Darren Aronofsky Q&A

The director of 'Pi' and Requiem for a Dream' discusses his new film, 'The Fountain'.

Jan 17 2007

Darren Aronofsky says 'The Fountain' is 'A post-'Matrix', metaphysical science fiction movie.' His producer, Eric Watson, calls it 'a love poem to death'. Fans say 'That wasn't a movie, man, that was an experience.' One detractor tagged it 'A pile of time-travelling Kabbalistic balderdash.' The director of 'Pi' and 'Requiem for a Dream' talks about his trippy space oddity.

'The Fountain' is science fiction, but not as we know it.

It is science fiction, but it's more interested in inner space than it is in outer space. Recent sci-fi has been hijacked by laser guns and hardware, what I call 'techno lust'; but there is a long tradition of using the genre to explore ideas. Also, ever since 'The Terminator' and 'The Matrix', we've been living in a computer-generated universe. So the look and design of 'The Fountain' is partly a reaction to that. You might say 'The Fountain' is a fairy tale for adults. It starts 'Once upon a time . . .' and it ends happily ever after.

The film has three time frames: the twenty-sixth century, with Hugh Jackman in a bubble spaceship; the sixteenth century, in which the Spanish queen Isabel (Rachel Weisz) sends a conquistador to steal the Mayan people's Fountain of Youth; and the present, in which scientist Tommy Creo searches for a cure for his wife's cancer. How did that develop?

We started off with David Bowie's 'Space Oddity'. The astronaut Tom Creo is floating around in space – but not in a tin can. We also knew we wanted to mix in some historical adventure, so very early on we introduced the stuff about the Mayan myth of eternal life. Later on, we realised that the film would have to be grounded in the present. Those two strands needed a powerful emotional underpinning, and love is the most powerful emotion.

The film took more than six years to make. Brad Pitt left the project and the original $70 million budget was halved. Did you still hold fast to your original ideas?

Yes, that long period of gestation was an advantage for me, I think. That's why we were able to make the film for a relatively small amount of money, yet create such a complex, inter-locking structure and a depth of visual detail.

Was the decision not to use CG effects financial or aesthetic?

It was entirely an aesthetic decision. For the past 15 years we've been living in a CG universe, but I wanted to do something completely different. We found this amazing English guy, Peter Parks, who's been beavering away in a converted cowshed outside Oxford for the past 20 years, creating incredible effects with cloud tanks and liquids. Then we fed his amazing raw material – sometimes just images of yeast growing – into a computer and got our digital artists to make it look a bit more celestial. But all those incredible images of space were shot under a microscope.

You planned to shoot the Mayan jungle scenes on location, but for budgetary reasons had to shoot in a studio. Was that a hindrance?

Since we were trying to create our own cohesive universe, it definitely helped. The nice thing about building and shooting everything in a studio is that you really are in complete control of everything: the designs, the weather, the atmosphere, the lighting, every single colour. I like that feeling, because it does create its own world, its own reality.

Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' was criticised for being a cinematic 'trip' rather than a movie? Do you see any parallels?

I'm not going to compare my movie to '2001', but it's true that Kubrick got a lot of flack, because it was a very abstract and experimental film. But now those images and ideas are part of our consciousness.
People are used to more linear storytelling, do find 'The Fountain' challenging. But there's nothing that original about braiding together a tapestry of themes and telling a story in a poetic, circular fashion. The important thing for audiences to know is that 'The Fountain' is more of an experience than a movie.

'The Fountain' opens on January 26.

• 
•