Darren Aronofsky has been celebrated at the 79th edition of Locarno Film Festival with the Pardo d’Onore, recognizing a career willing to risk.
Aronofsky gave a talk in Locarno reflecting on his career. His career began because he failed to enter a university sculpture class. His first feature acquired its visual identity because he was broke. Several of his most enduring films were considered commercially disastrous or nearly impossible to finance.
The lesson running through his conversation was not that struggle automatically produces great art. It was that filmmakers must discover what a limitation can offer, protect the human presence inside the frame and eventually release the work from their own control.
Aronofsky did not grow up inside the film industry. His parents were public-school teachers in Brooklyn, and his childhood relationship with cinema was much like that of other children shaped by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
The decisive discovery came at university, when an art class taught him how a three-dimensional world could be translated into two dimensions. Rejected from sculpture but accepted into filmmaking, he entered an editing room and found the first activity more compelling than his friends or girlfriend. “You could accelerate things or change the pace of reality,” he said. “There was a lot of power to it.”
Editing still meant cutting physical film with razor blades and tape, then carrying the result to a projector. The immediate transformation between work and image became addictive.
“It was definitely the first time I felt excitement and passion,” he said.
After film school, Sundance gave him a model for an independent career. Watching films such as Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, Aronofsky realized that a story could be intensely personal, small and unusual and still find an audience.
His own proposed feature about growing up in Coney Island required approximately $2 million, an impossible amount for an unknown filmmaker. So he reduced the problem until it became achievable. For Pi, Aronofsky and his collaborators wrote to everyone they knew and asked for $100.
“I could have invented Kickstarter,” he joked, “but instead I became a film director.”
They raised roughly $20,000. The film’s stark black-and-white design, now inseparable from its paranoid energy, arose partly from an inability to control the palette of a color production. Aronofsky chose high-contrast reversal stock that would immediately impose a consistent visual world.
“It would look like I was brilliant,” he said, “but actually it was just because I was broke.”
The decision created new difficulties. Only one American laboratory still processed the stock, and Aronofsky did not see the first footage until two weeks into a three-week shoot. When the images arrived, some exposures looked wrong. He was terrified that the film had been ruined. Once assembled, however, those apparent mistakes intensified its unstable style.
“Sometimes you can’t really see it until you keep working on it,” he said. The success of Pi could have served as a calling card for a safer genre project. Instead, Aronofsky moved directly to Requiem for a Dream, a film even more disturbing and formally aggressive. He compared the decision to winning a hand at a gambling table and leaving the chips in play.
The attraction was not simply a story about illegal drugs. Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel placed the addiction of young people beside the desires of an older woman consumed by food, television and the dream of becoming visible again.
“It was more about the way addiction shows up in food and also in desire and dreams,” Aronofsky said. “I always thought that counterpoint was so beautiful.”
That search for emotional and formal intensity continued with The Fountain, although its origins were unexpectedly personal. Around the age of 30, Aronofsky became newly conscious of mortality, just as both his parents were diagnosed with cancer. What began as a potentially commercial search for eternal life became, in his words, “a love poem to death.”
The film took years to complete and failed commercially upon release. Aronofsky believes it was presented through the wrong institutional framework. A major studio treated it as a broadly accessible production when it required a specialized distributor prepared to protect its strangeness. Its initial reception placed him in what filmmakers call “movie jail.”
Yet The Fountain produced the most powerful audience response he has ever received. Years later, while accompanying his parents to a New York cancer institute, Aronofsky met a terminally ill man in a wheelchair with his wife and twin daughters. The man told him that the film had given him “permission” and guidance on how to die. “It was super intense,” Aronofsky recalled.
The encounter demonstrated the distance that can exist between a film’s market performance and its private life inside an audience. A commercial disappointment can still become essential to the person who finds it at the necessary moment.
After The Fountain, few people wanted to finance The Wrestler. The industry regarded professional wrestling as ridiculous, while Mickey Rourke’s troubled career reduced rather than increased the project’s value.
Aronofsky nevertheless saw an art form to which grown men had devoted their bodies and lives, and he believed Rourke was the only actor capable of carrying it. When Nicolas Cage briefly became attached, the film was immediately financeable. But a star of that scale also introduced a larger support structure and a more expensive production. Aronofsky ultimately returned to Rourke and accepted a smaller budget. “It’s impossible to think of The Wrestler without Mickey,” he said.
Rourke regarded the director as a kind of medicine, unpleasant to take but ultimately good for him. Aronofsky saw beneath the actor’s difficult reputation. When they first met in Miami, Rourke was sleeping on friends’ couches and had almost no money. After a stranger asked for change, he handed the man $50.“He has the greatest heart in the world,” Aronofsky said. “He is definitely, at times, a boy caught in a man’s body, but he has a beautiful soul.”
Black Swan took a decade to assemble. Aronofsky combined his interest in Dostoevsky’s The Double, an abandoned screenplay about an understudy and the ballet world that had shaped his sister’s childhood. The decisive connection arrived when he attended Swan Lake and recognized that its white and black swans already contained a doppelgänger narrative.
Natalie Portman had been part of the conversation from the beginning. “I had been kind of doing my own dance with Natalie Portman for 10 years on this project,” he said.
Even after the success of The Wrestler, financing remained difficult. One studio summarized the perceived problem bluntly: Horror audiences did not like ballet, and ballet audiences did not like horror. The incompatibility became the source of the film’s identity.
Across these projects, Aronofsky rejects the idea of carrying one recognizable visual style from film to film. “Every movie is its own movie,” he said. “The job of the filmmakers is to figure out what the themes are and what the story is about. Then you try to create a visual language that reflects that.”
The handheld photography of The Wrestler emerged from limited resources and the idea of filming Rourke almost as a documentary subject. Aronofsky initially imagined Black Swan through elegant cranes and dollies, but the result felt predictable. Adapting the handheld approach allowed the camera to move with Portman and effectively dance alongside her, even though Aronofsky feared that such documentary immediacy might destroy the isolation necessary for horror.
Style, however, must never overpower the person in front of the camera. Aronofsky traced that lesson to childhood, when he attempted to light one of his sister’s ballet performances with a flashlight. The beam illuminated only a small portion of her body, prompting his frustrated father to turn on the room lights. “Don’t get in the way of the talent in front of you,” Aronofsky said. “You can use the camera to paint, but when the performance is really in front of you, make sure you’re right there.”
The same tension between design and instinct shaped mother!, which Aronofsky wrote in only five days after years of making films through arduous revision. He wanted to know whether he could become so full of an emotion that a screenplay would simply pour out.
The production continued developing the script, but excessive refinement threatened to destroy its dream logic. Aronofsky’s religious imagery operates similarly. He is less interested in proving that sacred stories happened than in treating them as foundational myths.
“When you get into fighting over what is truth, you get into war,” he said.
Like Greek mythology, biblical narratives remain useful because their symbols can be reapplied to contemporary experience. Noah turned a few paragraphs of scripture into a debate over whether humanity deserves to survive. mother! used biblical structure to compress the history of the planet into the experience of a house and a relationship. Neither film offers religion as an easy answer. Myth provides a shared language through which the films can pose questions about violence, creation and humanity’s treatment of its home.
His latest film, Caught Stealing, moves toward a lighter and more openly entertaining register. Aronofsky said he wanted to make something capable of bringing people together at a moment of intense social division.
“One of the powers of film is that it can bring people together,” he said. “I also wanted to give people a fun experience at the cinema.”
At the end of the masterclass, Aronofsky returned to the impossibility of perfection. Film is always shaped by limited time, money and control. The director’s task is to push as far as possible within those boundaries, then recognize when continued intervention will no longer improve the work.
“At a certain point, you have to abandon your movie,” he said. “You have to get it out into the world and give it away. Then it isn’t yours anymore. I spent a lot of time in my life thinking about mistakes,” Aronofsky said. “As you get more mature, you’re able to just do your work, do it as well as you can, and then let it be.”
Image courtesy of Locarno Film Festival/Ti-Press.