[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.

Makers of sustainably grown wines that are a reflection of the their family values since 1968.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," Academy Award nominated filmmaker, Darren Aronofsky, discusses both his creative process and his extraordinary career.

- That's the thing about cinema, is we're really not anyone and in other ways, we actually are everyone in the sense that the similarities that connect us all over the world is actually what makes us humans.

And so, using your imagination to sort of understand how someone else thinks and talks and doing the research to understand who they are is part of what it is to create drama and to create human stories.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [Narrator] Aronofsky takes us through his storytelling journey with his 1998 debut film "Pi" through his recent A24 feature, "The Whale."

[typewriter dings] I know that you did the film school route.

Were you focused on purely production or were you doing screenwriting too or, you know, how was that journey that ended up getting you to be this kind of full-fledged storyteller?

- I was good with camera and visual and that came easier to me early on, that really excited me is thinking of different ways of using the camera and then sound.

But I was terrified of actors and it was very hard to learn anything about how to work with actors.

I actually took acting before I made a feature film.

I took Meisner.

For Meisner, it was really about learning what it's like to recognize two things, two truths at one point, which is that you're in somewhere artificial.

For a film actor that would be on a film set, but as an acting student you're in the acting class with people looking at you and at the same time you have another thought process going through your head.

So you could sort of hold two ideas at once in your head which is what I think really good film actors can do is they're aware of the emotion and the truth of the scene, but they're also aware of the technical requirements of the crew, whatever those requirements are that have been put on the actor.

- How does that work with the actors?

How are you directly communicating with them about there's so many layers in your writing?

- A lot of it is just talking about the text and the interpretation of the text.

So it's really important that you and the actors understand the text in not exactly the same way, but in complimentary ways.

I think that especially when you're the writer if you're not the writer, you're the interpreter of the text.

So you need to become like the writers or at least get into the writer's mindset so that you can understand what you need from the actor.

So the process is if you don't go over every single line which I've done with some actors where you go through line by line, through the script making sure that there's an understanding of some type.

When you're actually on the set with the actor watching performance in front of you you're open to what they're doing.

One of the gifts that an actor can give you is their own interpretation.

[typewriter dings] - For instance, in "Requiem," I'm just curious hearing this about Ellen Burstyn and Jared Leto and working with two people that sort of, this person who's been doing it for a very long time and has worked with so many incredible people and then Jared Leto who was earlier in his career.

So how do you balance that act when those performances are so specific?

- That was the main reason I did "Requiem for a Dream" was for that scene in the movie.

It's actually a 10-minute-long scene in a 100-minute-long movie.

So it's like 1/10th of the film is the scene when Harry and his mother come together and it's kind of the crux of the film.

And there was some problems, because when we shot, we ended up shooting for some of it, Jared's side first and he gave an interpretation.

And then when we turned the camera around on Ellen as often happens is especially with a very emotional scene is that sometimes and a very experienced actor will hold back a little bit about what their emotions are gonna be and suddenly she unleashed that kind of incredible performance that's in the movie.

- Your father's gone, you're gone.

I got no one to care for.

What have I got Harry?

I'm lonely.

I'm old.

[Harry] You got friends Ma.

- It's not the same.

They don't need me.

I like the way I feel.

I like thinking about the red dress and the television and you and your father.

Now when I get the sun, I smile.

- Jared, I remember was concerned, because he was like, "Emotionally, I wasn't at the same level, because she wasn't doing that."

And I wasn't concerned, because I think if there's emotion on one side, the other side can feel it too.

And in fact, it's often bad sometimes when they're both playing the same emotion.

So it worked great and I had spent some time with Jared explaining that and then he got that and was like, "Oh okay, that makes sense."

And he understood.

I think it's Eisenstein who showed that you don't have to really show an emotion.

It's- if people put their emotions into certain actors especially when their actors that we can sort of enter their skin, which Jared has that.

- And so, that was your sort of way into crafting story, the side view lens as opposed to sometimes the more direct storytelling of, you know, a real overt plot.

You're not a truly plot-driven storyteller, right?

- I don't know, I just tell the stories that come to me.

They often start with ideas and sometimes those ideas are big themes and outta the themes we build story.

But I'd say there's two types of films I've done.

"The Wrestler" was an idea that was extremely grounded and it was an idea we were trying to do for a long time.

I guess, "Black Swan" floats in and out of something that's very grounded and also kind of goes off into fantastical.

But I don't know, I think for me it's mostly about emotional honesty and performance and I think if you understand what the character you're supposed to be empathizing with is feeling, it doesn't necessarily matter what the story is.

[typewriter dings] - You were so connected immediately to Samuel Hunter's play "The Whale."

What was it that drew you to that to wanna work with somebody else's story?

- I just remember seeing the play 10 years ago and being really moved by it and just believing that it was something to grab onto and try to figure out if it could be a movie.

The characters were so different than who I was as a person, but by the end of the film I thought I knew them incredibly well and they broke my heart.

And that's the power of cinema is the ability to connect with characters we don't expect to connect to.

So I was excited by it and for a while I didn't know if I was the right person to direct it, 'cause it wasn't my story.

That's the thing about cinema is we're really not anyone, but and in other ways, we actually are everyone in the sense that the similarities that connect us all over the world is actually what makes us humans.

I also had the gift of having Sam Hunter with me.

But when I thought over my work, I've never been a professional wrestler or a ballerina or a drug addict yet I was able to connect with those stories because of the clarity of the writing and then the depth of my research.

And could I understand a drug addict as well as any drug addict?

I'm not sure.

But I think that what Selby did in his book was he showed that the need to take heroin wasn't so much different than the need to have another piece of chocolate that you don't wanna have, 'cause you're on a diet.

And that that internal psychology was similar.

And so for me, that was like oh, that's a great really amazing concept.

Everyone knows that feeling of trying to not eat something or not have another cigarette and maybe that could help people understand what it's like to be jonesing for your next fix.

- Thank you.

Three things is all I did that changed my life.

30 days is all it takes.

Three things.

Number 2.

- Number 2.

- No refined sugars.

Sugar's everywhere, now sugar's it's everywhere.

You know they even put sugar in bottled water.

I was sick with sugar.

That was my medicine.

It nurtured me.

It nurtured my spiraling brain that felt I was a loser, juice by you!

- Juice by you!

[Presenter] Number 2 is no refined sugar.

- One of the characters that I really love in your films is Noah, because it's an interesting and different perspective on that person.

- People grew up with a Noah that was pure fantasy, like, the old, it was like a toy made for kids.

But if you read the four chapters that is that part of Genesis, it's horrific.

It's the world is filled with evil and then God decides to kill everyone, but this one family.

And then basically, the first thing that happens afterwards is his middle son insults him and he's damned for all of history.

So it's just like, it's nothing but darkness in that story.

And I always thought about when I heard the story as a kid, 'cause we all feel like we're sinners.

Wow, that would suck to drown and not get on the boat.

And what is that reality when the rains came?

But there's so little about Noah, the only thing it says about Noah is that he was a righteous man and most people think the word righteous means good which it doesn't.

It's a balance of justice and mercy.

And so, that was interesting.

So that means that Noah was a flawed character, 'cause it doesn't say he's a good man it says he's a righteous man.

And so, then we started to align Noah with whatever psychology we could find in the story and the best psychology we could find was the psychology of God in that story, 'cause God basically judges man and then he has mercy for man and we thought that it would make sense as Noah being the prophet of God to follow the same kind of psychology of his creator.

So we made it a man who has to make this big decision about should the human race continue, 'cause that would clearly be on someone's mind, if you're gonna wipe out and destroy everyone, why are you gonna let it go?

I mean, Noah and Noah's wife and his family, they're all descendants of the original sin.

So we were just following the logic out and some people were like, "What are you doing?"

- Now, it begins again, air, water, earth, plant, fish, bird and beast, paradise returns.

But this time, this time there will be no men.

If we were to enter the garden again, it would only be to destroy it once more.

No, the Creator has judged us.

Mankind must end.

- I love "The Wrestler," because he doesn't come very far in the movie, he doesn't come very far at all.

In fact, maybe not, he doesn't even take a step, I'm not sure.

- He takes a leap.

- A leap.

[Barbara laughs] But he does.

But he is somebody, I feel like he's somebody you really know.

At some point we've all come across somebody like that and you gotta like give him his due for being what he is.

And so, when you had that idea in your head about, you wanna make a movie about a wrestler and where it went from that to this great character.

- I think I had the idea to do a story on a pro wrestler very early in my career at film school.

It was on a list of possible things I wanted to make a film about.

And we started a script a few different times trying to figure it out.

I think the origin of the story actually is the first time I tried to make "The Fountain," it fell apart a few weeks before it was ready to happen.

And it was just an awful moment in my life.

And the first phone call I got from Hollywood was from Sylvester Stallone.

It was like, "What happened?"

And he invited me up to his house up in the Hollywood Hills and he was super-charming and super-nice and interesting for a kid who grew up in Brooklyn on those movies.

It was a big thrill to meet him.

And I pitched him "The Wrestler" as an idea and it didn't end up working out with him.

But that's when we started kind of thinking about it and working on it.

And we worked hard on the script.

And I think Rob Siegel who wrote it, very early on, one of the reasons I think he wanted to do it was the idea of Mickey Rourke behind it.

Even though Mickey's a mystery to even myself, he was able to channel some elements of Mickey to bring to it through metaphor and through hiding behind a character.

And then I think when Mickey showed up, Mickey really did a lot of interpretation of it.

- Got any G.H.?

- Got Chinese and I got Serostim.

- I don't want any of that Chinese stuff.

- You're my boy, Ram.

I'll hook you up, all right?

- Okay.

- You gotta take the bacteriostatic water with it too.

It makes the growth last longer.

Need anything else?

Painkillers, Vics, Percs?

- No bro, I'm tapped.

- Demerol, Oxycontins, you sure?

- No, this'll do me.

- Viagra?

- No.

- Maybe some blow?

- No.

- Got it all man, whatever you need.

- Opened up a pharmacy brother.

- My man, I gotta look out for you.

- Yeah, I'm square.

- Just need the juice and you're all right then, right?

- I'm just gonna get big and strong.

- Yes, you are my friend.

[hands slap] - Okay.

- All right.

Anytime man.

- You're looking good brother.

- I'm trying, baby, I'm trying.

- Show me what you got there.

- Oh, come on man, come on.

- Show me what you got.

- Just a little something.

There's not much there, baby.

- Come on, bring it up, bring it up.

Look at that mother [bleep].

- I think Rob used the word bro and Mickey was like, "I never say, 'Bro.'

I'd say, 'dude,'" I was like, "All right, find, change.

[audience laughs] Find bro, change to dude."

I went through that script line by line with Mickey and gave him a chance to get it into his spirit and stuff.

And then there was a lot of improvisation on the set and there was a lot of little things that Mickey did that was a very unique working with an actor relationship of understanding the give and take of how to make an actor be part of the process, not just feel it.

[typewriter dings] - It feels like your architecture is very different than the standard Hollywood movie.

And so, that architecture, I'm really curious about is how you start with something like your idea with "The Wrestler" or any of them like "The Whale."

And then the layers that you put on top of them.

How cognizant are you of all those layers as you're in that process of writing the script and developing the actual story?

- Some of them are there, but a lot of it happens through collaboration, which is filmmaking is a collaborative medium.

And like the story I just told about Mickey, it's similar with crew members, is that you want to get great stuff from your crew and you wanna give them the encouragement to do something they haven't done before and push them to follow certain nascent ideas that excite both of you and let them use their artistry and their skills to bring it out.

And then figuring out how it marries into ultimately the theme that's underneath it all that everything has to fit together.

You're basically trying to get really one idea, one feeling across.

It could be a very complicated feeling with lots of shades, but it's just really working through the logic.

My mentor Stuart Roseberg always would say, yeah, he's had a sign on his desk that said, "Where's my audience now?"

So you're always thinking about your audience every step of the way.

You want your audience to be engaged and questioning.

I just don't-- I mean, there's enough out there that's easy stuff and I'm always looking for stories that challenge us and are interesting in some way or another, 'cause I think that's exciting is to keep the brain working.

It's the movies I like where your characters... And I like all types of movies.

But, I-- this-- it doesn't feel like-- it feels like there's room for making characters that really push you to sort of connect.

In many ways, they make you feel the most, I'm not sure why I don't take the easy path.

- That sort of brings us to "The Whale" again in that really hard to describe that movie in a log line, like so much of your stuff from that stage onto the screen, there's so many things you can do with it.

I think you brought up, somebody asked a great question about why was it always so kind of rainy and gray-looking when they were outside and he said that you really wanted it to feel like they were at sea.

- I mean, it was part of it, it was also there's a progression to the sunlight at the end and that was part of it was we knew we wanted to end into beautiful daylight at the end for the final for anyone who hasn't seen it before the end of the film.

And to get there, they had to travel some rough seas.

But I love the big metaphor of "The Whale" and "Moby Dick" that hangs over the entire film.

I wanted to lean into that from the sound, the music.

Rob Simonson was very interested in sounds that came from the sea to even the costumes, if you remember like Mary, his wife showing up in the kind of yellow fisherman jacket.

There was a lot of thought going into all that type of stuff to make it feel like we were on a boat at sea.

- Going to Google.

For some reason it kept coming up the word horror with a lot of your films.

- Yeah.

[Barbara] I don't look at your films as being horror films.

- I don't think, I don't think horror fans look at 'em as horror.

I mean, even "Black Swan" it's like psychological thrillers how people do it.

But I would love to be on the horror list with that film, but I don't get on them.

Part of my curse is that I don't really fall into a genre.

I kind of cross-genre.

I like to flow between the different ones.

I mean, "The Whale" is definitely a drama, but what the hell is that?

I mean, it's all drama.

- In that sense though with "Black Swan."

And I certainly could see how people would consider putting that into a horror, because you're never really sure what's going on with her.

[music Tchaikovsky "Swan Lake"] - I think it's just about following the psychology of the character and playing with her truth, 'cause it's all from her point of view.

It's all subjective filmmaking.

A lot of it is all subjective filmmaking.

I guess, "The Whale" is very objective.

We're just sort of watching this drama play out.

There are a lot of scenes of Charlie alone with his struggles, but it's really just told observationally as is "The Wrestler."

But I think "Mother" and "Black Swan," I was trying to put the audience into the characters, the lead character's mind and have them go along for the trip.

I think "Black Swan" worked more successfully 'cause you were really grounded in what she wanted and the kind of things that got in the way really were opposition.

- Even in "Requiem" though, it felt like that was very...

I mean, some of those shot choices were so deeper and richer for the storytelling.

- Just after film school I was with my friend Jed and we watched "Jacob's Ladder," remember that movie?

And he said, "Oh, that entire movie's subjective except for the final shot of Macaulay Culkin," which is like this objective shot when he walks up to heaven.

And I was like, "What the hell is that word?"

And I pulled out the dictionary, 'cause I didn't know what subjective and objective meant.

Anyway, I thought that was really interesting that idea of subjectivity versus objectivity.

So "Pi," if you think about it, I actually used the limits of my budget to say, hey, we're just gonna make a fully subjective movie.

We're never gonna cut away to the bad guy.

Whenever we shoot Max who was the lead character, we'll shoot him clean.

But when we shoot the other actors, we'll shoot over your shoulder so that we know it's from his kind of point of view.

The scene, we'll shoot sometimes the other actors will look very much right close to into the lens.

But Max will never do that.

We'll always be on the side.

So it's his story, he's our storyteller.

And I did that, because I knew Sean the actor would show up every day, 'cause he was my partner in it.

I wasn't so sure about some of the other actors.

And then one of the reasons I was attracted to "Requiem" is that when I read the book, Hubert Selby Jr. is a master of getting inside characters' heads in his writing and visualizing what the kind of drama in their heads.

And I was like, "Oh, this is exciting, 'cause no longer is it one subject of character, it's four.

And so, what is that going to look like?

And then I read the opening scene between Harry and his mother when he steals the TV and I came up with the idea of a split screen.

I was like, oh, okay, if I wanna do two subjective moments at once, let's do it as a split screen.

And then that kind of started off a visual language that we sort of built upon.

- Harold, please not again, the TV.

- Ma, come on Ma, why you have to make such a big deal out this?

Ma, you'll know get to set back in a couple of hours.

Why you gotta make me feel so guilty, Ma?

[dramatic music] [TV stand crashes] Jesus, what are you trying to do?

You trying to get me to break my own mother's set, break the radiator and maybe blow up the whole house Ma?

Is that what you're trying to do?

Your own son, your own flesh and blood, Ma.

Is that what you trying to do, your own son?

- You, I think said last night that you're, well, I don't know, agnostic, atheist or whatever.

You're not, but you're- - No, I'm an atheist.

- An atheist.

But you're exploring religion in everything.

Or you're exploring faith in everything?

Or you're exploring some level of that concept?

- Yeah, well, I'm not sure I am, but I think, there's a lot of religion in it, but I think religion is, the stories of the Bible are really important stories to people in the West.

And I think they're more impressive as mythology and often as people fighting over if they're fact.

And in fact, they're more powerful with their mythology.

We get more out of the story of Icarus as a myth that none of us believe is true.

But we all understand the message of Icarus so well that I think there's more power to them that way as opposed to like, did it really happen?

And how could it have happened?

And that's impossible.

When they become symbols, they become powerful.

[typewriter dings] [Narrator] You've been watching a Conversation With Darren Aronofsky on "On Story."

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the "On Story" archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [projector clicking] [typing] [typewriter ding] [projector dies]