So what follows is part one of our roundtable interview with the man. Expect Part 2 to hit the site tomorrow.


Question: You lost your original leading man and you lost your original budget. A lot of filmmakers would probably just move on to the next thing, and you obviously didn't.

Darren Aronofsky: I tried!

Question: So what was it about this project that you just had to do it?

Darren Aronofsky: I don't know. It's hard to explain why something connects with you and where you get the passion. It's very hard to explain, but I think that for the seven months after the film shut down, before we really got behind doing it again... There was really about a seven month window there. Everyday I went to the office and tried to and bothered everyone with "What are we going to do now? What are we going to do now??" And we started to develop so new ideas which were actually the ideas we're probably going to start working on now. And then there was this one night where I couldn't sleep and I just realized that it was in my blood and I just had to get it done. I'm not sure if it's purely to prove them all wrong and to get it done, because that's what we've always done. Pi, no one wanted to make a black and white movie about God and math. And Requiem for a Dream was a drug movie that no one wanted to make. And the Fountain was also a hard film to make. So I think that it's just the process that I've always gone through up till this point.

Question: The spiritual pursuit in this film is a lot more personal... First would you agree with that and secondly why do you think that's true?

Darren Aronofsky: I think it's probably very per... I mean, when I made Pi everyne was saying 'Oh, it's very interesting because its not this autobiographical independent film.' And back then, most of the Sundance films coming out were all these coming of age stories. And I was like, yeah, I suck in Math, but this isn't me and the further I got from it I started to realize that all the paranoia and obsession was very similar to my years living in LA. ::laughs:: And that's exactly how I was when I got depressed and dark and I was single and lonely. I was very much like Max and his computer. So there was a personal thing in it, but I think The Fountain is even more personal even though I'm not fully aware yet and I'll need some distance from it to see... but I think the whole writing of the project was in many ways a kind of spiritual quest to start thinking about life and death and mortality - all the big issues. My way of dealing with it was, to spend some other persons money to make some art about it.

Question: Well, I was very excited when it first leaked out about you making this film. Because I'm a trained Mayanist. So my interest in the film was very esoteric. I'm interested to see how you track with Maya cosmography in the film and I was very intrigued by the animal tree. So I was wondering if you could talk to us about the animal tree.

Darren Aronofsky: Sure. You're talking about the Tree of Life?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Darren Aronofsky: I've never heard that term Animal Tree before.

Interviewer: It's an meridian concept of a tree that's alive, because you had the hairs that would come out of it...

Darren Aronofsky: Right, oh you mean that element of it... Well, I co-created the story with a gentleman named Ari Handel, who was my roommate in college. And when we graduated school, I went to try to make movies and he went and got a PHD in neuroscience. And right when we started working on this was right when he was finishing up his PHD and was fed up with neuroscience. So I brought him on as a co-creator and we started working on it. And the nice thing about Ari is that he was able to communicate with academics because he is an academic. So he could speak to them in their speak ::laughs:: via e-mail. So we talked to a lot of them and I had taken some classes as an undergraduate about Mayan studies, and he reached out to a lot of them. So all of the stuff in the film is based on, I want to say truth but, you know, when you're dealing with the Mayans, you're definitely dealing with interpretation because it's us as westerners looking at stuff that was written down thousands of years ago. And even though their are Mayans that are living now, and you can connect it, but who knows really what it was - it was a western take on the stuff that was discovered and read. But all the cosmology and all the stuff about Xibalba, all the stuff about the star in the sky which would be right where they thought Xibalba was, and their kind of sense of the holy tread and the sacrifice of life, creating creation seems to be stuff that you can interpret out of their writings and their artwork.

Interviewer: Well you did it pretty well and the only thing there was a major difference with was the orb. Though as a transit vehicle not, but as a specific vehicle yes.

Darren Aronofsky: What do you mean, the spherical ship?

Interviewer: Yes.

Darren Aronofsky: I don't think that really came out of the Mayan tradition. For me there was this tree of life and I think that tree of live was the sephiroth (?) tree. And our tree wasn't because I think the sephiroth tree was two or three hundred feet tall. So we had talked about it but we were dealing with the horizontal frame, it would be really hard to photograph it. So we had to make a kind of fictional tree. But all that stuff was true and we tried to put into the Tree of Life, actual life and we tried to bring it alive. And that was the concept of the hairs and that also tied into Izzi and the hairs on her neck.

Question: When you first announced the film, you said you wanted to create a science fiction film which went beyond technology and science. What did you mean by that and do you think you achieved that?

Darren Aronofsky: hmmmm. I think that a lot of science fiction... I don't remember saying that? When did I say that, where did I say that?

Interviewer: I didn't write down the source...

Darren Aronofsky: I said a lot of things, so we'll try to defend it. ::laughs:: I think that science fiction movies have really been hijacked by the Buck Rogers tradition of sci-fi of technolust, hardware or what my producers call button sci-fi where all the, he says button but now it's all holograms. And I think that it's not that cool anymore, the techno stuff. I remember when I was a kid seeing Total Recall and there was a secretary who would, I don't know if you remember, would change her nail color with a little pen and everyone in the audience went 'cool!' but it's really hard now in a world with CGI is so prevalent and you can do anything, that you see something with technology that really blows your mind. And either way, I'm not really that interested in that. I really wanted to move sci-fi from this filmic tradition of outer space to inner space. Get away from the lazer gun and from the ray run and go back to sci-fi which is more eternal and more psychedelic in the tradition of what Philip K Dick was doing and Rod Sterling was doing. And I think there is a whole tradition of that which is much less explored then the ray run sci-fi. And I think there is still fun stuff you can do with that, it's just less interesting to me. If you think about it, for the last 50 to 60 years we've been seeing tin cans floating around in space and there is no reason why they should be made out of steel or any shape, because there is no friction up there. They could be any shape, they could be made out of anything. So instead of there being trucks in space, we said no more trucks in space. Let's get rid of that and go for something else. And for several other reasons we slowly evolved to this bubble ship, which was kind of, you know... What's the best thing to have the view when you're in space? You think about it, you have these little portholes from Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica because it's all the same thing. We just really wanted to throw that all out and rethink it.

Question: You talk about psychedelic, I was wondering if that last bit in 2001 had any influence on you?

Darren Aronofsky: 2001 is an influence in that we're coming up on the 40th anniversary of the film and if you watch that film now, it's pretty seamless as far as the effects. You can see through some of them but they're just incredible. I can only imagine in 1969 when you sat down and saw them for the first time what it would have been like to experience something that radically different and that authentic, that it still holds up forty years ago. And I think that's because they invented a lot of techniques and really worked hard to create complete truth and a full realism. So I think that was an inspiration to try and create something that was that cohesive that it would hold up so that when audiences go to see it today, they just won't see how we did it, they won't see the magic trick. I think now you see so much CGI in today's landscape that, even in some of the most expensive films of the Summer, they cut to a CGI shot and it looks like a cartoon. It doesn't look real. And I know that in a couple years... even CGI that looks real good, a couple years goes by and it's suddenly like 'oh, I see what they did. I see how they did it.' So we wanted to make something truly real and that's why we went for this whole organic approach. 98% of the film is CGI free. Everything was basically photographed and you've probably read in the press notes that it was all shot through a microscope. It's all chemical reactions and it's all about the size of a postage stamp. So it was kind of a new way of doing things and hopefully it gives a new look to space.

Question: The microphotography actually provoked in me a visceral response, very similar to watching Brakhade films and I was wondering if you viewed any experimental films in preparation?

Darren Aronofsky: I don't know his work but I will check it out. And its Brakhage spelt?

Interviewer: B R A K H A G E, Stanley.

Darren Aronofsky: Stanley Brakhage. I know the name.

Interviewer: He's from Colorado...

Darren Aronofsky: You know what, did he do like different color spheres and changing colors? What was his stuff like? You know, we may have. I think while researching this we did look at some experimental filmmakers whose names... I kinda remember different names, but I'm sorry I'm forgetting right now. But I can still answer the question which I think I come, in film school I studied animation and I was exposed to a lot of different techniques that you could do by hand and a lot of experimental ideas. That gave me the confidence that there had to be someone out there that was doing interesting stuff with film. And I was really open to go abstract. Rather than go CGI, I was like let's go really abstract. We were looking at a lot of cubist and a lot of painters of the 1920's just did a lot of really stark stuff, stark paintings and we were thinking of doing stuff like that but we couldn't because it would require something as real as what Peter, the guy who did the microphotography, did for us.

Question: Abstraction seems to answer the question he asked as how you made this science fiction. Does it have to be the technology? It's the concepts that make it science fiction. And what really struck me was the temporal concept of the kind of slippage of time which among the Maya, is one of the main things I learned when I was studying about them was their concept of time was not based on tense, as we think about it. They thought about it in aspect, like everything is happening all the time, and that's how they recorded and did their art. I was wondering if you were aware of that?

Darren Aronofsky: I wasn't aware of that either ::laughs:: That's the great thing about, you know, it's weird... For instance the conquistador sequence, when he dies with flowers bursting out of him. I wrote that and that was one of those unconscious moments that you hope for as a writer where you're just typing along and suddenly you forget what time it is and you look and you're like 'wow, that's a really cool scene.' And that was one of the first scenes I wrote and rewrote for four of five years but it basically stayed the same. And then when I started to research the Myans, there's this whole thing about how when great warriors die flowers and butterflies come out of them. And I actually had written butterflies as well. We couldn't do it because that would have meant CGI and I didn't want to do it, and cut the butterflies out. But it's weird how you can tap into that kind of stuff without being fully aware of it