Darren Aronofsky Is A Master Of Sustaining Intensity, How The ‘Caught Stealing’ Director Keeps His Perspective Fresh #shorts

Interview with Darren Aronofsky

Transcript

00:00You are so good at creating tension and then sustaining intensity in your movies.

00:05But I'm curious because I edit a lot of video.

00:07And so do you ever have any trouble maintaining an objective perspective with like the tension

00:13and like building that?

00:15That's the hardest job.

00:16Yeah.

00:16You got to sort of be able to like step back and try to like look at things as if you've

00:23never seen them before, which of course is impossible because you've seen a million times.

00:26So you kind of, it's a weird kind of muscle that you practice of like, is this really

00:30working or not?

00:31So it's hard to know what level of intensity to get up to and when you lose the audience

00:38and when, you know, but I think it's just about when audiences are like kind of feeling and

00:45when they're not feeling, they're asking questions.

00:47But the questions that they're asking are questions that the character is asking.

00:52So I think it's, it's following the truth of the character.

00:55And in this case, luckily we have a tour guide, Austin Butler playing Hank Thompson in Caught

01:00Stealing.

01:00And you are with Austin hopefully the whole time.

01:03So for me, I just, I knew I just had to string the pearls of his performance together so that

01:08the audience is just following along and kind of in his head.

01:11And then if I did that, whatever madness was going on around him, it would make sense.

01:16Did you ever get like numb to it?

01:18Where you have to kind of like pull in somebody else to be like, hey.

01:21No, I mean, there'll be times when we'll, we'll, we'll call in a more seat, like a producer.

01:26Sometimes we'll just call in an assistant and be like, what do you think?

01:28Is this too much?

01:29Is this too little?

01:30Sure.

01:31I mean, you always want little feedback and then you kind of, when they give the answer,

01:34you see how you feel.

01:36And then like on this movie, I was very open to test screening it because it's kind of inspired

01:41by Charlie Chaplin who used to tour with his movies just to see what was landing, what was

01:46working and I definitely learned a lot from that in a film like this, which is interactive

01:51with an audience.

01:52This is meant to play with a live audience because you do get like a lot of, and laughs

01:58and things like that.

01:59And so that's kind of fun.