- 4 months ago
Darren Aronofsky joins GQ as he revisits some of the most iconic films from his career so far: from the psychological drama The Whale led by Oscar-winning Brendan Fraser, to the 2010 horror film Black Swan starring Natalie Portman.Caught Stealing is exclusively in theaters August 29, 2025: https://caughtstealing.movie----------Director: Adam Lance GarciaDirector of Photography: Jack BelisleEditor: Louville MooreTalent: Darren AronofskyProducer: Camille RamosLine Producer: Jen SantosProduction Manager: James Pipitone; Elizabeth HymesTalent Booker: Meredith Judkins LeeAssistant Director: Dayna SchutzCamera Operator: Carlos AraujoGaffer: David DjacoGrip: Mar AlfonsoSound Mixer: Tyson DaiProduction Assistant: Onya Bosco; Ziyne AbdoPost Production Supervisor: Jess DunnSupervising Editor: Rob LombardiAssistant Editor: Justin Symonds
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00I think all limitations are necessary in filmmaking.
00:05There's kind of the magic triangle, I call it,
00:07which is how much creativity you have,
00:09how much money you have, and then time.
00:13And you kind of, within those boundaries,
00:16try to make choices so that you're pushing out on the edges of that triangle,
00:21but never breaking it.
00:27Requiem for a Dream.
00:30I always thought you were the most beautiful girl I've ever seen.
00:35Really?
00:41Ever since I first saw you.
00:44That's nice, Harry.
00:47What made me want to make Requiem for a Dream was Hubert Selby Jr.'s book.
00:51I remember reading the book, and from opening story, I could see it.
00:56And that's what was amazing about Selby's writing is it's so visual.
01:01Like, he's able to take such deep internal feelings and turn them into, like, scenes that you can actually shoot.
01:10It's just very cinematic writing.
01:12And Requiem is very much written like a movie.
01:17I mean, it's a very dark, messed up movie, but it has really good structure.
01:23So I got your brand new TV set.
01:25It's going to be delivered in a couple of days.
01:27It's from Macy's.
01:28Oh, Harry.
01:29There.
01:30Your father would be so happy if he could see what you're doing for your mother.
01:38See that, Seymour?
01:43You see how good your son is?
01:46He knows what it's like for his mother living all alone.
01:50There's so many with Ellen Burstyn.
01:52I had just never been around an actor like that before.
01:56I was new in my career.
01:58She was so experienced and such a master.
02:01She was constantly making choices that were unexpected and insightful and so deeply inhuman felt.
02:10She'd go into this, like, kind of trance state right before she would go.
02:14It was just, like, deep focus.
02:16And then suddenly something would be unleashed.
02:19And it was amazing to sit there and receive it.
02:22Caught stealing.
02:25I made a save tonight.
02:26O.D.
02:27That's incredible.
02:29I've got pushy of the journal and I'm not thinking clearly.
02:33Let's go back to your place and you can take advantage of my poor judgment.
02:36I depend on your poor judgment.
02:38It starts with research.
02:40Luckily, Mark Freeberg, my production designer, was also here in New York in the 90s, as was probably most of his crew.
02:46So it was, I think, fun for us to deep dive and remember and look at old photographs and probably video that was shot on VHS.
02:55Every film we try to do something different.
02:57We come up with a film grammar or a different approach.
03:00And that all has to do with what the story's about.
03:02You kind of assemble a team.
03:04You start working on it.
03:05You think about it.
03:06And you just try to do the best you can with all the limited amount of time you have.
03:11It's like, okay, how are we going to make this great?
03:13And then when you're there, you just try to capture as much of that universe as you can.
03:18You know, one of the best reference points for what Coney Island was like in the late 90s was footage from Requiem for a Dream.
03:26We have footage from on top of the Trump Tower building looking out over the whole Coney Island so you could sort of see what was around back then.
03:33You know, so I think it starts with just like research and you start to, and memories and everyone had a lot of memories about that time.
03:40I grew up near Coney Island and Coney Island is this kind of mystical place in a lot of ways.
03:45It's funny, most people think when all the people on the boats first came to America back in the 1890s, 1900, that the first light they saw was the Statue of Liberty.
03:56But in reality, it was like the 10,000 lights of Lunaland.
04:00It had more light bulbs than anywhere on the planet at one point, which you could imagine that people coming from a place where electricity was extremely rare suddenly to see like a horizon lit up.
04:10But growing up there in the 70s, 80s, 90s, it was dying and it was rotting and it was rusting and it was falling apart and there were lots of empty lots.
04:19But still the kind of storied history was just sizzling out of the ground so that every time I went, I was inspired to sort of capture it in different ways.
04:31So I was always trying to capture it.
04:32And then when I started making feature films, I knew I wanted to come back to it.
04:36It's interesting, Pi, which was released in 1998, there's a scene where Max goes back to Coney Island.
04:42And I realized after the fact, after I made the movie that in Caught Stealing, which was set in 1998, that not just going back physically to the same place, but emotionally where Hank Thompson, Austin Butler's character is, he's emotionally in the same place as where Max is.
05:00And the Coney Island serves the same type of turning point for the movies.
05:04Welcome to Narnia. Supposed to do the big split the day I left.
05:14How much is there?
05:16A wee bit over four million.
05:18Okay. All right. Okay. So will you call Rome?
05:21It's more complicated than that.
05:22I want to go home. I want to see my mom. I... Mom. Phone.
05:28You want to phone your mom?
05:29Yeah.
05:30Just don't use up my minutes.
05:31I think there was like a certain type of lawlessness and grit that to the streets, which the East Village still has for sure.
05:40I think it was like important to bring that, bring that kind of, I don't know, that punk, that punk smell up from the sewers.
05:50The Wrestler.
05:54You realize what's coming up?
05:56Huh?
05:57April 6th.
05:5820th anniversary of you and I atoller to God.
06:01Yeah. Hey.
06:03Long time ago.
06:05Time fucking flies, right?
06:06Here's what I'm thinking.
06:08Two words.
06:10Re-match.
06:11I have a couple of questions about Mickey Rourke, but with Randy specifically is if he gets to this point where he has two options.
06:17He can chase the dream that he had lost.
06:19Or get the girl.
06:20Or get the girl.
06:21And his daughter.
06:22What is it about self-destructive characters?
06:24It was something I noticed when I did the research.
06:27I knew there was a film set in the wrestling world that hadn't been told yet because no wrestling film had really been made.
06:36But there had been so many boxing movies.
06:38And I was like, why is it?
06:40And I think it's because people looked at wrestling as a joke.
06:43So I started to do research.
06:45And when I started to meet some of these older wrestlers, guys that I was a huge fan of when I was 13.
06:51And they were just all beaten up and just their lives had been just taking tough turns.
06:57First, I realized that it wasn't just all fake.
07:00Meaning, of course, the plotting might be fake, but the physical violence was real.
07:05I was really curious about what drove these guys.
07:09Why they were on the road late 50s, 60s, 70s.
07:13What was it?
07:14Clearly, there's other ways to make money.
07:16And I started to see that throughout.
07:18Like, I meet young people that were getting into it.
07:20They could see where their future was headed.
07:23Some people do certain sports, even though they know that it's going to mess them up.
07:27But there's like great financial awards or fame and stuff.
07:30It was very tricky to understand it.
07:32And so it was really, I was trying to explore that when I was looking into Randy the Ram.
07:38Who's next?
07:39Me.
07:40What'd you have?
07:41Good looking.
07:42Half a pound egg salad.
07:43Half a pound egg salad.
07:44Coming up.
07:47Here we go.
07:48Fresh?
07:49Fresh?
07:50Yeah.
07:51Fresh is monkey's breath, brother.
07:52Into the good stuff.
07:54Coming up.
07:55Down and out.
07:56Come on.
07:57I think he was excited, Mickey, by it.
07:59I think he was reluctant because he realized that he was going to have to hold the entire film.
08:04And it had been a very long time since he was the lead of a movie.
08:08And, of course, he had memories of how hard that was.
08:11And, well, he was reluctant a little bit because he was a boxer and he was a little bit of a snob towards wrestlers.
08:16Which is often the case because boxers are really getting in there and trying to knock each other out.
08:22And wrestlers aren't, that's not the same motivation.
08:24But, he slowly learned a lot of respect for wrestlers as he got to meet a bunch of them and learn about the art.
08:31It wasn't that much of a battle.
08:32The big battle was trying to get the money to make the movie with Mickey.
08:36No one in the world believed in him.
08:39No one.
08:40And, uh, it almost didn't come to pass.
08:44Because I knew the audience would be really curious to see what Mickey looks like.
08:48People hadn't seen him that much.
08:49Of course, there was a lot of gossip about what he looked like.
08:52So, I thought, like, hiding that for a while, it would make the audience lean in.
08:56But, Mickey's just an absolutely brilliant actor.
08:59But, a brilliant director that worked with him was actually my mentor.
09:03So, Stuart Rosenberg, who was my teacher, directed Mickey in Pope of Greenwich Village.
09:08And, he told a story about Mickey doing this scene with his back.
09:13And, how much an actor, a great actor, can perform with his back.
09:17So, that was floating in my head when I started shooting with Mickey.
09:21And, I think it was a game-time decision when we were shooting the opening of the film.
09:25Where I was like, you know what? Let's do something different here.
09:28Let's take a while to introduce him to the audience.
09:31Let's find the right moment.
09:32And, I realized the right moment was when he was alone in his van.
09:36And, there was nowhere else to hide.
09:38And, just a flashlight to light him.
09:40Because, it just felt like a great way to kind of open and reveal his humanity.
09:46The Whale.
09:47I want you to do some writing just for me.
09:53I hate writing essays.
09:55Just think about the poem for a while.
09:57Or, write something.
10:02Be honest.
10:03Tell me what you really think.
10:05You want me to write what I really think?
10:07I think the reason we were interested in Brendan Fraser was because my main collaborator, my main producer, Ari Handel, was a huge fan.
10:15In college, he had made a bet with our other roommate that Brendan Fraser would win an Oscar in the next 25 years over a case of beer.
10:23And, we made it, we made it happen in 24 years.
10:26How could you?
10:27I haven't been to the bathroom all day.
10:29I'm not ready to explode.
10:30You know, I had only seen Charlie on paper.
10:49I saw a play version of it early, when I first saw the play.
10:53It was really Brendan's role.
10:54I didn't really see it until he was in makeup and he was in front of me and he started to breathe life into it.
10:59And then it just became a dance after that.
11:02Mother.
11:03Mother.
11:04And dad.
11:05What is that?
11:06Careful.
11:07This is very, very delicate.
11:08It was a gift.
11:09A very special gift.
11:10Is it from you?
11:11Yeah.
11:12I would love to know how you approach directing an actor when they're playing an allegory.
11:15It's a good question.
11:16I would love to know how you approach directing an actor when they're playing an allegory.
11:20It's a good question.
11:33I think it's all grounded.
11:35I think the allegory stuff is there, but you have real human relationships.
11:40You know, the setup of that world is fine.
11:42It's a loving couple, newlywed couple, living in a home in the middle of nowhere.
11:47And she's building the house and he has writer's block.
11:51And you just treat it like it's reality.
11:54I can't believe you did all this work yourself.
11:57Why not?
11:58It's a lot.
11:59Well, we spend all our time here.
12:02I want to make a paradise.
12:04I think really we were pretty traditional to the stories in both the Old and the New Testament.
12:09That's all I needed.
12:10I had the idea for the story and the Bible is what gave me structure.
12:17Black Swan.
12:29When I met Natalie the first talk about Black Swan, it was more like,
12:33I knew I wanted to do something in the ballet world
12:35because my sister had been a ballerina in a serious way in my youth.
12:39And I knew nothing about ballet.
12:41And I knew there was a world there to discover.
12:44When you make a movie, you kind of get a doctorate and the subject matter you're covering.
12:48So I knew this was a good way to sort of kind of figure it out.
12:52And then when I talked to Natalie, we had some mutual friends.
12:56I found out she had taken ballet and had been serious about it as a young girl.
13:01And so that was intriguing because there was a connection.
13:04So I said, hey, would you want to do something in that world?
13:07And she was super excited.
13:08So we started, we did a couple of meetings.
13:10We went to see some rehearsals of some of the big ballet companies,
13:13but there really wasn't a script ready.
13:17And then it took the following, you say 2000.
13:21So it probably took 10 years to get a script together or eight years to get a script together.
13:25That made sense, which is a very, very long story.
13:29And I think as it evolved, Natalie was always in our head to play the lead.
13:52It was literally shot in a nightclub on a church in Manhattan with strobes
13:58and with the lighting, with the actors and with some extras.
14:02That was all done by this great artist named Ray Lewis,
14:06who was a friend of ours and was kind of a guy who worked in visual effects back then.
14:11And he went through that frame by frame and manipulated shots in lots of different ways.
14:16So it's an entire approach to a movie is like camera, sound, everything's working together
14:22to like make the audience kind of vibe with the character.
14:28You know, it was very subject to filmmaking.
14:31It would be done totally different in today's world, but that was kind of handmade.
14:37Hi.
14:38I was a freshman in school getting B minuses on my papers.
15:05My roommate in college was an animator and was just basically making these incredible things.
15:11And I was just fascinated by it.
15:13And so I took a drawing class.
15:15There was an amazing teacher, Will Reitman.
15:17And he kind of changed the way I could look at the world and think about representing it on paper.
15:22And that kind of sent me down the path of thinking about having a career in the kind of arts.
15:29He stopped caring.
15:35How could he stop when he was so close to seeing Pi for what it really is?
15:46How could you stop believing that there is a pattern?
15:49I guess Pi started with like being in New York and trying to make a feature and thinking about how to control the canvas.
15:58And the first thing I thought about is like, okay, let's find a actor that I could collaborate with.
16:03And that became Sean Gillette, who was a friend from college.
16:06And I was always interested in a character.
16:09For some reason, I thought calculus because I had no idea what it was.
16:12But like someone who was brilliant in mathematics in a way, I thought that was interesting.
16:17There was also like a famous story about these Russian guys who had built a supercomputer in their apartment on the Upper West Side to calculate Pi.
16:29And then I had a teacher in high school that was like a great teacher.
16:34And he did a class on the mystical elements of math.
16:38It was an elective.
16:39And for some reason, I took it.
16:41And there was just all these interesting like crazy Pythagorean stories about.
16:46I thought there was something there that was like taking mysticism with math, hard math and sort of finding a blend.
16:53So those all different elements came together and eventually created Pi.
16:58Noah.
17:01Men are going to be punished for what they've done to this world.
17:05There will be destruction.
17:07There will be tragedy.
17:10Our family has been chosen for a great task.
17:15We've been chosen to save the innocent.
17:20The innocent?
17:22The animals.
17:24Why are they innocent?
17:27Because they still live as they did in the garden.
17:30Those first few chapters of Genesis all the way through the Tower of Babel are like extremely abstract.
17:38And I think the normal laws of this universe were very different at that time.
17:47That's even in the Bible.
17:48The length of time people lived.
17:50And also there's just very little description about what's going on.
17:55We wanted to be incredibly truthful to gospel.
17:59Meaning we didn't want to contradict anything.
18:02But we wanted to kind of recognize that before the flood it was a very different planet.
18:10You know when they described Nephilim it's about these fallen angels that actually have sex with women and then they have an offspring.
18:19And so we were making a PG-13 film and that seemed like very hard to approach.
18:25So we went for a metaphor which was they were still fallen angels but they blended with the earth.
18:31And we used the earth.
18:32And the offspring are these creatures that come out of a blend of the earth and of the spirituality.
18:37And that's how we sort of kind of created these kind of creatures.
18:41They have the spirit of the angels stuck inside of them.
18:45But they are crusted with the kind of weights and the chains of earth because they are fallen angels.
18:50So we kind of tried to lean into the metaphor because it's so abstract the ideas.
18:58And how do you kind of visualize it and put it on film was the question.
19:02The fountain.
19:07It's like RC Soulet before
19:08the first one.
19:10It's like RCBR, Star Trek Brisco last piss in the sky.
19:17Road by LeBron, Sancti of Uber!
19:19No.
19:21You turn 30, it's an interesting moment because you never think you're gonna get old
19:29and then suddenly you're 30.
19:32And that's like the first number they stick on you that you go oh shit, it's happening cause you know,
19:35Because, you know, you're 20s, you're just in your 20s, you're doing fine, and then suddenly, like, wow.
19:39At the same time, I start to see people dying around me, so you start to, like, really kind of wake up to those types of things.
19:46And then I just, I thought that, you know, a search for the fountain of youth is, like, totally a big commercial idea.
19:53So I started to, like, think about how do we make something interesting.
19:56It just became a poem, I had to tell.
19:59And once I get my teeth stuck on something, I sort of have to keep biting.
20:24You know, I don't know if it really falls into sci-fi.
20:27It's weird.
20:28There are science fiction elements.
20:30You know, I've heard sci-fi romance, which I never thought I would be responsible for a romance movie.
20:35It's definitely not a disturbing one, yet they still say I make disturbing movies for some reason.
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