Darren Aronofsky strolled into an upscale SoHo bakery/coffee shop not far from where he lives with his on- and off-screen leading woman, Rachel Weisz.
It was early May, and she was three weeks from giving birth to their son, Henry. Aronofsky, who looks as much like a wiry-haired grad student as a renowned film director, was just reaching the end of a far longer gestational period.
“The Fountain,” which opened last Wednesday, is one of those movies that invariably get described as a “labor of love” because if any random person suggested it to a studio exec, he’d be laughed out of the room. You need a strong track record, which Aronofsky had with “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream,” and an especially fierce passion to get a studio to underwrite a science-fiction romance that spans a millennium while exploring the meaning of death.
You also need a thick skin and a level of determination that those closest to you might equate with insanity.
“The Fountain” had just begun screening for test audiences and certain journalists, so Aronofsky finally was able to start gauging what people thought of the work. More important, he was able to say to himself: “The Fountain” had made it.
That didn’t seem to be the case in August 2002, when a two-year process of lining up a star (Brad Pitt) and studio (Warner Bros.), doing numerous rewrites to please both parties, setting up the $90 million production in Australia, losing one co-financier and gaining another, building elaborate sets and enlisting hundreds of cast and crew members culminated in Pitt abruptly dropping out of the movie. The project collapsed in his wake.
“We had a Mayan pyramid built,” recalled Aronofsky, a 37-year-old Brooklyn native who reflects upon potentially soul-killing situations with disarming casualness. “We had gotten 150 Mayans, cast them in Guatemala, guys without passports. All of them had to go through chest X-rays for tuberculosis to get through the Australian government.”
But neither the Mayans nor anyone else was needed. The project was dead. The sets were destroyed.
Aronofsky decided at least to finish a virtual version of the movie. He had storyboarded every shot, so he scanned those images into a computer and animated them to create “a 45-50 minute version of the film where you go shot-to-shot . . . .And then when I was finished, I saved it, and I saved it wrong, and it all fell apart.”
As did Aronofsky. He fled to India to “clear my head.” But he came to see that last setback as a positive sign: To finish “The Fountain,” he would have to make the actual movie.
The genesis of “The Fountain” was the convergence of milestone events in Aronofsky’s life. Both of his parents were diagnosed with cancer — and underwent successful treatments. He also turned 30, which felt like a graduation into serious adulthood..
Plus, he had seen “The Matrix” and thought it redefined science fiction in a way that he might build upon. Finally, “I had been reading a lot of stuff about Latin America and about conquistadors,” he said.
Put it all together, and you get a highly personal story about a man who can’t accept the looming death of his cancer-stricken wife — all mixed up with 16th Century conquistadors, a 26th Century bubble-encased space traveler and a millennium-spanning tree that represents the Fountain of Youth.
After Aronofsky returned from his travels, he tried moving on to other projects. He and comic-book writer/artist Frank Miller co-wrote a screenplay called “Batman: Year One,” a hard-edged reimagining of the dark superhero’s origins, but Warners ultimately enlisted Christopher Nolan to make “Batman Begins” from a completely different script.
Aronofsky said his heart wasn’t in “Batman” anyway because he had another project he ached to direct: “The Fountain,” despite all of the debt and “bad karma” it had rung up.
He reflected upon his indie-filmmaker roots and wondered: Did he really need 300 conquistadors battling a Mayan army? Would anybody be dazzled by such a computer-graphics-driven spectacle after “The Lord of the Rings” anyway?
“I realized it’s really about one man against an impossible force, because that’s the theme of the film: It’s one man trying to stop death,” Aronofsky said. “So all I really need is one guy fighting these Mayans. And that started to limit the scope.”
He took two weeks to write a new script, not telling anyone “because everyone would think I was out of my mind.” He showed it to his longtime producer, Eric Watson, who felt the movie was more poetic and could be filmed for $30 million. Amazingly, Warners and co-financiers Regency Enterprises agreed, and “The Fountain” was back in business.
“Even at points when everyone else was ready to let it go, he showed some pretty remarkable reserves of will and resiliency,” said Ari Handel, a college friend of Aronofsky’s (from Harvard) who applied his neurobiology expertise in collaborating on the “Fountain” story. “That surprised me.”
Aronofsky had been wowed by Hugh Jackman in the Broadway musical “The Boy from Oz” and enlisted the Australian actor shortly thereafter. As for the female lead (who was Cate Blanchett in the first version), well, the director had been living with a talented actress for a few years, but he was wary of mixing his professional and personal lives.
“But when I started to look at the field of actors that were available and wanted to do it, she was definitely the most interesting choice,” he said, crediting Jackman with pushing him to cast Weisz, who would win a best supporting actress Oscar for last year’s “The Constant Gardener.”
The production was set up in Montreal on less elaborate sets than in Australia; only 20 of the original Mayans traveled up for the shoot. Aronofsky and Weisz tried to “be professional” by living in separate apartments.
“I figured basically when I come home from set, I just pass out, and I’d be a terrible, terrible partner for anyone that wants, like, emotional support,” he said. “So basically we’d work during the week and have a great time, and then on weekends we’d try to have a normal life where we’d end up fighting or arguing.”
“I would say it was pretty romantic,” Weisz said. “We’d work during the week. Meet up on Saturdays. Squabble for an hour and have a good time.”
And they’re still together, parents even. “We fell much more in love,” she said.
“We survived it,” he said. “It’s a very difficult thing, and I don’t recommend it for people to do at home.”
The production’s high point came just before Christmas break in 2004. “I asked the editor to cut together a reel of some of the best shots, and we would play it at the Christmas party,” Aronofsky said. “And at the screening, I remember being just overwhelmed with tremendous amounts of emotion watching it with the crew just because of all the years I had waited trying to finally shoot something. It was finally there. For me it was like, wow, `The Fountain’ actually exists. It’s alive. They can’t stop us anymore.”
As of early May, “The Fountain” had received several positive Internet reviews and one brutal one from test-screening viewers. The movie also had been denied a competition slot at the Cannes Film Festival. Instead it would premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September.
Aronofsky said he wasn’t concerned about it receiving a mixed reception, noting that “Requiem,” a merciless depiction of drug addiction, initially divided critics and audiences. “When that film came out, I got slammed by a lot of people,” he said. “[Now] people like it.”
Cut to mid-October: Aronofsky was in Chicago to show “The Fountain” at the Chicago International Film Festival and to collect the festival’s “Emerging Visionary” award; he received a rock star’s welcome when he took the stage. In the meantime he had enjoyed the resultant “roller coaster ride” of becoming a father. His movie had experienced some ups and downs as well.
“The Fountain” did premiere in Venice where, Aronofsky said, it received a 10-minute standing ovation at the public screening. But Leslie Felperin’s bruising review in Variety claimed the movie was “greeted by booing at its first press unspooling”–a point that was widely reported.
Aronofsky’s in a sticky situation because he doesn’t want to strike a defensive stance, but he said someone who was at the Venice press screening informed him that (1) they weren’t booing but whistling (same intent, different sound), (2) just as many people applauded, and (3) people kept arguing about the movie outside the theater.
“You could say it splits audiences, and to me that’s fine,” he said. “‘Cause I’m used to it.”
The Hollywood Reporter also ripped the movie while others, such as Hollywood Elsewhere online columnist Jeffrey Wells, waxed rhapsodic about its trippy visuals and emotional core. “The Fountain” was one of the most anticipated releases on fan sites such as Ain’t It Cool News, whose founder, Harry Knowles, has seen it three times.
“I love it,” Knowles said. “To me it’s a film you have to give yourself over to because it’s such an intimate, personal story and very light on dialogue and explanations.”
Despite his history Aronofsky admitted to some surprise over the movie’s reception, which would include all-over-the-map reviews upon its opening. “I never thought that `The Fountain’ would be as divisive as it is, and I’m still trying to figure out why,” he said. “I understand why `Requiem’ was divisive. It was a punk movie. But `The Fountain’ to me just had really good intentions.”
It’s also enigmatic, mixes seemingly incompatible genres, takes its time to assemble its puzzle pieces (in keeping with most science-fiction works), isn’t touchy-feely with its characters and asks viewers to confront their feelings about death. It’s less entertainment than art.
Otherwise, it’s an easy sell.
But Aronofsky can’t worry about such matters — because finally he can say this:
“You know what? It’s the film I wanted to make.”
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mcaro@tribune.com
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Aronofsky at work
– 1998. Aronofsky’s hallucinogenic, low-budget feature-film debut, “Pi,” premieres at the Sundance Film Festival, where he wins the Directing Award and garners a distribution deal.
– 2000. Aronofsky ups the ante by plunging viewers into the depths of drug addiction with his tough adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s “Requiem for a Dream.”
– August 2002. After two taxing years of development, Aronofsky’s third and most ambitious film, “The Fountain,” is set to begin filming in Australia when star Brad Pitt — with the crew already assembled and working on the set — abruptly pulls out. The production shuts down.
– Late 2004. Aronofsky finally gets back behind the camera to film a scaled-down version of “The Fountain,” starring his live-in girlfriend, Rachel Weisz (above), and Hugh Jackman.
– 2006. Weisz wins a best supporting actress Oscar for “The Constant Gardener” in March. Aronofsky and Weisz become parents in May. “The Fountain” is born Nov. 22.
