Black Swan: Interview with Darren Aronofsky

It's a little-known fact that Darren Aronofsky once saved the life of a man who was choking on a shish kebab at an LA street fair, grabbing him from behind in what he now realises was the Heimlich manoeuvre. “And it worked!” the director marvels. “I didn't know what I was doing. I mean, I look at those posters they have up in restaurants every once in a while, but that's all.” He laughs. “It was exciting!” This anecdote is somewhat emblematic of Aronofsky's career. Now 41, with five feature films to his credit, he prefers to work intuitively, starting with characters and situations and letting the narrative find its own way out, rather than rely on the usual predictable, over-complicated plot devices.

Pi, his 1998 debut, suggested a director who would follow the likes of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, creating dark, sinister worlds and obsessed with science and technology. Instead, however, he found another way; through films as accomplished and diverse as Requiem For A Dream (2000), The Fountain (2006) and The Wrestler (2008), Aronofsky has revealed himself as an intelligent and surprisingly human director, whose films sympathise with failure and identify with fragility. His latest, Black Swan, is the furthest he's yet been with this approach, taking the story of a young, neurotic ballerina, Nina (Natalie Portman, interviewed here), and creating a fascinating, sometimes frightening vision of her descent into madness.

Once again, he claims his decision to explore the world of ballet was a happy accident, something he hadn't, as usual, planned on. “I think curiosity keeps you young,” he says. “It's the fountain of youth. So learning about stuff is kinda what gets you going. Otherwise it gets boring.”

Warning: This interview does contain Black Swan spoilers.

When did you first embark on making Black Swan? How did the film come together?
I'm responsible. I take full credit. My sister Patti was a dancer growing up, and she was very into ballet. For me, it wasn't anything I understood, but then as I got I older I started thinking about worlds to set films in. And I thought ballet could be an interesting world.

Was your sister a professional dancer?
Well, she got pretty far. She went to a professional ballet school all through high school. But once she got out of high school, she stopped. So Patti went all the way through high school – which is pretty far – and then she realised it wasn't for her, and now she does other stuff.

Where did the character of Nina come from?
I was also very interested in Dostoyevsky's The Double, which is a story about a guy who wakes up and his double's there – it starts to replace his life. And then I went to see a production of Swan Lake, which I thought was just a bunch of girls in tutus. I didn't know what it was. Then I saw that there was a black swan and white swan, both played by the same dancer, and it was kind of a eureka moment: I was like, “Oh wow, so there's a double...” Then it started to come together.

How long ago was that?
Ohh, I don't know. I met with Natalie, like, eight or nine years ago. We met in Times Square and we had a coffee. I had this idea for a film set in the ballet world. But I kind told her a little bit more than I actually knew for sure about what it was... So it was slowly evolving, over the years. It kinda came together more recently. After The Wrestler, I got this writer, this guy called Mark Hayman, to do a bunch of work, and we started really working on it together. It was a very hard script to write. Mostly because understanding the ballet world was really complicated. As was getting into it.

How would you describe the ballet world?
Very insular. It's probably the only world I've ever entered where the attitude wasn't, “Oh, you wanna make a movie? Sure!!!” (Laughs) They were very indifferent, and they were very unfriendly and they were very... not very helpful. It was very difficult to get into that world.

Why?
They don't give a shit about anything but ballet. They really don't care. They don't care about movies, it's not their art. It's some kind of popular culture kind of thing, I guess. They're really focused on their ballet. They live, breathe, die ballet. Well, maybe not die because they all retire at a young age. But even then, they stay involved – teaching and all that stuff.

So how did you convince them?
There were people who had other interests. Some people talked to us: some retired dancers, some disgruntled dancers, some major stars. And then we started working with Benjamin Millepied, who is deeply respected in that world. He's a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet, and he's one of the youngest, hottest choreographers around. And when he came on board – he has a lot of interest in film – he opened up a lot of doors for us and got us into a lot of places.

How much of the dancing is Natalie?
Most of it. She was up en pointe. Like the closing shot of the opening sequence, when she goes off into the bright light and she's flapping her arms – that's her. Now, a lot of dancers have been working since they were four years old, so their bodies have changed. There are some wide shots where it's clear she's not a dancer. But so much of the dancing is her. She was pretty impressive.

Did you ever feel guilty about pushing her in such a demanding role?
You don't really need to push Natalie that much. She's incredibly hard working and disciplined, and present, and willing to go for it. She rarely complains. And she's tough. She's a tiny little girl but she's built of some strong material, and she went for it – over and over again. But she was very prepared, so I didn't really need to push her that much, emotionally and physically.

Do you see parallels between Black Swan and The Wrestler?
It's a diptych. They're total companion pieces. I look forward to the day when an art theatre plays them both as a double feature. I mean, there are just so many similarities. They're both artists that use their bodies to express themselves, and they do a tremendous amount of damage to themselves to do that – except that one's the highest art and the other's the lowest art. If you can even call it an art. Most people wouldn't. And so I like that comparison. I'm very clear about it – they both leap at the end. The stories are very, very different but there is a comparison.

How did you approach the sexual content of the movie?
No-one told me to tone it down, and I'm glad about that. I guess it is a bit adventurous for an American film. But... I don't know. There's so much sexuality in our culture and on the internet that it's tame, compared to the sickness of what's out there.

You use a lot of Tchaikovsky in the movie...
Well, it's not purely Tchaikovsky, it's Tchaikovsky via Clint Mansell, my composer. He took Tchaikovsky and he pulled it apart. Because if you just put Tchaikovsky music over the movie, it would be way, way too up and down and too fast. Classical music is not movie music. So Clint took certain themes and ideas and turned them into scary music. So it flows out of Tchaikovsky, into Clint being influenced by Tchaikovsky, and then back into Tchaikovsky. Even the dance club music is all samples and manipulations by the Chemical Brothers and all these bands using pieces of Tchaikovsky. So there's Tchaikovsky's throughout the entire film but it's not purely his music.

Let's talk about some of the motifs in Black Swan. There are an awful lot of mirrors...
Look, the mirror is in every room in the ballet world, because ballet dancers are constantly looking at themselves, studying themselves, and maybe even judging themselves. All the time. So it was very clear to me that the mirror was a major character in this film. And the film is also about doubles. Your reflection is your double, isn't it? So it just became a really important part of the film. And very early on we started to think of all the different types of tricks we could do with mirrors.

And how about the scenes in which Natalie grows feathers?
Well, the story of Swan lake is that, during the day, the Swan Queen is a swan and at night she's like a half-swan, half-human creature. That's like a werewolf, y'know? (Laughs) So I was excited to be making a were-swan movie. And the idea of taking Natalie Portman and turning her into some kind of creature was even more delicious fun. That became a major part of the film.

Why did you cast Winona Ryder as Beth, the older ballerina?
I cast her because, in many ways, Natalie – not Natalie herself, but someone one like Natalie, her generation – has replaced Winona. I mean, Winona used to be as big as Natalie, if not bigger, and now Natalie is there. And now there's Mila Kunis coming through... I was trying to use their reputations as actors a bit to play off what was happening in the dance world.

Did you think about Roman Polanski's early films while you were making this movie?
Of course, Repulsion was a big influence.

...And The Fly?
...And The Fly. Very good!

What's going on in Nina's mother's room, with the drawings?
I don't know. What do you think was going on!? (Pause) No, really, what was she painting?

Er... portraits?
Portraits, yes. Of what?

Of herself?
Of herself or her daughter?

(Tentatively) Of her daughter?
Of her daughter? Or herself? All good. (Laughs) It doesn't really matter; it's just... what's she's doing.

Do you always know what your films are 'about' while you're making them?
Look, I remember working on the first film I ever did, Pi. I thought I understood it. And then, after doing press for a few months on it, I was like, “Wow, I never really understood the movie until I talked to you guys.” (Laughs) But I think that's true. Well, it probably changes in meaning, but as I speak, and talk about it and ask questions – and I see what you're all interested in – it kind of acquires a new meaning. On Black Swan, every day I was on set working with Natalie on a take it would be one thing. But it's constantly evolving, about what it is and what it represents.

Are you ever surprised by what comes out of that?
I think it's always a surprise. There's something about the material that's interesting and attractive, and you just work on it... It's gotta have something that connects with you, because it takes years to make these things, so it's gotta be something you can come back to. I was very excited about the werewolf element of it – the transformation, the metamorphosis – and I liked the idea of shooting dance, and the movement of dance. I also liked the nightclub scene between Lily and Nina. So there were always things that were always exciting about it.

Are there many special effects shots in Black Swan?
There's over 250-300 shots of digital effects. It was hard, because we had to rush to get them done for the Venice Film Festival. But it was fun. I mean, I come from an animation background, which is very similar to CGI/digital effects, so I enjoy what digital effects allow you to do. We get much less time on set that the great filmmakers did 20 or 30 years ago, because it's so expensive to shoot a movie. But the one advantage we have over them is that if we make mistakes, we can fix them digitally. So if there's a light or a C-stand in the shot, it's not very hard to paint it out. But back then, if they had a light or a C-stand in the shot, the shot wasn't usable.

What would you say about the look of the film?
When you're doing a colour film and you're gonna stylise it, then first thing you think about is how to control your colour palette. So black and white was always going to be a major part of the film, because of darkness and light, and then pink became a very obvious colour, because it's the colour of ballet. And then we had the colour of the lake, which was this greenish-blue... It all had different meanings for different characters and we tried to track it through the whole film.

But then it changes with the drama. Did you have to plan that, or was it intuition?
I guess so. And luck. And editing. And you can control colour tremendously these days, digitally.

As you say, you took Black Swan to Venice, where you won the Golden Lion for The Wrestler. You've had some ups and downs at that festival...
If you're talking about The Fountain, I had a great time. The audiences were great. Critically, I had some schmucky reviewers that are being proved wrong as time goes by. It's like a good bottle of wine that was opened too early. The Wrestler, though, was just insane. I mean, we were completely under the radar. We were the last film in the festival. Not the closing-night film – we were just the last film. So we had no expectations. Everyone was like, “Mickey Rourke? Wrestling? Are you crazy?” And then it all happened, it was insane. With Black Swan, I wasn't that nervous, even though it was opening night. But then they sat me next to the president of Italy, who's, like, 80. And I was like, “Oh my God, this film has ecstasy, lesbianism, self-mutilation...” So I leant over and I said, “I'm really sorry for what's gonna happen, it's really an upsetting movie and I don't know what to say.” He said, “Don't worry, I will try not to feel any emotion.” And then at the end of the film I turned to him, and he said, “I tried, but I felt emotion.” Which was a good victory for me.

Are you still in touch with Mickey Rourke?
Yeah. In fact, he called me up [before Venice] to wish me luck. And to complain that his movie wasn't selected. I said, “You see? It WAS me...”