We had the opportunity to sit down with Darren Aronofsky on October 31st 2006. Aronofsky, of course, is probably one of the best directors to come out of this next generation. Film geeks around the world have been watching this guy for years. His first feature film Pi went from Sundance to become a cult hit. Requiem for a Dream very well may be one of the greatest films of all time. And then there is The Fountain, the mysterious sci-fi movie which Brad Pitt with-drawled from just weeks before principal photography was to begin. A lower budget version starring Hugh Jackman has been met with both boo's and cheers, and will be unleashed on November 22nd 2006. (I assure you it's awesome, watch for my review in the coming weeks).

So what follows is part two of our roundtable interview with the man. You can read part one from yesterday at this link.

Question: Can you talk a little bit about what happened with the first incarnation of the film with Brad Bitt...

Darren Aronofsky: Well what happened with it was that it ended up in a graphic novel, which is out in hardcover and softcover, now on the marketplace. ::laughs::

Interviewer: ::Laughs:: Insert link here...

Darren Aronofsky: I mean, that's what happened with it. It fell apart and it's hard to... We were seven weeks away from shooting and Brad lost faith in the material, and who knows what happened. When you're working with someone for two years and you break up it's kind of like you don't break up because someone left the tooth past cap off the tooth paste. It was much more complicated. You know, it was a lot of stuff. Basically we ended up in different places. So it didn't work out.

Question: And then you just hit on Jackman when you saw him in Boy from Oz. Can you describe getting from Peter Allen to...

Darren Aronofsky: When you talk about Peter Allen, a singer songwriter from Australia who was married to Liza Minnelli and then playing Tom, it was a stretch. I saw the play and it didn't click right away. I was blown away by his performance and he was just tremendous. The charisma, the passion, the power, the energy, the charm, it was endless. And he got a standing ovation every night for however long his run was for - 10 months? I mean, standing ovation where people screaming and crying. So it didn't connect right away. I went backstage and he said 'What are you doing next?' And I said I'm still working on this film, The Fountain. And he said I want to be in your film. And I was like WOAH. It was very aggressive. And he talks about it because he knows my face went... I didn't see it right then. Then a few days went by and he clearly wants to work with me. He's clearly very talented. And even though I don't quite see it, let him read the script and see what happens. So I gave him the script when he finished the show and the next morning he called me before 9am and said 'I want to do it.' And I said 'Alright, let's get together.' And we talked and he just understood the material and he got it. It was clear that the stuff that the film was talking about was the stuff that he had been thinking about for his life. And he had some questions, and he had some ideas and we just connected. So that's why we went together.

Question: Why on your expedition on your perpetual Adam and Eve is Adam the conquistador?

Darren Aronofsky: ::laughs:: What's your take on it? You think that this is an extension of Adam and Eve?

Interviewer: I think that what you've been speaking to and the way that your symbols are all neutral but they have a base in some religion. And the image duplicates and replicates. And in the beginning you have your Genesis quote with Adam and Eve and in each of your incarnations of this sense of marriage, there is some type of conqueror.

Darren Aronofsky: Well that's really interesting. I like that theory and I don't think we ever thought about that. ::laughs:: But I like that a lot because it's true that their is an Adam and Eve... and I would love to run through that in my head before I answer that about how it plays out with the Adam and Eve myth for each time period, because I bet you it does. But once again, I don't think it was fully conscious element of it. I mean, clearly we were playing with all those myths and we were clear that... I mean... One of the final images of the film is when the star explodes and shoots his body and he rains back and stuff comes down and it's right there on the poster

[At this point Darren got out of his seat at the table and went over to The Fountain poster on the wall to point out the Mayan Hieroglyphic pictured underneath the N]

Darren Aronofsky: And I did not realize that... this little glyph here. It's the glyph from the tombstone of Empalenka (sp?) with a guy laying on his back with the tree of life coming out of the stomach, which is also in the film. But if you look at that image of him sprawled back with the same posture exactly is there. Completely unconscious, yet I had been staring at that image for months or may-be even years, studying it and trying to figure out before I realized when it got on the poster and I was like oh my gosh... That's the exact same position as what we did in the visual effect that we've been working on for two years. So the way it all ties together is strange when you're dealing with myth, I think it just sort of comes out in a very unconscious way. And I'm curious if it's something where we're programed from when we first read our little three page books, you know, that I'm reading now to my son, looking to see how much myth is in there or if we're actually wired in some way for that stuff to be in there. I don't know which it is but I know when I write about this stuff it comes out in weird ways.

Interviewer: I think when things are mythic, they are very natural and nature of course is a vacuum, and that's why the human imagination is drawn into the vast empty spaces of a myth. Your film to me is very much like 2001 because it will exactly do what it's doing right here. We are all reading into it who we are and what our quest is.

Darren Aronofsky: So I think The Fountain is dealing with all these huge issues. It's asking the same questions that all people have been asking since the beginning of time, which is why are we here, what is life, what is death, what happens when you die, can you love, what is love, can you love forever? Those are the big questions and no one can answer that. There are no answers, there are just ideas that we think about and we talk about and that's what The Fountain is for me. It's those late night conversations you had with your college roommates, where you basically sat around and talked about what is conciseness and what is existence. And for me, what the exercise of the film was about  was to explore these big questions and to explore these big questions everyone has to come into it and start thinking about how they answer those questions for themselves.

Interviewer: You create the space. The original mayan myth is that the first father goes to Xibalba, lifts the tree and becomes the axis that separates darkness from light so that you have this space of consciousness.

Darren Aronofsky: Yeah. After that were do you want to go? ::laughs:: [enthusiastically] Let's talk more about Brad Pitt now! ::laughs:: Sorry!

Interviewer: Actually I have a hard time imagining Brad Pitt in it.

Darren Aronofsky: Did you see him in Babel? I think he's great now...

Interviewer: But before you came in we were just talking about that. We can't imagine Brad Pitt in The Fountain.

Darren Aronofsky: I think we would have had fun. We would have gotten there... but Hugh was just fantastic. Most people wouldn't imagine Hugh in it either because they know Hugh as Wolverine, right? So I think it opened up a lot of things for Hugh.

Question: But thinking back to the issue that he's trying to create immortality, but you can't really have immortality... There's only a finite amount of space, you can't have a race of adults with no children?

Darren Aronofsky: I think humanity is defined by their mortality. I mean, that's what the story of Genesis is about. They drank from the tree of knowledge, and before they drank from the tree of life they were kicked out. And the question is if they had drank from the tree of life what would have separated them from their maker? So what makes us human is actually death. It's what makes us special.

Question: The symbols the reoccur...

Darren Aronofsky:  Here comes another one! ::laughs:: I love it.

Question: some of them are largely neutral but right now, when this film comes out, we're in a country that is largely divided by religion and I was wondering on a less esoteric... Pi exposes certainly a lot of sentiments about faith. And in this film you don't point to any religious orientation but I was kinda curious about your awareness about putting out a film that has a lot of strong religious undertones and overtones.

Darren Aronofsky:  I think that there is a lot of religious influences. The film starts out with a quote from Genesis. There's all this Mayan religion throughout the film. There's Buddhist imagery throughout the film. There's ideas about reincarnation, energy and matter from a Hindu tradition. But I've always been into the connections between different religions. Because I'm not really psyched about organized religion. What interests me is that there is a spiritual truth that connects all religions. A shelf underneath them. If you think about the Genesis story and the Tree of Life, and then the Mayan story there is a Tree of Life and then the Buddhist tradition of transcendence happening under the tree. The ancient Jews and Mayans were probably separated by tens of thousands of years yet they still have similar myths. It makes me think that there is actually something that connects us and that makes us human all together as opposed to saying 'my religion is right and my grasp of the spirituality is right.

Question: I wouldn't be from an internet website if I didn't ask these questions but what can we expect in your future? You have a bunch of projects in development...

Darren Aronofsky: They are all nonsense. All of them in development are nonsense. Don't listen to the imdb or any of the internet chatter. We are developing a lot of new stuff. We're developing something that is really REALLY big and we're also developing something that is really REALLY small. And I don't know which will be first, it depends on what we put together first. But we haven't put either together yet.

Question: I also wanted to ask when will we get that episode of LOST out of you?

Darren Aronofsky: I don't know. I keep forgetting to download this weeks episode of LOST. Was it good this last week?

Interviewer: Yeah

Darren Aronofsky: Shhh! Don't tell me anymore! I got to go download it for my iTunes. I don't know... we'll see what happens, if the schedule worked... But I really wanted to do it but it got messed up.

Question: You're kinda a controversial director in each of the projects you have done. What kind of a bell jar do you use to protect yourself from the divided reaction you've gotten. One evening booed the next standing ovation.

Darren Aronofsky: I've always made divisive films. I think whenever you try to do something new and something different, some people are going to want to hang with it, and some people are going to shut down. You know, I've had the same type of response on Requiem so... and the same sort of response on Pi. So I'm very use to it. I know the amount of labor and the amount of love that went into the Fountain. For me it represents that work so I'm proud of it. It's an interesting thing because it's not the critics that judge films anymore, it's the public. Because of the internet, you get people writing and creating dialogue. And that's what you want to do. You want to make an impact. And when you get a 20 year old kid writing three pages on a talkback about your film, that's the victory for me. That that kid had a great experience with it. That's what I'm trying to do.