Feature: Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky talks to press in London about his new psychological thriller.
While I personally found Black Swan to be an overblown psychological thriller, that thematically treads cliched ground, it can't be denied that Darren Aronofsky is a fascinating director.
From the precocious beginnings with the dazzling Pi and the hugely disturbing Requiem For A Dream, he's always been pre-occupied with the madness of the body and the mind. This is clear in Black Swan, where we see in great detail what a perfectionist ballerina goes through.
Natalie Portman's performance as a talented ballet dancer desperate for the lead in Swan Lake leads her down a path of paranoia as she impresses Vincent Cassel's director, and the sexually confident Mila Kunis. This is in stark contrast to a life with a controlling mother (Barbara Hershey), a woman determined to keep her daughter as a little girl.
Darren, Vincent and Mila were in town for the London Film Festival, and here's what they had to say at the press conference. Black Swan is released February 2011, and this is safe to read, as there are no spoilers.
How easy was it to research the world of ballet?
Darren: The ballet world was a very hard world to get in to. Usually when you make a movie, doors open up, but the ballet world just really couldn't care. They're just very insular and self-involved and very focused, but slowly and surely a few dancers were interested in sharing their stories, and we did a lot of research and eventually the choreographer Benjamin Millepied came on, and that gave us a stamp of approval because he's very well respected in the New York city ballet and the ballet world, and slowly but surely that helped us out.
Is there a natural connection between Black Swan and The Wrestler?
Darren: When we were cutting The Wrestler, we really got into revitalising the film, because we had been developing it for eight years actively and it kind of died during The Wrestler. One of my producers, Mark Hayman, who is also my director of development, came to me and said he wanted to write something, so I said what about a ballet project. He got deep into it and said there were a lot of similarities between this and The Wrestler and I wasn't afraid of them. I thought it was an interesting thing because one's about the highest art and one's the the lowest art - if you wanna call wrestling an "art", which most people don't, but that's an argument for a different press conference. I think they are both about performers and performances, where performers put their bodies before their health, and age and their physicality is the big challenge for that.
How did you train for your dance scenes?
Mila: I think it was important for everybody to do a little bit of dancing - the way a ballerina holds herself is very very specific, and you can only fake that so much. I personally needed have my collar bones showing, and bones protruding, and I had to lose weight. It made sense because ballerinas hold their arms back and their ribcage is tucked in. All of that helped the character.
Vincent: As you can see, I don't dance that much in the movie, but I could have actually! There's one scene where I direct Natalie's character, and reading the script I thought that would be a dancing scene. But I've seen Mikhail Baryshnikov directing a young dancer and he wasn't moving at all, only slightly showing what he was doing. So when we got on the set we got into that vibe where the dancing wasn't really required, and it was more about helping her, following her. That looked more like an ex-dancer than if I had been spinning. I did train 17 years ago, as you can see.
Vincent, who was your inspiration for the director?
Vincent: When I was much younger I had the opportunity to be close to Michael Bennett, who was the director of Chorus Line, Dreamgirls, Ballroom, he was one of the biggest Broadway directors ever. He was a good friend of the family when I was younger and my father actually had a part in Chorus Line in London. So I have seen him work with the dancers, and he was really close to what I'm doing in the movie. Meaning he was a real jerk with the dancers but only to get them where he wanted them to go. He was gay, and that's a pretty big difference because my character here is not gay, and uses his sexuality to direct the dancers. So it's a different take. All the dancers I've watched have something in common - they move like they're owning the world.
Mila, what was hardest part of training for this role?
Mila: The physicality was the hardest, transforming your body at the age of 26. I wasn't alone in this, everyone across the board in this production, if they played a dancer somehow, somewhere they got hurt. I think both are incredibly competitive in a certain way. Dancers have a perception of perfection that I don't think actors necessarily do; actors always feel that for every part there is always something they can do differently and that there is no such thing as perfect. Dancers, it's their career trying to achieve something that is impossible, but they're both incredibly disciplined. I've never met anybody as disciplined as a dancer, ever. I've seen actors call in sick, I've never seen a ballerina call in sick, and that's a testament for their work ethic. It's incredibly competitive, the ballet world, more than anything I've experienced.
Was it really a difficult film to get financed?
Darren: It was a really difficult film to make. After The Wrestler, everyone was like what are you doing making a film about wrestling with Mickey Rourke, and the success we had with it, I thought it would get easier having Natalie Portman and Vincent Cassel and Mila Kunis, and Winona Ryder but it was really, really difficult. Raising the money for this was harder than raising the money for The Wrestler. Two weeks out, the money fell apart - I don't even know if my actors knew this, after training for months and months. But then we were very lucky and very quickly got Fox Searchlight to come in after hands and knees begging. But because we had so little money, every single day was difficult - there was never an easy day. Every day was like 'oh my gosh we have to do all that today'. 42 days of a huge hustle. All the money used up while we were shooting meant there was no money for post [-production]. We have over 300 visual effects shots. It was really, really hard - until now, where we're at this fancy hotel! Suddenly there's money!
Did you always intend to use visual effects in the film?
Darren: The complicated ones like the goose bumps, and the tattoo moving on Mila's back, they are things that are very difficult to and we had to pre-plan as there was no way we could improvise on the budget we had. We really started to play around with things when we got to post, and because I shot wide screen, I started to think about where the audiences eyes might be and thought I could manipulate the other side of the screen in very gentle ways, and actually add it to the tension and paranoia of the movie. There's very slight manipulations of various things. People won't notice them, but they'll feel them.
What did you shoot the film on, to give it its grainy feel?
Darren: The film is shot on film, 16mm, and that's what gives it the delicious grain. We shot it wide screen, it's actually the same format as The Wrestler. Very early on I knew I wanted to get the camera on stage with the dancers. When you're in the audience, dance is very effortless, but these dancers train their whole lives and make all the effort disappear. But when you go backstage you see all the muscles and tendons and blood and sweat and breath. As a director, I thought, how am I going to show that. I wanted to get the camera on the stage and out of the wings. But I was a little nervous about bringing this cinéma vérité style I had used in The Wrestler, this hand held style, to a psychological thriller/horror film. Because I thought a documentary feel might have sucked out the tension, because people might think, why doesn't Natalie turn round to the camera man and say hey, help me out. You couldn't really storyboard the dance shots, because the movement's too fluid, so first me and Benjamin, the choreographer, would talk about parts of Swan Lake, and he would turn the story into movement. The camera was almost a third dancing partner.
Why didn't you go down the digital route?
Darren: Film is amazing. I haven't shot with the RED, but it seems like it's an equal pain in the ass as film, as you still have to light it and face technical challenges. I haven't even seen a RED camera, so I don't know much about it. But I love grain, and that aesthetic, and it adds texture. When you watch a movie, you're not watching reality, even if it's 2D or 3D, it's something that's not real. So I'm not sure you should try and make things look real, because you can never quite get it there. I'm into stylisation of work so it takes on its own aesthetic and life. Doing a feature on 16mm just doesn't happen that much in the universe, and it adds to something.
What cinematic references are there in the film?
Darren: I saw Red Shoes really late in the game, I had heard of it, but we were pretty late in the game when Scorsese did that restoration of the negative. It came out and I saw it - I was blown away that the stories were very similar. That's because they're both based in the ballet world, those characters that emerge, similar themes. There are a lot of references throughout, of course Polanski and Cronenberg's work, Hitchcock's Marnie, Vertigo.
What was it like to work with Natalie?
Vincent: Easy. Easy to work with her, and she was very focused on the dancing. I was very impressed by the amount of work she put into her physical transformation as a dancer. I was so impressed woth the way she got involved, I didn't want to interfere with her, and I let her do what she had to do. She was always training, even though her body was hurting. When we had to do scenes together, she was really going for it. She's not like a typical actress who doesn't want to kiss or whatever, she just goes for it and has fun with it. And she did it really well so it was easy!
Mila: She was absolutely fantastic to work with. I was lucky that I got to work with a friend of mine, but she's a brilliant actress and amazing to watch. She's everything you want her to be. Beautiful to watch while she's working, and great off screen - perfect.
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