Darren Aronofsky

Born on February 12, 1969 in Brooklyn, Darren Aronofsky was artistically minded from a very young age. He was always passionate about classic cinema, and as a teenager, he spent a lot of time painting street graffiti. He studied at the Edward R. Murrow Institute, the same one where an actress he would later hire, Marisa Tomei , attended , although she was a few years ahead. When he finished he enrolled at Harvard, where he studied animated and live action film. He was already drawing attention back then due to his visual power, and Supermarket Sweep , his end-of-career short, received important awards. Filmed in 1991, it starred Sean Gullette . Until five years later, and after the shorts Fortune’s Cookie andProtozoa , Aronofsky did not start working on the script for Pi , the first treatment of which received so much praise from people close to the director, that he decided to launch himself into directing it. For this mathematical thriller, he received the award for best director at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998, and received wide recognition despite the low budget of $60,000. Photographed in black and white, the film featured a score by Clint Mansell, who became its regular composer. Once again, it featured the aforementioned Sean Gullette, as a young mathematician looking for the model that governs the behavior of the stock market, which attracts a powerful company and a sect, who try to get hold of his discovery. Next, Aronofsky dealt with the harsh consequences of drug and other addictions in Requiem for a Dream , an adaptation of a novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., who also adapted the screenplay. Veteran Ellen Burstyn – in the role of a woman hooked on television – earned an Oscar and Golden Globe nomination.

After the release of Requiem for a Dream in 2000, Aronofsky was the darling of film critics and festivals, and fans of avant-garde cinema praised him as a genius. And yet, the filmmaker was about to die of success, when he embarked on his most ambitious project –if possible– to date, La fuente de la vida , which for one reason or another would not end up in theaters until 2006. Warner had offered Aronofsky to direct two blockbusters, Batman Begins and Watchmen ., but he rejected both films because he was excited about his own project, for which he had devised the plot together with his best friend, the neurosurgeon Ari Handel. And when he started talking to Warner executives, they were excited, perhaps because after the death of Kubrick, who always worked for the company, they were looking for a great director to replace him, and they were dazzled by the science fiction part. of the film, as difficult to understand as the harsher parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey . With the support of Warner, Aronofsky managed to recruit Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as protagonists., and they gave him a whopping 100 million dollars, the largest budget he had managed to date. The script was finished, all the actors were chosen and the production plan was ready to shoot in Australia…

But when he was going to fly to the set to start shooting, Brad Pitt took a look at the script and was completely disappointed. It turns out that he had not liked it at all, and yet he had the script for Troy on the table , which interested him much more. He decided to leave Aronofsky ‘thrown’, who had very bad luck, since without Pitt Warner suspended all filming.

Aronofsky was about to leave everything, when the filmmaker spent a night thinking about the film without being able to sleep. He decided that he had made Pi against all odds, and without money, and that in the same way, he was capable of pulling off The Fountain of Life . And although this time he did not achieve even half of the budget -he stayed at 30 million-, he recruited Hugh Jackman -an actor who was on the rise at the time- to replace Pitt, while Cate Blanchett, who was not very supportive either With the task of staying on board, she was replaced by the director’s girlfriend, actress Rachel Weisz , with whom she had a son, Henry Chance, shortly after finishing filming.

The film consists of three parts. A Spanish conquistador flees from the Native Americans who are chasing him, a doctor floats through space, and that same doctor seeks treatment for cancer, a disease that affects Izzy, his wife. Izzy writes a book about Spanish conquistadors in America, which narrates what happens to the protagonist of the first story. In Venice, Aronofsky received huge boos, and while some stalwarts were more or less convinced, by and large everyone was disappointed.

When it seemed that Aronofsky had deflated, that he had become one of those promises that later come to nothing, the director reinvented himself with The Fighter . Fascinated by the world of wrestling, American wrestling, Aronofsky had thought of portraying the adventures of one of those giants who compete in these massive shows. He rightly decided to disassociate himself from the script for the first time and entrust it to Robert Siegel, editor of “The Onion” magazine. He decidedly bet on Mickey Rourke, so in the doldrums that it was very difficult for them to let him sign him as the lead, despite the fact that he later won awards, was a finalist and a great favorite for the Oscars, and it is difficult to imagine what other actor would have done his role better. And besides, Aronofsky decided to moderate his usual visual excesses and put his mastery at the service of the story without attracting attention with great boasts that would take the public out of the story, about the fight for dignity of a man doomed to failure. “I decided that this story had to be filmed as a documentary,” says the director. “Some friends, familiar with my previous films, were surprised by the lack of close-ups, distorting lenses and such. Are you sure you’re not going to include extreme close-ups? they asked me. But no, here the idea was different”.