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For a guy with only two features on his resume, Darren Aronosfky has built up quite a cult following over the past decade. With the zero-budget feature Pi, a hit that prefigured the DIY filmmaking revolution, and the Oscar-nominated junkie drama Requiem for a Dream, the Brooklyn-born Aronofsky leapt to the forefront of America's vanguard directors. Along the way, he briefly dallied with a potential Batman remake, as well as several other high-profile features. Now he's released his first studio picture, the genre-hopping, time-traveling romance The Fountain. It stars Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as literally star-crossed lovers whose passion for each other prompts a search for the Tree of Life — the mythical Fountain of Youth — in three different time periods: Latin America during the time of the Conquistadors; the present; and a twenty-sixth-century outer-space journey that looks like no other space journey ever committed to film. Elaborately conceived, profoundly heartfelt and nearly five years in the making, The Fountain is a deeply ambitious work, a full measure of its director's ability to realize entire worlds. Nerve caught up with Aronofsky in New York. — Bilge Ebiri

Is it true that The Fountain was partly inspired by David Bowie's song "Space Oddity"?
Absolutely. Think about it. "Here am I sitting in a tin can. . . " It's not quite a tin can in the sci-fi episode. It's a twenty-sixth-century version of a tin can. "I think my spaceship knows which way to go. . . Tell me wife I love her." There are a lot of correlations.

The Fountain has been speculated about extensively during its half-decade of production. Does it feel strange that so many people know about everything you went through to make it?

promotion

Absolutely. There used to be something beautiful about the way you could maintain a sort of secrecy over a film. Today, with everybody having a film fetish, it's hard to do — hard to have a film be just discovered. Now, everyone gets as much information as they can about the film before they walk in. I made The Fountain to be a surprise for people. There's a cut that occurs about ten minutes into the film, where we suddenly go from fifteenth-century Spain to twenty-sixth-century outer space — I wanted people to be like, "Oh wow." But I don't think there's any way to get around it. I'm excited for the person who comes into the theater, hasn't brought anything, and is blown away. When Terry Gilliam's Brazil came out, I was about sixteen and I didn't know anything about it. I remember going into the theater, asking, "Why are we seeing this movie called Brazil, what is it?" And then suddenly, we see that tracking shot of that whole passel of computers, which just keeps going and going. And I decided maybe I should shut the hell up and watch the movie. I really hope there'll be some sixteen-year-old kid who just walks into The Fountain and thinks, "Oh shit!"

That cut you mention actually made me think of the cut from the bone to the spaceship in Kubrick's 2001. Was that the vibe you were going for?
2001 is an influence on all filmmakers. It's always an inspiration, and obviously we were conscious of that. But that was not the main influence on us wanting to mix sci-fi, historical pictures, and romance. That came from wanting to do something with the science fiction genre that hadn't been done before.

While making this film, you lost two stars [Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett] and had to slash your budget. How did that change your concept?
The old conception of the film is captured forever as the graphic novel that we released through Vertigo Comics. That shows you where the story is different, and you can see, it really hasn't changed that much. The part that changed wasn't the movie itself but how to execute the movie — how to bring it to life. It was the first time my collaborators and I were really playing the studio game. The film was conceived as a studio picture. But we didn't know what we were doing; we had to learn that whole process. When we had to change things around, we were able to figure out how to make it more streamlined and pure. Having an extra couple of years in pre-production allowed us to figure out what the core story was — just what it was exactly we wanted to tell. And, of course, how to tell it in a way that was financially smarter as well.

I was surprised to hear that you initially resisted casting [Aronofsky's fiancée] Rachel Weisz in the film. The whole film feels like a love song to her.
Well, for starters, the script and the film existed in a pretty strong form before she ended up with me. But life and art do end up coming together in a strange way. I became conscious of these connections after the film was done, when I looked at it and started to think, "Uh oh, people are gonna read things into this." That said, I would have shot any actress as beautifully as we shot Rachel — although Rachel is pretty easy to shoot well.

I was also surprised by how consistent The Fountain seemed to be with your other films. All your characters seem to exist in these obsessive loops — they do the same things over and over again, in different ways, rather than progressing in conventional narrative ways.
Some writers I've talked to say they don't see any connections between my films, but I personally think there are a lot. There's certainly nothing conscious about it — that's just the way it happens for me. I write my characters the way I think they would act, and they come out in this pretty distinct way. I think all my films have something pretty simple at their heart.

It's amazing how people look at The Fountain as this very complicated picture, even though it's ultimately about something very basic — the importance of appreciating the limited time we have in this life. Is it difficult trying to maintain the very simple idea at the core of this story when you've built up so much complexity and so many metaphysical ideas around it?
I think that initial simple idea is not enough for a picture. I felt that it was a very earnest idea, and I dealt with it by making the film more of a puzzle. Part of the pleasure that I want people to have while watching The Fountain is the same feeling you have when you work out a puzzle: it slowly clicks into place. Like a mystery, but in this case the mystery is how the entire structure of the film holds together. I thought that would be a different experience for moviegoers. On the one hand, they can get the emotional love story that's at the core of the film. At the same time, they can experience this meta level on which the film also works, where its structure becomes part of its story.

Although it's being billed as a love story — and it is a love story — the three stories in the film all seem to focus on different kinds of love. Only the story set in the present day seems to be focused on romantic love specifically. The story of the Conquistador and his Queen feels more like a kind of platonic devotion.
I think that's very accurate. Remember, in the structure of the film, the character of the Queen is actually scripted by Izzy [the character Rachel Weisz plays in the present-day storyline], in that this story is found in the book she gives Tom. Izzy consciously writes herself as someone who assumes responsibility for the conquistador's actions, and by extension for her husband the scientist's actions. Which is accurate: when she first got sick, I'm sure that she was very much behind her husband's deciding to try and find a cure for her. If you had found out you were dying, and if your husband could maybe potentially do something to help you. . . I don't think anyone would have stopped him.

At the same time, while the film sets up Hugh Jackman's character's search for eternal life to be a very noble, romantic quest — I was impressed with the dark, almost comically ironic ending with the Conquistador.
You could see the three Toms as correlating to parts of the human psyche — the Conquistador is the id, the scientist is the ego, the space traveler is the superego. There are very heroic elements to the Conquistador, but I also see him very much as the id. And that's how the id goes out.


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