Pi - being mind, Requiem - being body and The Fountain - being spirit.
Peter Sciretta: That’s awesome…
Darren Aronofsky: And as far as a progression of style. Even though I hope they are unique of each other, there’s definitely connections between them. That was for me as a filmmaker, I was growing and developing a language. But if Madonna taught us anything, it’s that you’ve got to reinvent yourself. And I really believe that and so I kind of felt like The Fountain was everything I wanted to do, in the sense that everything in it, every frame, every sound effect on the speakers was thought about, and controlled and tweaked to what we wanted. And I just wanted to throw that out the window. That was a big part when I cast Mickey. I realized what type of actor he was. I wanted him to create an environment where he could completely roam free. So I hired Maryse Alberti to be the cinematographer. Maryse has done a lot of fiction work, but has also done a lot of documentary. So we just sort of lit up the spaces so that we could just basically let Mickey roam. We did crazy things like at that big wrestling match when I told Mickey to just “Go back stage” after their match ends. And that was not scripted. Those guys didn’t know we were coming. That was the first take and the only take, and we just put the camera on our shoulder and we followed Mickey through the crowd. And they just reacted. The wrestlers were great because they are entertainers and they’re used to cameras so they were just totally natural in front of the camera, and they just went for it. So we could do things like that.
Peter Sciretta: That was one of my favorite shots of the film, that and the sequence where Mickey first goes to the deli and it’s almost like him walking through the backstage area while getting ready to make his entrance to the ring.
Darren Aronofsky: He did not like that scene, just so you know. Because he just felt the shame of Randy the Ram. Most of it was improvised; in fact a lot of those customers were not actors, they were real customers and we just started filming. They knew the camera was there, and we were like, “Hey! Do you mind if we shoot this?” I don’t know if they knew Mickey Rourke but they were like, “OK. Fine.” That woman ordering the chicken, that just happened. Really. All improvised. The supermarket was open and people were coming up to him. We didn’t shut down. We didn’t have the budget to shut the super market down. We were just behind the deli counter and people were shopping. We would kind of control them with PA’s. One of the managers came up and said “You know, the check out people can’t read Mickey’s handwriting.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” Apparently some people were trying to buy some of the things that Mickey was filling out. I mean Mickey’s scribbling random numbers. He doesn’t know what anything is. And customers actually went home with the food that Mickey put together.
Peter Sciretta: That is funny. That is really funny.
Darren Aronofsky: Yeah.
Peter Sciretta: And I noticed that some of the people in the Deli sequence also had the last name of Aronofsky.
Darren Aronofsky: Yeah, my parents. Both of them have been in all the films, so it was great to bring them back in.
Peter Sciretta: How did Mickey’s training go? There’s some sequences in there where he’s fighting and it looks like a real wrestling match of an older wrestler.
Darren Aronofsky: He did every single move in that film. He performed everything in that film. And he wanted to. We hired Afa. I don’t know if you remember the Wild Samoans. Afa is a great wrestling teacher, now out in Allentown. He put together a team of guys who trained Mickey for three months to do it. As he got deeper and deeper into it, he wanted to do more and more and more challenging and more and more difficult things, which scared the shit out of me. As a director concerned for his safety, but as you know, he didn’t want to look like a sap. One of his trainers, Tommy Rotten, came up to me last night and said, “he’s better than 80 percent of the guys in the WWE right now. And there’s not a wrestler in the world who will see this movie and not think Mickey is a wrestler.” Yes, Mickey is athletic, we know he was a boxer. But boxing and wrestling are opposites in many ways, even though they both take place in the ring. Mickey explained to me, that in boxing you hide where you’re going, you don’t want people to see your moves. But wrestling is the exact opposite, you’re showing them. It’s complete broadness. Boxing is like a simple quick, can’t see it, wrestling is all about being seen. So it actually hurt Mickey having been trained as a boxer. I had to constantly watch him and make sure he wasn’t moving like a boxer in the ring because they move completely differently than wrestlers. But being a boxer and trying to play a wrestler was very difficult for that reason as well as the reason is that most boxers look down on wrestling. But I think as he met Afa and as he met all these old-timers, Greg The Hammer Valentine, that he saw that it was a real art and truly a real sport. I think he learned to really respect it and I think he’s very proud.
Peter Sciretta: Did he even like the glass shot, and stuff like that?
Darren Aronofsky: No, he didn’t go through the glass, but he did get hit on the back with the bucket and so he did a lot of it. There were a few things he couldn’t do, you know. He climbed to the top rope. You saw that shot where he jumps on the top rope and mounts the other guy and does the spin. So he did a lot of crazy stuff.
Peter Sciretta: Can you talk a little about the music of The Wrestler. You have Slash doing guitar riffs for Clint Mansell’s score, and you have Bruce Springsteen… How did you pull that one off?
Darren Aronofsky: Well, Bruce Springsteen did the film for one reason. And it had nothing do with me. In fact, to be honest, I met with Bruce, and he’s heard of me, which is very flattering, but he had never seen any of my work. He did it for one reason and that was that he did it for Mickey. He’s a friend of Mickey’s. He’s a tremendous fan of Mickey’s and when he heard about this film, he felt that this was something that Mickey’s been looking for for years. So he wanted to help, and that’s the only reason he did it. And he did it for basically nothing.
Peter Sciretta: That’s awesome.
Darren Aronofsky: Purely out of love for Mickey. And so I can’t wait for him to see the movie because Asbury Park is in it and I think he’ll be psyched.
Peter Sciretta: Oh, I’m surprised he hasn’t seen the movie. You listen to that song and it’s so dead on…
Darren Aronofsky: He actually put more effort into it. He read the screenplay which is probably harder than watching the movie. He read the screenplay, knew it and basically just pumped it out. It’s a beautiful song. As Mickey says, rock stars love him, and so he got Axl [Rose] to close a deal on Sweet Child of Mine. It was really fun rediscovering all that old Hair metal and finding a place for it in the film. And then Clint did a very subtle job in this movie, as compared to what we’ve done in the past. The film really didn’t call for a big score and what I really admire about what Clint did with the help of Slash is that they did very very very subtle work.
Peter Sciretta: Yeah, I didn’t even notice it…
Darren Aronofsky: Yeah, I know, I read your video [blog].
Peter Sciretta: Speaking of boxing. What’s going on with The Fighter?
Interview: Darren Aronofsky - Part 3
Posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 7:00 am by: Peter Sciretta
Darren Aronofsky is the director of Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain. His latest film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and was bought by Fox Searchlight the morning after it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival (You can read my review here). Earlier this week, I was granted the chance to sit down with Aronofsky for a half hour interview. You can read the first part and the second part of the interview at the provided links. Enjoy.
Peter Sciretta: Speaking of boxing. What’s going on with The Fighter?
Darren Aronofsky: We have a beautiful screenplay. It’s based on, you probably know, Mickey Ward. It’s a great great project. As I told you I love sports movies. Rudy and Chariots of Fire are some of my favorite films. Fighter is a great script. Scott Silver wrote it. He’s the guy who wrote Eight Mile. So we have a great script, we’re just trying to cast it and try and figure out how it’s going to get made.
Peter Sciretta: So right now is it kind of on the back burner? Last I heard that Mark Wahlberg was training?
Darren Aronofsky: Mark is training. Mark’s totally gung-ho, he just sent me text that he wants to see [the Wrestler] this week. So I guess I’ll set up a screening for him in L.A. He’s totally gung-ho and I think it’s a great project. It’s been in development so long there’s a lot of money against it already. They’re trying to figure that out but I’m ready to go on it.
Peter Sciretta: And when I first saw the rumors Robocop I was like “No way! This can’t be rea!?”
Darren Aronofsky: Well, what I like about Robocop is that it’s Hollywood is making big films right now and I’ve always had an interest in that. You know about my flirtations with some of those other projects, but which at some point we’ll set the record straight on a lot of it because there’s a lot of bullshit out there about all this stuff… But what the thing I like about Robocop is that it’s not as iconic as those other titles, and I think that fans of it will be open to reinterpretation. And yet a studio will probably back it because it’s got that tent pole feeling to it. I think it could be a lot of fun if we can get the script right. I’ve always had an interest in doing big movies, and not just doing independent films. And that’s why I’ve tried to get them going a lot. The whole thing with The Dark Knight was that through that whole process I was always trying to make The Fountain and because I was on the Fountain for six years, they moved on. But that was my main goal and when they offered the project to me I thought it was probably the smartest thing to do since this was before Requiem for a Dream had any fan base. I figured they’re never going to hire me to do something with the Fountain. I had to get them to perceive me as being a bigger director, so that’s why I agreed to write it.
Peter Sciretta: So Batman: Year One was almost like a stepping stone?
Darren Aronofsky: It was, the whole step. The whole game for me was to make The Fountain. And for the last 6 or 7 years that’s all I wanted to do. The Batman job was just a way of getting to see it. Watchmen… I was on Watchman for a week. I was literally on it for a week. David Hayter wrote a fuckin amazing script. I mean, he really caught it. Zack Snyder’s Trailer looks fucking great. I can not wait, couldn’t believe it. But literally I was on for a week. They said were you interested? I said yeah. We set it up at Paramount in a meeting. And then they said, let’s hire a production designer and this was literally when Hugh Jackman had just come on and the Fountain thing was going. So I was like, “Guys, I’m about to shoot The Fountain. You know, we can hire a designer but I’m going to be shooting this movie while that’s happening.” Then they quickl put Paul Greengrass on it. So I had very little to do with the project. I wish they would remove my name from both of those projects because I never really got involved.
Peter Sciretta: Back to Robocop, is it going to be a sequel or is it a remake.
Darren Aronofsky: It’s absolutely unrelated to the original. As Mike Medavoy already went on the record. David Self and my team have been working really hard on it. It’s a completely new universe.
Peter Sciretta: Is it going to be set in the future, or is it going to be today?
Darren Aronofsky: It’s going to be the future. And it’s really great. We’ve got to nail the script then we’ve got to find a script that the studio wants to make. So we’ve got work to do…
Peter Sciretta: So tell me this, with The Fountain you did so many practical special effects, like that whole climax sequence… with Robocop would you be…
Darren Aronofsky: I have no idea. I have no idea. It’s so early, but I think cyborgs are really interesting, because… I think it’s so funny. I got an MRI. Here’s a funny story. The last day of shooting, Mickey made me jump off the top rope. He made the whole crew jump off the top rope. I went first, and it was the last day of shooting, after a grueling shoot. It was late at night, and I was wearing boots. I wasn’t even wearing sneakers and I jumped. I got over the top rope and my tip of my toe caught the top rope and I went bam! I landed on my fuckin’ head and on my neck. My neck was killing me for five weeks, so I went to get MRI. I’m fine, but to take an MRI, you can’t have any metal on your body because it’s basically a giant magnet. So there’s a check list of probably 30 things that you could have. Like an eyelid shutter, pacemakers, re-implants. I couldn’t believe the different types of things that people have in their bodies. And I realized you know what? We are in a cyborg culture, we are part cyborg already. It’s only a matter of time till we have the cell phones in our head and the mp3 players in our ears…
Peter Sciretta: And it’s all going to get more nano too.
Darren Aronofsky: Yeah, so there are a lot of interesting themes out there that connect even more than when Verhoeven did it. A nd I have full 100 percent respect for that, but I kind of don’t even want to go near that territory, except for the “bitches, leave!” line. [laughs] Otherwise I think that’s the only shout out to the movie we’ll have.
Peter Sciretta: That’s awesome. The only other thing I wanted to ask you about is when you were in San Francisco with The Fountain, you told me about your next project, which was going to be a religious film…
Darren Aronofsky: That was Noah.
Peter Sciretta: Yes, Noah, what’s happening with that?
Darren Aronofsky: We have an amazing screenplay.
Peter Sciretta: Who wrote it??
Darren Aronofsky: I wrote it. Me and Ari Handel, the guy who worked on the Fountain. It’s a great script and it’s HUGE. And we’re starting to feel out talent. And then we’ll probably try and set it up…
Peter Sciretta: So this isn’t something you can make for six million dollars?
Darren Aronofsky: No, this is big. I mean, Look… It’s the end of the world and it’s the second most famous ship after the Titanic. So I’m not sure why any studio won’t want to make it.
Peter Sciretta: [laughs]
Darren Aronofsky: [laughs]
Peter Sciretta: You would hope so.?
Darren Aronofsky: Yeah, I would hope so. It’s a really cool project and I think it’s really timely because it’s about environmental apocalypse which is the biggest theme, for me, right now for what’s going on on this planet. So I think it’s got these big, big themes that connect with us. Noah was the first environmentalist. He’s a really interesting character. Hopefully they’ll let me make it. Oh that’s right I forgot I told you that whole religious thing.
[At this point a publicist came in to drag Darren away]
Darren Aronofsky: I had forgotten about San Francisco but now I totally remember. All right, man, it’s been really good to see you. Thank you so much.
Fighter: You can't hit me! I have five hundred times faster reflexes then Mike Tyson!
pa ocekujem Oscara sto bi omogucilo Mickeyu brdo para i novih uloga. Film inace dolazi u kina 19.12.2008.
