Darren Aronofsky

Torsten Schmidt

I guess this is the man you actually came to see, so I might just shut up, sit down, get a drink, wait for someone to bring us nice little commodities, and say welcome.

Darren Aronofsky

Which side, here do you want me?

Torsten Schmidt

I think they want you there, yes. As you can tell, the German-ness really comes through in this. It’s really well-rehearsed. We like to keep it this way, ever since we started this in 1998 already, which kind of dates us. You shouldn’t… I hope you’re not too good at mathematics. You might wonder…

Darren Aronofsky

1998, is that what you said, or ’88?

Torsten Schmidt

’98.

Darren Aronofsky

That’s the same year as Pi, there you go.

Torsten Schmidt

There you go, yes. Actually, our videos look as grainy from then as…

Darren Aronofsky

Thank you.

Torsten Schmidt

You might wonder what this whole thing is about. Oh, thank you very much.

Darren Aronofsky

You’re welcome.

Torsten Schmidt

That is very kind, thanks. At the heart of it, it is a traveling workshop where 60 people make it past a really grueling process, where you have to apply and send in music. In the end, you get to sit in a room a little smaller than this, because there’s only 30 of you. You still get to listen to people sitting on a couch, talking about what they would talk about on their own couch at home, which is mostly music and music stuff and how to do the music.

Darren Aronofsky

It feels a little bit like the Zach Between Two Ferns, doesn’t it? He’s the Zach, for sure. I’ve been set up.

Torsten Schmidt

Shall I open the shirt to make it more authentic?

Darren Aronofsky

Sorry, I don’t know.

Torsten Schmidt

What is your best President of the United States impression?

Darren Aronofsky

I don’t do impressions.

Torsten Schmidt

Good, anyway. This thing, in the end you get there and you hear banter like this all day and yet, you kind of start to think, “Do I actually want to be in a parade of industry? Do I want to be a music producer?” all that kind of stuff, where people talk stuff like that all day, or “Do I want to go back and get a real job and do accounting and be a surgeon, or something that means something?”

Over all those years, some people did not choose to go down that path, and some of you might know. There’s a kid called Hudson Mohawke. He was actually a participant in this very town in 2007, opened for M.I.A. as one of his first bigger gigs. I guess some of you heard of her by now. His partner in crime in TNGHT, Lunice, who is a fellow Canadian, and the good news is, he was not only a participant in 2010, but his debut album is finally ready and coming out in the first quarter of next year, in case you ever wanted it.

There’s a bunch of others, Aloe Blacc, Nina Kraviz, a whole lot of people that do really interesting music, and some of them end up in films sooner or later. That is why we figured, it makes actually a lot of sense to talk to the people on the other side of it, because in very selfish fashion, we just want to know from the people we think are kind of good at what they do, how they actually do it, why they do it, and all those good things.

It is called an Academy, and sometimes you can get to speak to people who went to Harvard and other places, so I think this is the time when, it would be the cue, and I’d say, please join me in welcoming Mr. Darren Aronofsky. (applause)

Darren Aronofsky

Thank you for having me, and thank you for showing up and coming out. It’s probably the best introduction I’ve ever had. Let’s get into it.

Torsten Schmidt

What we usually like to do is, we play records, because that kind of… Records that people liked in their childhood, people they like, people they admire for the weirdest reasons, or stuff that was big in their household. Seeing that to my knowledge, you did not produce all too many records, we just went over to film. Your first choice would be something rather local. You want to introduce it?

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah, so I guess it all started, they asked me just to think about a bunch of different… How music and film has interconnected and influenced me over the years. I guess I started where it probably all began, which was this. I was kind of lucky to grow up in Brooklyn when two major musical forms sort of came and took over the world. This first clip, which you’ll all recognize from the beginning, really was the first of the two movements. We should probably just start with that.

(video: Saturday Night Fever Opening Scene / applause)

It’s so easy to forget how good of a movie that is. It’s very clear how good the film is, but I think it was way over my head at the time. In fact, it was my first R-rated movie. How the story goes is, I guess I was seven or eight when it came out and stormed the world. Me and my sister were dying to see it, and my dad was not having it but my mom was like, “Everyone’s seeing it. It’s all going to go over their head.” They took us to the theater to see it, and was during the scene in the back seat when there was the blowjob. Am I allowed to curse? My dad’s hitting my mom and she’s like, “Don’t worry, it’s over their head.”

The next day at breakfast, my mom’s making breakfast, and me and my sister are fighting over what a blowjob is. We’re like, “Mom, who’s right? Who’s right?” My mom’s great line was, “Patty, listen to your brother.” I don’t know what that has to do with anything, but it was interesting, because it was the start of disco taking over the world. That was probably 10 or 12 miles from where I grew up. It was interesting just to be at the birthplace of that, and then of course a few years later, also being there when hip-hop started and became even a bigger phenomenon. I think I chose that one just because there’s no getting around it, it was an incredible, seminal thing. I think as far as a film sequence, technically it does so much from the opening title starting off just in the silence and the natural sounds of those aerial shots pulling out of Manhattan to geographically completely set you up, and then just establishing the characters so quickly, from the paint which becomes the next… [turns to audience] Are you OK? The paint swinging… Are you? That was like, the last time when we showed Requiem For A Dream here, we had a heart attack. That was Saturday Night Fever, it’s not so bad.

Torsten Schmidt

We’re still in the mildly more offbeat territory.

Darren Aronofsky

It just establishes the character in so many ways, and just the incredible charm of John Travolta is completely won over to the audience. That type of efficiency is just great, great filmmaking.

Torsten Schmidt

How different does the film seem to you now, apart from the blowjob scene, to when you watched it as a kid?

Darren Aronofsky

Has anyone seen it recently? Not really, but the whole time you’re seeing it, you’re thinking that the girl he really likes, the one who’s always talking about moving to Manhattan, is really classy and wants to go into Manhattan. You kind of miss the whole irony that she is totally as Brooklyn as he is. I think I missed that whole level. I didn’t realize there was this… It’s a very complicated film, because it’s making fun of the characters in a certain way, and then it has incredible pathos like the suicide on the Verrazano Bridge. It’s complicated, because there’s an incredible realism of what these kids are suffering, and what their lives are, but also the kind of shallowness and ridiculousness of the way they behave.

I guess that kind of shallowness would be the follow-up to Travolta’s career, which would be Grease, which is really all that it was. It didn’t really have the pathos, except for maybe “Beauty School Dropout” had a little pain in it, but there wasn’t that much pain. I think it’s an incredible film, in the fact that it really swept… I think there’s something about the realism with these iconic characters that has been an influence. I think there’s something I liked about mythological characters in very, very normal, real settings.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess folks here are a little bit closer to New York, but still, especially growing up on the other side of the pond, that was one of the movies that really informed our notion of what New York must be like, and the light alone. Let’s say, when 20 years later you read like Jonathan Lethem Fortress of Solitude, which is sort of set in a similar area.

Darren Aronofsky

No, it’s pretty far away.

Torsten Schmidt

Era, I meant, sorry.

Darren Aronofsky

Era, but different area, yes.

Torsten Schmidt

No, era. You still kind of get a vibe. By the time you probably go to New York, you enter it at Giuliani times and it’s a very different place, straightaway.

Darren Aronofsky

I think New York is always about change, and that’s one of the great things. New Yorkers like to constantly complain about how things used to be. There was a writer I really like, Colson Whitehead, wrote about… He wrote this piece after 9/11 that was kind of the first thing I read that sort of helped with the mourning of that, which was that New Yorkers are always complaining, and people are always talking about how New York used to be, and that this is just another event in a chapter in a city that is eternal in its own way, and will keep moving and keep changing. People are now complaining about the old New York but there’s a lot of great things that continue to be about New York.

Torsten Schmidt

Let me put on my Waylon Jennings voice and say, “Turn the page to another chapter of New York, forward to 1989, and another number, another summer.”

Darren Aronofsky

The next clip, I kind of chose it because it’s another opening of a film, and it uses music and imagery in a completely different way but they’re definitely related because they’re about neighborhoods in Brooklyn once again, so let’s roll it.

(video: Do The Right Thing Opening Credits / applause)

It’s so interesting, because it’s also… You forget that there was this fairytale element to Do the Right Thing as well as this total realism mixed with this fairytale. When you look at that, it’s hard to believe that was shot in a real location. When you think about the whole movie, it has this strange feel of somewhere between something really happening, and this kind of magical, realistic setting. I don’t know, it was a major, major film when it came out for all of us because New York was in a very different place than it was in 1977. Race relations were really boiling over and Spike completely tapped into the sort of ethos that was just floating around and what was in everyone’s head every time you got on the subway, every time you walked down the street. He just made it a timeless tale. I knew I had to pick something from Do the Right Thing. I didn’t know what it was going to be, and then I just saw the opening titles and I realized it kind of brilliantly summed it up. It was that epic song that kind of summed up what everyone was thinking about at the time and it sort of captured the aesthetics of the movie, which is this complete realism set in this timeless space, if that makes sense.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess it does make a lot of sense because, like you say, you’ve got this almost antique kind of play, classic freak, but at the same time you’ve got that chick from Soul Train dancing to it.

Darren Aronofsky

Yes, actually the chick from The View, which is amazing, talk about a career path. It just captured everything. You left the theater after you saw that movie with such this incredible visceral feeling. I can remember everything about the first screening of seeing that film, and how important it was. Spike is just great at… He’s able to put a stylistic spin on everything yet also make everything emotionally true and real. He was able to capture all that pain that was going on but also have this humor and sort of playfulness that comes out of his mischievous style.

Torsten Schmidt

Seeing that this is also about music today, especially at that time, you always have this thing where you have very current and hot music and then you would have the Branford Marsalis horn in there, you would have the score that was written by his father, and so a lot of young hip hop kids got actually introduced into that era of jazz.

Darren Aronofsky

That’s really interesting, is trying to take music that is contemporary and mix it with a score. I’ve only… I’ve thought about doing that many, many times, because so much music that I grew up with I have so much connection to it. The one movie where I actually used songs was The Wrestler, and I had absolutely no connection to hair metal music. I didn’t know anything about it. That actually, we’ll talk about in a little bit, was a very, very difficult thing to score. Anyway, we should probably move forward.

Torsten Schmidt

We are a little bit pressed for time, but I still want to hear… When I actually saw Pi for the first time, that’s why I was really curious of your relation to Spike Lee, because it reminded me a lot about She’s Gotta Have It in a way.

Darren Aronofsky

Sure. I think I always sort of had a taste for the alternative, or different. I was lucky to get the tail end of the 70s, so I did get something like Saturday Night Fever, which became this phenomenon, but was definitely an underground film, and probably is more connected in some ways to Taxi Driver than it is connected to E.T. That was sort of what came next, was the Star Wars, E.T., Jaws, which was a great time to grow up around movies, as a kid. My taste, I think, was always for alternative things. I don’t know why.

One time, we went to this one shopping mall in Brooklyn, called King’s Plaza, it’s not really a mall but it had a multiplex. We went, and I think Rocky III or something was sold out. There was this poster, and there was a goofy guy with the word “Brooklyn” on his hat. I was like, “Let’s go see that.” We walk into the theater. It had… We were about 10 minutes late, and it was She’s Gotta Have It. It was that kind of montage sequence where all the different guys are doing pick-up lines to Nola Darling about their privates and stuff. I just sat there and I was like, “What the fuck is this?” I had never seen anything like that before in a cinema. That sort of was the beginning for me of getting exposed to independent film, and the idea that there was another way to tell stories. Then, I started just sort of exploring it, but it was still very early when that was happening. There wasn’t that much going on. There weren’t that many people making films like that. I think the bigger influence was probably things that were playing at this theater on West 8th Street in Manhattan. I forget the name of the movie theater. Does anyone know it? It’s above the Jimi Hendrix [Electric Lady]. I think it was called the Astroplace Theater? I don’t know. It’s weird to ask Toronto people that. They used to do late-night showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show, and they would do a bunch of the other movies that we’re going to look at, Clockwork Orange, which we’re not going to look at, would play there.

I think my dream was always to be a film like that, to be a midnight movie. That was the first aesthetic that I thought was really super cool. There’s another long, funny story, but we’ll have to tell it another time about when we had my first… My dream was always to have a film play at midnight in Manhattan and when Pi did, it turned into a disaster, but that’s for another time.

Torsten Schmidt

We’re always up for a good disaster story, but maybe we’ll save that for later.

Darren Aronofsky

Since we were going to talk about music and film, I wanted to definitely choose a piece from my favorite musical. It was really hard, because every number in this musical is incredible, and they’re all perfect. I’m not sure… I think I chose this one because my 9 year old likes it the most. Anyway, we should roll it.

(video: West Side Story - Officer Krupke / applause)

No one expected me to pick that one, did you? It’s just… That is as good as filmmaking gets. Everything’s perfect. Also, it’s interesting, because it’s related to the first two in a lot of ways. When you think about that, you can really think of Saturday Night Fever as a musical and even Do the Right Thing very much as a musical. Of course, this is very clearly a musical. I love that the sets are so realistic, and there is such a strive for this realism even though they’re dancing and singing. Once again, this kind of anchor of realism mixed with this fantastical… They’re all portrayals of New York City, is something I’m just very, very attracted to, and has definitely been a big influence. I look at that and every single shot the camera’s in exactly the right place, as far as capturing the choreography, telling the story, including the right characters at the right time. From the opening shot, you can see the bars over to the side that they’re going to end up, for the final verse, to stick them behind. The director is already thinking about where the entire number is going to go. That entire film is as good as it gets, with camera work, and everyone coming together, choreography and all the departments.

Torsten Schmidt

At the time, I guess I was about grade 8, they made us read that to learn proper English.

Darren Aronofsky

West Side Story_ or Romeo and Juliet?

Torsten Schmidt

No, West Side Story, in music lessons, actually. I was kind of perplexed at the time, that New York street lingo hadn’t actually changed that much. That was about the time that Stetsasonic came out and all of a sudden you’ve got a guy in West Side Story, which is clearly parents’ music, talking to daddy-o like one guy in Stetsasonic. You’re like, “What on earth is going on here? I thought this was like the cool, hip line.”

Darren Aronofsky

I think the words come back. I don’t know what the final word is, Officer Krupke…

Torsten Schmidt

“Krup you.”

Darren Aronofsky

“Krup you,” is that what it is? That’s how they got away with it. Yeah, love it.

Torsten Schmidt

Did you ever see… I presume you did, that really fantastic documentary they did around the Jose Carreras version of… There’s this really fantastic documentary, I guess it’s late ’70s, early ’80s, and it’s about a recording, I presume, of West Side Story with him in the cast, and I want to say Montserrat Caballe, but don’t crucify me if it isn’t. You really see New York at the time, and the creative class. There’s one of the greatest moments ever about artistic outrage in there, when the union master comes in and tells everyone, “Look, time’s over, rehearsal is over.” Carreras was late, and he didn’t get his ice cream in time, and so on. Just about when he gets started, union comes in and shuts the thing down, and he just takes the sheet music and puts it into this really lovely leather pouch with a [makes breathing sound] There was just one second that always will stick with West Side Story in a way, of what it must be like working with actors of a great caliber. I guess you know one or two things about that.

Darren Aronofsky

I don’t know anything about actors coming late to set. (laughs)

Torsten Schmidt

Or dropping out, whatever.

Darren Aronofsky

I hear my producer Scott laughing, somewhere in the audience. I don’t know, that would be a very different subject matter.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess they usually try to come on time, because usually working with you usually tends to get them an award nomination or two.

Darren Aronofsky

Yes, absolutely. (laughs)

Torsten Schmidt

That kind of helps, I presume, which is a segue to the next one.

Darren Aronofsky

Is it? I chose the… I don’t know why… You don’t know why I chose this one. You were all confused by this one, but this was a movie that I can remember. I don’t know if I should say this… No, I’m not going to say it, but I can remember…

Torsten Schmidt

When anyone says, “I don’t know,” it’s usually a good thing to say it.

Darren Aronofsky

I can remember watching this from the balcony of the Waverly Theater, which is now the IFC Theater, in Manhattan. This was what… This was one of those films that inspired me to become a filmmaker, without a doubt. I just chose a very special moment for me, which kind of blew my mind on what a concert film could be.

(video: Stop Making Sense Opening / applause) 24:19

Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, I don’t know. I guess first, one of the cool things about that concert is, you never see the fans, which is a very rare thing. They always have a cutaway to the fans, and it immediately dates every concert film out there, which sometimes can be really cool, as in Woodstock, and other times can be… I can’t think of a humiliating one, but I’m sure there’s many of them.

I imagine what that was was, I don’t really know the history of it too much, I haven’t researched it, but I imagine that was the [Talking Heads] concert that those RISD kids came up with and the idea of starting with an empty stage and then slowly building to a full concert, it just blew my mind, the conceptual idea of that. If you remember, he comes out in the opening scene with a boom box and sets it down, and you see the back of the stage and it’s just a bare stage with him and a microphone and an acoustic guitar. By the end, you have these huge numbers with a 15-, 20-piece band, backup singers, and fully electrical.

For the audience, you’re slowly getting the gimmick as the concert goes on. It’s just, first it’s David Byrne, then Tina Weymouth comes out, and they sing that. I think the next song, you get the drummer, I don’t really remember. It just was such a bizarre idea.

The way Demme decided to shoot it, and how he captured it was perfect, because he’s hinting at it. You don’t really get it, but that one shot that’s right at the beginning, when he’s shooting over the tech hands as they’re setting up Tina, is just a brilliant way to slowly tell the story, and slowly reveal what’s going on. That for me, I think is the great thing, is when the camera is pushing the story forward so well, and working so well with the music.

Torsten Schmidt

Apart from the fact that Tina Weymouth gets to shine, which is really great because she’s probably one of the most underrated musicians of the 20th century, is the moment just before that scene when he comes in and puts in a cassette and starts a drum track alone, which is a pretty lethal drum track. It’s actually the second out of four tracks, where a cassette plays a crucial role. I believe there’s a third one later as well. It’s kind of interesting how that kind of gets lost, because what are you going to show now, like someone dialing for a file?

Darren Aronofsky

Exactly, and then you would just move your iPhone around, but people wouldn’t know if you were just checking your text messages or what. “Hold on, I’ve got to put a drum beat on here for a second,” yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

“Psycho Killer, qu’est-ce que c’est?” Can we go to the next one, maybe?

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah, sure. We should probably talk a little bit about stuff I’ve done with Clint, a little bit.

Torsten Schmidt

Who’s this Clint character?

Darren Aronofsky

[Clint Mansell] is the composer who’s done the last… All my feature films. You all know Clint, right? (applause) Clint, when we were working on… Requiem was an interesting step up, because on Pi… He just reminded me about this story. I guess it started off with a single track I asked him to write, which was sort of the theme music for the Pi man. He came in with this track, and it was so good. As we moved further and further along on making the film, we just saw other places where he could create music for us, and he just kept supplying great music for us. When we got to Requiem it was very important to me to treat the composer like I would treat the DP or the production designer or the editor. They’re an equal partner, I think. I’ve always come from that philosophy, that the composer is one of those major collaborators.

Clint would always get the script at the very beginning of the process, and conversations would continue. Sometimes after he would read the script, he would put together a small… Back then it was a mixtape of some of his ideas, that he probably recorded on some electronic device. When we were into the editing of the movie, he kind of hit a wall a little bit. It was sort of like, I don’t think he really knew where to begin. He was living down in New Orleans then, and I flew down and this sort of major piece of Requiem For A Dream was this little tiny phrase that was in the middle of this mixtape. We just listened through the mixtape, and we heard that part. We recognized that something interesting was going on there, and we cued it up with different parts of the image, and it worked really well. That, I think, gave Clint the first sort of stepping stone of how to begin to sort of make the score that it became. We should probably just watch that clip.

(video: Requiem For A Dream - Lux Aeterna / applause)

That’s the Verrazano Bridge. That’s the same bridge as in the opening of Saturday Night Fever.

Torsten Schmidt

See the hermeneutics unfolding here in front of your eyes.

Darren Aronofsky

Patterns are everywhere, that’s from Pi. It’s funny, that’s only a little piece of what became “Lux Aeterna,” which ended up on Peter Jackson’s trailers, and then I don’t know, now it’s during the Rose Bowl parade and when the Knicks take center court. It’s strange when that happens. It was almost a lost clip on this mixtape that Clint just was, after reading the script, was inspired to write.

It was interesting how we did that. We basically said, “OK, this is going to be our main kind of requiem, or our main tune.” We chose the different places in the film, and we almost color-coded it. In fact, we may have color-coded it and said, “We’re going to use this over in different places in the film, to sort of emphasize a certain thing.” We sort of looked at the different characters and tried to create themes and ideas that connect them. Clint would see all the narrative underpinnings of the script and the story and sort of try to match up his music along with that. That’s part of the reason I think we’ve had a good success between me and him, is because he’s very interested in story, and understands story, and can see how those different things connect. The reason I let that clip go on was interesting because when we first got that piece of music, that kind of crazy frenetic thing that plays throughout the third act of Requiem for a Dream, I bought… I went to the bargain… You remember how they used to have, like, in record stores, like bargain bins? I went and I bought all the requiems from Mozart and from Bach and Brahms, because it was always filled with classical. You could buy them all for 99 cents. It was probably just beginning DVDs. I gave Clint all the requiems of the great classical musicians and I said, “Just sample it and turn it into something.” That’s what that is. That’s actually… It might be the Kronos Quarter playing over it, in fact I know it is, but it started off with Clint taking… Illegally taking samples and mixing them around and distorting them, which then I guess maybe makes that legal, at that point, if it’s distorted enough, and then the Kronos is over it. One little story about the Kronos in that, which is this great quarter which we collaborated with on this film, and The Fountain and on Noah... Because Clint was working electronically and I don’t even think, back then I’m not sure it was as sophisticated as ProTools. Things could be not quite in time, very easily. It was interesting to watch them kind of debate if it was 1/32s or 1/64s. They could actually hear the difference between a 1/32 and a 1/64, which is kind of hard, right, for all the musicians? I don’t know, maybe not. For me, I was impressed. We looked at that entire film as a requiem, because requiem is a musical term. There’s probably music wall to wall throughout that film. It starts in the opening sequence when Harry is stealing the TV. It’s the Kronos warming up and I was actually conducting them on how intense their warming up should be. When the car hits and the film begins is sort of when the requiem actually begins. (applause)

Torsten Schmidt

We had [Public Enemy] in a different clip beforehand in Do the Right Thing. You were actually thinking of using Public Enemy in this one as well, the rumor goes.

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah, I forgot that story until I read it. I think I’ve always… Hip-hop was such a big influence. I was 15 or 16 when hip-hop first got onto the radio in New York and it was only on Friday and Saturday nights that they would play hip-hop, which is a crazy thing, but that was the only time that they played hip-hop on radio. Friday and Saturday night was the biggest thing in the world. You would drive around with your friends, and depending on which borough you lived on, you either listened to 98.7 or 107.5. Both radio stations would be insulting each other about how cool Brooklyn and Staten Island was versus Manhattan and the Bronx. No one really talked about Queens, except for Run DMC.

It was an amazing time in music so I think when I started to do film I always wanted to sort of do something with that passion I had as a teenager, because that’s often… Those early teenage years, that teenage music, it’s funny because there’s a big debate about what popular music is with me and my son, who is like, “The Beatles were pop music.” I’m like, “You’re kind of right, they kind of were, but how do you define pop music?”

Torsten Schmidt

It’s popular.

Darren Aronofsky

Popular, right, so the Beatles would be pop. Would Kurt Cobain be pop music?

Torsten Schmidt

I would say so.

Darren Aronofsky

Really? He… That’s… There you go. I guess maybe I like pop music.

Torsten Schmidt

I’d like to take a very Warhol-esque stance. In pop music, and hip-hop in particular, sampling is obviously a big thing. You said yourself how you kind of drove Clint to start from classical to end up where he was. Obviously, as any creator, trying to emulate things that you really admire is always a big leeway to get you to a different place. Would you believe it, it works visually as well, which would kind of lead us to the next clip, I presume.

Darren Aronofsky

Which is what… Yeah, this is… What was your connection to it?

Torsten Schmidt

I would call that sampling, or a segue to sampling.

Darren Aronofsky

How I would connect them is… The connection I was trying to make was, I think there’s something about when music kicks in, and how music, when it kicks in, can incredibly change a story. I decided to choose a few examples of that, because definitely in Requiem, after she has that horror moment where the fridge tries to eat her, and then it kicks in with “Lux Aeterna,” I imagine I was channeling some of my favorite films. This would be a perfect example of it. This is Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa.

(video: Yojimbo - No Cure For Fools Scene / applause)

Talk about badass motherfucker.

Torsten Schmidt

That’s only the beginning, right?

Darren Aronofsky

For me that’s, next to West Side Story, that’s also as good as it gets. It’s perfection. It’s interesting to see, I grew up watching that on VHS tape and I never… It was always kind of blurry. I never realized that the tattoo was a… He has like a tattoo of a die, it’s like a number 6 and a number 1. It was a weird tattoo, I thought. I never noticed it before.

I just love how the music kicks in and says this is… It’s just such a great exclamation point on the scene. He even plays with sound design so well, Kurosawa, in bringing down the sound of the wind and the leaves for a second, right before the line of dialogue. I imagine… I wonder… I don’t know why he brings it up again right before he says the line, “Coffin maker, make two.” I’m wondering if he was using the sound that was on set and he didn’t loop it, but it almost feels like there’s a reason for it. I never noticed that as distinctly as here, so I’ll have to look at it closer. It’s just a great moment. He’s just pulling everyone in to this shocking moment, then gives the character a joke, which is what the character is, and then kicks in with that awesome beat.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess scholars are always on about how Kurosawa is all about these little gestures that he assigns to a character. I guess you’re trying to do a similar thing sonically as well, like you would recognize certain themes with characters throughout the movies, especially when you’re dealing with different levels of timings and multiverses and stuff like that.

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah, you try to use music and sound design both as ways to push character. We often would talk about different themes for different characters all the time. That even relates to sound design. Definitely in Requiem for a Dream there was a whole… There was tons of sound design about what her apartment would sound like, and how those different sounds in the apartment had their own life and became completely subjective with her insanity. We should go on to the next clip, which is kind of the exact… Does the same exact thing as what Kurosawa does. It’s just by another great master, Sergio Leone. This is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Torsten Schmidt

Who kind of sampled the movie we just saw as well.

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah, was clearly influenced by it, yeah.

(video: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Duel Scene / applause)

That’s so good. I’m choosing all the best, and then I’m putting my crappy shit up next to it. That’s the bomb. That’s like… Right before that, the beginning of the film, Blondie, Clint Eastwood, abandons the ugly and almost kills him, and then the ugly gets him back and almost kills him and then they both find out that there’s a treasure, and they meet each other. They recover at that church.

The last time we saw them, they were basically just using each other and enemies. By the end of this moment, there is this new chapter where they are fully partners. There’s this new brotherhood that has come out of it and everything is working to that from the performance of Clint Eastwood having witnessed what really went on between the brothers and willing to rise above it because he recognizes what’s ahead of them. The ugly doesn’t realize he’s being manipulated, but is able in his sort of id state to let go of that pain and move forward and take the cigar and take this moment of charity from a new friend, almost. When he lets that go and there’s that great moment by the great Eli Wallach, where he lets go of the pain, wraps himself in his pancho and takes a breath towards forward and Morricone kicks in with the greatest… Maybe the greatest melody ever written for film music.

Torsten Schmidt

That’s in a film that has at least four other top 50 world hits in it.

Darren Aronofsky

Exactly.

Torsten Schmidt

The one for the Mexican stand-off scene, the main theme song as well, and the one that Metallica abuse all the time.

Darren Aronofsky

I never caught that. Anyway, that for me is the greatest of filmmaking. Once again, that same idea of using music to enter a new chapter, by going back to the main refrain, which I didn’t actually realize I was doing until right this moment here on the stage. I think that’s what it is. It’s like, in the moment with Toshiro Mifune, he’s suddenly, he set the stage that he is the badass in town and the most valuable chess piece on the board. Now, it’s all about how that chess piece is going to be moved. In this moment, it’s that final chapter. This film, Leone as much as anyone makes opera, I think. There’s that great scene later on, when the ugly is searching for the tombstone and it’s running around and the camera’s spinning, chasing him. It’s no longer just cinema, it’s become something else where it is operatic.

Torsten Schmidt

Don’t you find it kind of tragic that the person who, on the musical side, was responsible for that, and composed all that, still doesn’t really want to talk about it or even perform it, because he feels like he has failed as a classical composer?

Darren Aronofsky

I saw him play Radio City Music Hall with 100 people.

Torsten Schmidt

He just about in the last years came around to it, but for years, he was just like…

Darren Aronofsky

He got there before he died, so he was all right. Definitely, when he played Radio City, New York went crazy for him. It was an amazing concert. I don’t know if he’s still doing it. I just heard he’s scoring Quentin Tarantino’s western, which is going to be awesome. That’s really cool.

Torsten Schmidt

Back to Japan.

Darren Aronofsky

We can talk about sound design, because that’s how we go on to this, which is another interesting thing about that that he does is as they’re pulling away from the church, is that, is the church bell. Everybody hear that church bell going off, which is a great… I don’t know, it’s almost the same way that Kurosawa was using the sound of the leaves. Suddenly, the sound design and the setting returns you to the reality where you are. I imagine if… You have to remember he was… I don’t even know if Sergio Leone was working in stereo, would you know? It’s probably… What?

Torsten Schmidt

I guess it depends on which phase.

Darren Aronofsky

What do you mean, which phase?

Torsten Schmidt

Like, what time of the recording.

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah, that’s what I’m asking. I don’t know, he might have been just working mono. There was no way for him to throw that church bell into the back speakers, and have it slowly disappear, which was kind of what he’s hinting at as they’re pulling away. The bell of the church is ringing and they’re leaving it, but it also is like, it’s a count to start the music. That’s, for me, something that’s always been something I’ve really been interested in, is bringing the sound designer and the composer as close together. When we did our first three or four films, the main sound designer would give Clint lots of his sounds sometimes, electronically, and vice versa, so that we could sort of blend them into one sort of soundscape as much as possible. I think there’s many, many great examples of how to use sound design, and the one that I wanted to… I did want, every once in a while I like to do a little homage, and you just get totally inspired by the themes of another movie, and how they’re connected to yours.

Torsten Schmidt

Sampling?

Darren Aronofsky

You sample. It’s a form of sampling. I think it… I’m a big, big fan of sampling. It’s one of my favorite musical forms, but I think you’ve got to make it your own. That’s always the line, when you’re just stealing and then when you turn it into something else. Spike Lee did a great one, I think it’s in Mo’ Better Blues when he’s crossing the street and the taxi cab almost hits him and he’s like, “I’m walking here,” and stole it from Urban Cowboy.

This is a really amazing use of sound design by Kurosawa again. It’s in the film called Ikiru, To Live. The setup is this man is just finding out that… He’s figuring it out, that he has terminal cancer.

(video: Ikiru / applause)

And this is my sample of it, in The Fountain, this is after Tommy has found out that his wife is dying.

(video: The Fountain / applause)

Kurosawa had a bigger crane. (laughs) I just realized, I could have gone further out. I was just very… Of course, To Live we watched, and there were many films we watched that dealt with mortality. That was a big influence, and I decided to give it a shout out in the filmmaking. I loved the idea of what Kurosawa came up with, this idea that you’re so lost in your own head that you’re completely cut off from the environment.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess almost everyone has experienced that at one stage in their life or another, how your inner and your outer worlds sometimes just don’t correspond.

Darren Aronofsky

All the visual cues he used from the background, from the welding arc, it was just brilliant. Everything deserves noise, and he does it. Kurosawa went directly to no noise, so there’s actually nothing in the soundtrack there. He went completely silent, and I wanted to do the same. The studio couldn’t… They wouldn’t allow us to do it, because in deliverables somewhere foreign might get really confused about what that is and think there’s a mistake and then they won’t get paid. I had to… I was forced to do that footstep thing, and it still kind of kills me that it’s there. You’re not allowed to have an empty soundtrack in a studio picture.

Torsten Schmidt

You could have just put like a really annoying frequency somewhere that was like…

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah, but they would have been upset with that, too. It would have been caught technically, and everyone would have complained about it. Not that it was distributed internationally, The Fountain, but if it had been.

Torsten Schmidt

It made it to like a 40-seater in Cologne.

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah, exactly. Oh, did it get to… It played in the theater in Cologne? No, it didn’t.

Torsten Schmidt

No, it did.

Darren Aronofsky

Really?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, it was a 40- or 50-seater, I want to say.

Darren Aronofsky

That’s OK, that’s good. People are connecting now, 20 years later.

Torsten Schmidt

I was going to say, I think it was probably everyone that bought the comic book as well was in there.

Darren Aronofsky

Good, that was one showing.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you deal with the sounds you’ve got in your head, when you’re actually writing the comic books?

Darren Aronofsky

The comic books are really… The comic books, I don’t … I’m not a comic book writer. I admire graphic novels a lot, and I think it’s a great art form. Los Bros Hernandez and Moebius, there’s so many influences that when I was maybe in my early 20s that I really got into that stuff. I came up with the idea to do a Fountain comic book because the film got shut down and looked like it was never going to happen. I really wanted to get the story into the world, because I had worked on it for years and years. We found an artist and figured out a way to bring it… To put it out there. We did the same thing with Noah when it looked like that was going to be an impossible film to make. Usually, if I’m doing a comic book, it’s something that I think is not going to happen, and it’s an act of depression, not an act of joy.

Torsten Schmidt

You should probably stop it. It might be a bad omen.

Darren Aronofsky

It’s fun, though. It’s fun to see, and those comic books are completely different than the actual movies, because I really wanted to choose an artist and give them free reign to create their own thing.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess some of the stories are easier to tell in that form, because avid readers, comic book records, are really used to multiverses at any given time. It’s just like, “OK, now we go to this different galaxy. Here we are, of course.” That’s what you do.

Darren Aronofsky

It fit very well into that world. I think one of the early things about the structure was influenced by comic books, so that made total sense to go back to it.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess we’re going to a different universe now.

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah, where are we? We did… I have no bridge here. Take it to the bridge, guy.

Torsten Schmidt

It is a different universe. It’s a parallel world.

Darren Aronofsky

I get… We talked about it a little earlier, but the only film I did that doesn’t really have a score is The Wrestler. Partly because we couldn’t afford one, but that wasn’t really the reason. It was clear when we were doing The Wrestler that with that character, Rob Siegel, the writer, made it very clear… It was, in the screenplay, so much of the hair metal music, is that what you call that, metal? Pop metal music? Hair pop metal music?

Torsten Schmidt

It depends on whether you ask the people that listen to it, or others that describe it. I think there’s a massive difference.

Darren Aronofsky

An outside scholar, if you had RATT sitting here, or Accept, what would you say their genre is?

Torsten Schmidt

Epic.

Darren Aronofsky

Epic? I wasn’t very familiar with epic music when I started The Wrestler. I got a lot of mixtapes and I started to listen to that stuff. It all fit great. It was a lot of fun, because we had to find songs. We had very, very little budget, and we needed a lot of music. It was just a very, very long process.

I realized without that, we were not in danger of being a documentary, but we definitely wanted to give the audience a sense that they were watching a movie. We also thought that maybe there was a way to sort of give a sense of mood by introducing a score.

I think it was actually probably one of the more difficult projects for Clint, even though there was only eight to ten minutes of music in the entire film, from him. That’s because the music, if it got too sappy, it immediately got really sappy, the movie. If it went the other direction… It just was very easy to tip this balancing act of reality we were trying to create. Eventually, Clint stumbled on something that I thought was very atmospheric and really did the job.

(video: The Wrestler - Round and Round / applause)

I guess it’s a little foreboding, if you had to put it… What adjective would you use for it? Foreboding, no? Anyone here? It was just a very simple thing. That’s Slash playing that. I think it just fit the mood, and we only used it for like eight minutes in the film.

Torsten Schmidt

Who’s on your funding committee or what supports the pill-popping, always?

Darren Aronofsky

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Torsten Schmidt

It just weirdly occurred to me.

Darren Aronofsky

Is there a lot of pill-popping in my films? I don’t know. Noah wasn’t pill-popping.

Torsten Schmidt

You should think about that.

Darren Aronofsky

At least on screen. Just joking, very bad joke.

Torsten Schmidt

Still, when you think of the next scene in that movie, the juxtaposition in sound as well, when he starts fighting with the kids in this playful way and it moves to something different and at the same time the way the sound is… The general soundtrack is used. You’ve got…

Darren Aronofsky

There’s no soundtrack in that, is there? It’s just them playing.

Torsten Schmidt

No, I mean later on, when you’ve got things like the stapler, that is painful. It sounds painful, every time.

Darren Aronofsky

Sound design was a big part of it. It was interesting, my favorite story from that is, we could only afford, as I was saying, these… We were paying $5,000 a song, which isn’t that… Not much.

Torsten Schmidt

I will use that in future negotiations.

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah, exactly. The only song we could get is that… There’s a scene where Mickey and Marisa go to a bar and have a drink, and “Round and Round” by RATT comes on the radio, and they start singing along. We were able to get that because the band RATT re-recorded it so it wasn’t the actual original masters, it was their new masters. That was a way a lot of bands, I think, got around licensing so they got some of the money.

The whole day, Mickey was like, “There’s no way I’m doing that song. There’s no way. Get me “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” The last time “Sweet Child O’ Mine” was given was when Guns ‘N Roses was a band, and I think they paid two million dollars to have someone sing along with it.

Torsten Schmidt

That was only one album ago. (laughs)

Darren Aronofsky

I was like, “Mickey, we’re not getting it.” He’s like, “I’m going to talk to Axl [Rose]. It’s not going to be a problem.” I was like, “All right, feel free. Talk to Axl, go for it.” He calls up Axl, who I think… I don’t know, they had some type of connection. It’s not happening. Axl won’t talk to Slash, Slash won’t talk to Axl, whatever was going on. I’m like, “Mickey, we’ve got to do the ‘Round and Round.’” He’s like, “All right, shoot Marisa’s side first.” We shoot Marisa, she’s great. We have to turn the camera… It’s after lunch, we have to turn the cameras around. Scott, my producer, comes up and he’s like, “We got ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine,’” but we had shot out Marisa already. I was like, “Umm…” He’s like, “Do we tell Mickey?” I was like, “Fuck, what do we do?” What happened is I think, I don’t know why, they just decided it. I guess we decided not to tell Mickey but Mickey already knew, of course, because Axl called him. He was like, “I understand the …” Mickey was big of heart, and he was like, “I’ll do the other side, because we’re already halfway done.” We ended up then using “Sweet Child O’ Mine” for the really great moment in the film when he enters the ring for the final fight. It was funny, because the deal we had, he had to actually be singing along with it. There’s this one moment where Mickey is mouthing the words and so that was singing along with it, and that’s how we go around it. Thank you, Axl and Slash and everyone in Guns ‘N Roses for that one.

Torsten Schmidt

Yes, sadly, we omitted the scene you were just talking about, the bar scene, because I felt it was clearly a post-Sopranos kind of scene in the way that the lyrics in the soundtrack are a part of the story, and take you to the inner monologue of what’s going on with the character. I think the RATT thing ends on something like, “Shoot an arrow through my heart,” or something like that.

Darren Aronofsky

I actually never learned the words either, so I don’t know what they were.

Torsten Schmidt

It really works in that moment.

Darren Aronofsky

Does it?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah.

Darren Aronofsky

It was probably one of the hardest days of shooting on that film. It was a very tough day. The next piece we were going to do…

Torsten Schmidt

Hang on, there’s one more question on that scene, because something we always wondered as kids, what is it with the white American male and dancing towards the end of a movie? There is always… If you don’t have a car chase, you need to have an awkward white male dance there. That clearly…

Darren Aronofsky

What are you talking about?

Torsten Schmidt

Mickey Rourke is dancing in that scene.

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah, but where else… What other movie has that?

Torsten Schmidt

Countless, like there’s…

Darren Aronofsky

Give me like, two. Wait, hold on, you’re saying instead of a big fight at the end, they have a…

Torsten Schmidt

Like a dance scene, where people are doing at least something like this. We’ll get to that later. We’ll save that for the after-party, I guess.

Darren Aronofsky

Does anyone know what he’s talking about? Anybody? No? Patrick Swayze or something in one of those movies, I don’t know, or Footloose maybe, that’s two, but that’s kind of what they’re about. I guess they could have put a fight scene at the end of Footloose. Using singing along with music…

Torsten Schmidt

No dancing, though.

Darren Aronofsky

No dancing, was what inspired this next clip, which is the very end of Full Metal Jacket, by Stanley Kubrick. I don’t know, we should just … It’s the very end of the movie. The joker, Matthew Modine’s character, has just killed this female sniper, and it just… Let’s watch it, and then we’ll talk about it.

(video: Full Metal Jacket - Final Scene / applause) 1.00.56

That is so good, also. Everything’s good that we’ve showed tonight, but for me, there’s so many things that that film is about, it’s hard to… One of the things that it might be about is, as you remember, it’s kind of split in two. There’s the first half in training camp, and then the second half’s in Vietnam. The first half is all about order. This is the way I see it. It’s all about perfect order, and it’s about turning these human beings into machines, but there’s this one piece of chaos, which is this overweight soldier, who just is slowly picked on until he eventually explodes and can’t handle it and explodes his brains against the wall. Then it’s all about bringing these machines and this order into chaos. Suddenly, the whole shooting style changes and the whole entire film is a completely different movie. I think that final shot is all about taking the grid of that order and sticking it over that chaos, while they’re in this complete… They’re in hell, literally, of destroyed landscape, yet they’re perfectly ordered in a grid, singing the great theme song of America, trying to stamp this grid across chaos. It’s sort of, in one image, not just an image, an idea through music, completely sells the whole point of the film. That’s my theory on that. It’s not bad, right?

Torsten Schmidt

I’d buy that. I don’t know whether there’s a similar expression in English. In Germany, we would call it the singing in the forest, when you’re a little kid and you go into the dark forest, and you’re trying to sing whatever sticks in your mind so that you don’t have to feel scared about the ghosts, and so on.

Darren Aronofsky

Right, but he literally says in this, “I’m not scared.” He points that out, so he’s… Knowing Kubrick, he was thinking about that. He knew the German interpretation, and wanted to answer it and say, “You’re wrong.” Maybe, I don’t know, but that’s a big part of it. They’re not afraid. They’re completely loose and free, like children, but they’re the perfect killing machine, going across that world of hell.

Torsten Schmidt

Then again, if you’re saying you’re scared, then there’s a good chance you’re shit scared.

Darren Aronofsky

Right.

Torsten Schmidt

This also sparked off a really bizarre phenomenon, the song from the first half, “I Wanna be a Drill Instructor,” had a dance remix and became a dance hit around the world, which looked a bit weird in a discotheque. It had like a funk sort of drumbeat.

Darren Aronofsky

Which line did they use?

Torsten Schmidt

The entire song, “I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor,” l wanna… Like the entire chant.

Darren Aronofsky

Oh, really?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, and it was like a number one song.

Darren Aronofsky

There you go.

Torsten Schmidt

That was a big disturbing, seeing that. I’m like…

Darren Aronofsky

Especially when you’ve seen the film.

Torsten Schmidt

It was also at the height of the cold war, so yeah.

Darren Aronofsky

Cool.

Torsten Schmidt

So to speak, yeah. Now, for something marginally different.

Darren Aronofsky

I don’t know why… I chose this, I wanted to do one more musical, which isn’t really a musical either, but it’s a film I only really got exposed to after being a filmmaker already and people saying, “Have you ever seen that?” I think I did see it. I did see part of it as a kid, but I think in this case when I did see it, my mom pulled me out of the theater, because she realized it wasn’t appropriate. That’s All That Jazz, by Bob Fosse.

I kind of… I’m including the clip, because it’s a moment to brag, which was he shot it at SUNY Purchase in this black theater. He filmed… The next film after that shot there was actually Black Swan. that theater had been dormant from film production. That was one of the major reasons I chose to be in the space. I was like, “Oh, this has got good vibes. We’ve got to shoot in it.” This scene that we’re going to watch a little bit of is shot in the same space where all the ballerinas are practicing, and Thomas, the head of… Vincent Cassel’s character, sort of pitches that there’s going to be a new white swan. This is the closing of All That Jazz, by Bob Fosse.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess you need to give a little bit of context where that scene kicks in, because it might be a bit misleading from where we cued it, like what happens in the last 10 minutes before that.

Darren Aronofsky

He’s dead, so this is his like… I don’t know what it… It’s completely abstract, but it’s sort of his final… I think it’s his moments of death, and it’s kind of been turned into a big musical number.

(video: All That Jazz / applause) 1.06.08

It’s really out of context, but everyone… He’s really forgotten as far as how amazing a filmmaker he is, Bob Fosse. That’s kind of the climax of his masterpiece and I definitely wanted to use a clip of it but it’s really… If you haven’t seen the film, it’s introducing all the characters of his life that he’s saying goodbye to as he dies.

Torsten Schmidt

Yes, sadly, it’s not available on the usual kind of platforms, so in order to watch it, you get every malware on the planet.

Darren Aronofsky

Oh, really? Is that true? It’s not on… It’s hard to get?

Torsten Schmidt

It was very tough to find, but gladly, the last 20 minutes or so in one block are on YouTube, and so are most of the key scenes. It’s worth actually… How they end up there, is actually really worth seeing.

Darren Aronofsky

Worth seeing. Everyone should go out and see All That Jazz, it’s great. That’s all I can say about it.

Torsten Schmidt

We started in New York, and we kind of circled back to New York, because I guess they really want to have us out of the building rather soon. I guess we have to talk about one of the other films where you make a really gorgeous actress cry, like you seemed to do. This time, we’re entering the classical arena. You just hinted at it, Black Swan.

Darren Aronofsky

Black Swan was also very much, in certain ways, it’s not a musical, but it’s… Music was clearly a big part of it. We looked at the entire film always as a re-telling of Swan Lake. When we first … It started off, it was a screenplay that had… It was sort of based on “The Double,” the Dostoyevsky “The Double,” and I always liked that idea. I always thought it was a really scary idea, that you wake up one day and someone’s stealing your identity.

I was looking for something to do with that, and I was also looking at something to do set in the ballet world because my sister had been a ballerina, and I had grown up around it. While doing research for this, I ran into… I went to a production of Swan Lake and realized that there is the story of doubles in Swan Lake. There’s a black swan and a white swan. It was this kind of eureka moment. I always looked at the making of that movie very much as just a narrative filmmaking version of the ballet Swan Lake. I even went as far as taking the whole ballet, listening to it over and over again, and assigning, in order, different pieces of music to each scene. Matthew Bourne, who did the all-male Swan Lake, which was fantastic, came up to me afterwards and he was like, “You didn’t have to put it in order.” It was like a great compliment to me that he picked up on that we did that. The closing sequence was always very, very clear. The way Swan Lake ends, I knew exactly how Black Swan was going to go. I can remember, that was the big pitch. Black Swan was yet another film that was incredibly difficult to make. I was actually with someone here at TIFF last night, with a guy who decided not to invest in it, and he was just sort of crying into his drink last night about it, still five years later, and I was sort of goading and making fun of him all night. This is the end of it and it was very clear when we first pitched the movie that this was exactly how we were going to do it. We didn’t know the exact moves, but I knew the music and I knew the narrative goal of where it was going to go, so the end of Black Swan.

(video: Black Swan - Last Dance Scene / applause)

That was fun. I saw Natalie last night. She’s here showing her film right now, the first film that she directed, which was great. She was reminding me how we did that, which was the falling onto the mattress was… She’s actually standing upright, and she’s on a dolly. The bed, the mattress is on a dolly, and they sort of both came at each other. Right before she hit, I would say “tuck,” and she would do that, so she was not really hitting it. That’s how we did that, which is… It looks pretty good, just because, how do you get the camera to follow with her? It took us a long time to figure that one out. I don’t know, do you have any questions or anything about that, or did I answer it all?

Torsten Schmidt

I always see this really nasty police wrap sign over there, and I don’t think they’re trying to tell us to do sandwiches or do rhymes, but yeah. The one thing that kind of struck me in there, are you ever thinking about the sonic characteristics that certain actors bring with them? You’re using her, who’s been in some things that were sonically pretty striking, and you’re also using Vincent Cassel, who one of his major roles was in Irreversible, and the way they work with sound there is incredibly stunning, with that droning sound that [Thomas Bangalter] did for it.

I somehow felt in this one like that character is somehow back, he just has a different job now. You always seem to… The way Clint deals with it, it’s always like a part two, even though it’s a totally different story, a different continent, in a way.

Darren Aronofsky

Yeah. Sorry, I don’t know what to say. I’m sort of… I didn’t quite follow, I have to admit. Are you saying that the character, Vincent’s character sort of is… That we were sort of inspired by it?

Torsten Schmidt

They’re always like the audience, or sometimes, has a tough time differentiating between the character and the actor, obviously.

Darren Aronofsky

Right.

Torsten Schmidt

They’re always taking the bits… Some folks are going like, “Oh, Princess Leia is doing Helena, so what’s the story there?” How do you deal with that when you start designing the characters?

Darren Aronofsky

You try to put… I think it comes down to casting. You try to get the right actor to fill the role. I think if people are thinking about other characters that that person played, you’re sort of… That’s a big problem. It’s about making the character convincing enough that it overcomes and that you believe what you’re watching. I think it’s always an issue when you’re dealing with celebrities. That’s why it’s interesting, when celebrities sort of shield their life and their personal life, it helps. Also a problem when you’re trying to get someone from TV, who gets so connected to a character, how do you break them away from the character that they played, and turn them…? Some actors get devoured by those characters, and that’s who they are for the rest of their lives. There’s Mark Hamill, and there’s Harrison Ford. I don’t know, it could be the actor trying, being able to take on other characters, or it could be the opportunities they choose. You never know why that is.

Torsten Schmidt

Do you find that is getting harder with the plethora of new content, especially serialized content out there now?

Darren Aronofsky

I think so. I think a lot… It’s also not just on TV, but of course in the superhero and all the franchise movies, is that a lot of the great talent is being used in those places, and it’s hard to just get to work with a lot of the great actors, because they’re booked for the next five, six years. That’s the other issue with those big franchise movies. As far as what’s happening on TV, it’s really a great and exciting time, because you’re getting incredible risks taken, and the stories that we’d never have anywhere else to be told, being told.

Torsten Schmidt

With a lot of space.

Darren Aronofsky

With a lot of space, and a lot of room, yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

Space is a little bit confined today, but obviously we don’t want to go out without showing an essential part of The Fountain. Before we do that, because we will sneakily disappear during it, I guess people want to hear about Mark Wie but they also want to have a chance to thank you before they go out and try some drinks. Please join me in thanking Mr. Aronofsky for sharing. (applause)

Darren Aronofsky

Thank you, guys, for being here. Thank you. We’re ending, I think this is probably mine and Clint’s favorite thing we did together, so here it is, the end of The Fountain.

Torsten Schmidt

Any words why?

Darren Aronofsky

That's my words baby, let's rock & roll.