Darren Aronofsky and I begin by admiring each other’s shirts. Mine has a quote from Barry Lyndon on it. (Yeah, I’m insufferable.) His has maps of New York and illustrations of historic landmarks.
I’m glad to see Aronofsky is on brand. Caught Stealing, the latest from the director of classics such as Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, is set around the Lower East Side of the city in the late 1990s. Reading up afterwards, I’m reminded that was the year Aronofsky, son of hard-working Jewish schoolteachers from Brooklyn, made his feature debut with the elliptical, head-stretching Pi.
Coincidence? Or was he mourning his last year as a civilian?
“We put it into the landscape,” he says. “There’s a bunch of Pis. Because that’s how we sold the movie. The film Pi came out in June 1998 at the Angelika. And this film is set in September 1998. So in different places we have Pi stickers. And my production designer would always surprise me. ‘Did you see it?’ And I’d be, like, ‘What?’ And he’d say, ‘the Pi!’ It was a nice little shout-out.”
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So Darren Aronofsky exists in this universe?
“I exist in the universe as a background character. I do think that Hank Thompson would have gone to see Pi on a date. Totally!”
Based on a novel by Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as Hank, once a promising baseball player, now a barman in the East Village. When his next-door neighbour – Matt Smith with a Mohawk – goes back to Blighty for a spell, Hank gets drawn into a mess of violent intrigue that involves an injured cat, murderous Orthodox Jews and a lock-up full of cash. It is set in 1998. It also feels like a film that might have emerged then – a little bit of Tarantino, a little bit of the Coens.
I feel this is a tribute to the last days in which that part of downtown New York retained a genuine Bohemian quality. Before the hedge-fund managers moved in. Does Aronofsky agree?
“I don’t: I think it’s still there,” he says. “I think New York’s great. I think it’s still great. And I think the East Village is great. The East Village is very interesting, because it sort of fights gentrification. I think partly because NYU” – New York University – “is so entrenched there. But also because they’re all tenements. There is no doorman.”
Aronofsky grew up in the coastal part of South Brooklyn that you got a sense of in Sean Baker’s Anora. There wasn’t an enormous amount of money about, but he worked hard and got himself to Harvard, where he studied social anthropology. Given that educational background – and his ability to drop urbane references – I assume he could have been an academic. I can see him wearing a corduroy jacket in some senior common room.
“No, no. I wasn’t a good student,” he says. “I was a good student in high school. But when I got to college I was a B-minus type of student. The only time I ever got an A in college was in film-making. I would rather be in the edit room than anywhere else. Just sitting there with the old slicing machine.
“I had a roommate who was into the arts. I was a public-school kid of public-school-teacher parents who got into Harvard. I was terrified to tell them I was taking arts classes.”
He took a few “elective classes” in cinema and rapidly became hooked. I don’t imagine that is what his parents expected.
“It was unbelievable that they supported me all the way through that, making $20,000 a year as schoolteachers,” he says. “They made nothing, and they were able to support me and my sister through college. They really did a great job.”
He honoured that trust by working hard and not taking no for an answer. The story behind Pi is now the stuff of cinematic legend. Aronofsky assembled the budget by collecting small donations from friends, relatives and any passerby interested in taking a punt. Everyone who contributed got a credit (and maybe a share of profits).
A complex psychological thriller that worked in references to complex mathematics and philosophy, Pi ended up winning the directing award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. It remains an inspiration to aspiring film-makers.
That funding concept now has a name, of course.
“Oh, my Kickstarter?” he says, chortling. “I should have made Kickstarter instead of making films. I would have been a billionaire. But it was not my idea. I had a producer on the film who said, ‘Hey, how about we send a letter out to everyone, asking for $100 each?’ There were a couple of people who, instead of $100, gave us $5,000. So eventually we were able to cobble together $20,000 and not that long of a list of credits, but it was just great. We thought we invented it.”
What followed was one of the more peculiar careers in American cinema. Aronofsky’s next movie, the deeply disturbing, heated Requiem for a Dream, starred Ellen Burstyn and Jennifer Connelly in a study of the way drug addiction dismantles the human brain.
The film ended up securing Burstyn an Oscar nomination and generating a lot of lesser copies, but, despite the acclaim for Pi, it was not an easy picture to get made.
“I think we had maybe $6 million for Requiem for a Dream,” he says. “But, two weeks before, the producer called and said, ‘I’m taking away $3 million.’ So suddenly the budget was half. I remember being in a bar on a first date. It was a blind date, and I just started crying. There wasn’t a second date. I just kind of broke down.”
[ Darren Aronofsky: ‘My ego finds its way into all the films’Opens in new window ]
The career has been hectic ever since. The Fountain, from 2006, was a $35 million fantasy epic – starring Rachel Weisz, then Aronofsky’s wife, and Hugh Jackman – that told a love story across an array of locations and periods. Reviews were mixed, as they say, and the box office was poor, but a cult eventually gathered around it.
“It’s meant a lot to a lot of people at this point,” says Aronofsky. “It just took a long time find its audience. It probably shouldn’t have been released by Warner Bros. It should have been released by Fox Searchlight or something at the time.”
Then what? He plucked Mickey Rourke from straight-to-video sludge and directed him to an Oscar nomination in the relatively conventional The Wrestler. Natalie Portman actually won an Academy Award for Black Swan, his singularly deranged ballet drama, in 2010.
Nobody expected him to cast Russell Crowe as the lead in Noah, a relatively straight telling of that biblical figure’s novel two-by-two solution to mass extinction. Crowe didn’t get a nomination, but Brendan Fraser won best actor for Aronofsky’s deeply puzzling The Whale in 2023.
Before that he went over the edge with the extreme, sexy, violent (fabulous, in my view) Mother! That surreal jamboree, in which Jennifer Lawrence welcomes existential chaos to her remote home, was one of those rare films to secure a rock-bottom “F” from punters voting on the CinemaScore market-research project.
It’s a puzzling list. I wonder if he sees a distinction between more eccentric films such as Requiem for a Dream or Mother! and mainstream entertainments such as The Wrestler or Caught Stealing.
“I don’t make that distinction,” he says. “I think the world makes the distinction. Because audiences decide how they’re going to react to something. With this film I definitely was playing within the genre lines much more strictly than I had before. I’ve always been a feathered fish with my movies. Is Mother! or Requiem or Black Swan a horror film? Or a thriller? What do you say? They don’t really fit. But, with this, it was, like, ‘We’re going to make a crime caper.’”
How do you create original content that lives as a movie experience? I think that’s what we’re trying to do with this film
Of course it matters how a film is sold and who is selling it. He said earlier that The Fountain might have done better if it had been with an in-studio art-house operation such as Fox Searchlight (now just Searchlight after Disney acquired most of the Fox empire). He believes that the awesome Mother! would also have done better with a smaller operation.
“It should have been an A24 movie, not a Paramount movie,” he says, referencing the trendiest indie of the age. “Because certain movies – when this was still possible – needed to build their audiences.”
He leans into the phrase “when this was still possible” to emphasise that something has gone wrong with the cinematic model. There was a time when a movie could start slowly and then gather audiences as the weeks passed. Now it is whipped out of cinemas if it so much as stumbles in its first week. To be honest, I thought that had already changed before Mother! emerged in 2017.
“I think it’s a very different landscape post-Covid,” says Aronofsky. “But what happened over Covid was the streaming war. And that’s really what killed cinema.”
Slow down there. We have moved from the difficulties of flogging eccentric movies to the death of cinema. Yes, the emphasis on “intellectual property” such as superhero franchises rather than on original stories (or on movie stars, for that matter) is disheartening. But we’re not quite at the apocalypse, are we?
“Well, ‘killed cinema’ is, of course, too apocalyptic,” he agrees. “Cinema is alive and movies are too. But it’s very, very difficult to release original movies into this landscape. If you look at last year, nine out of the 10 biggest movies were all IP related.
“So how do you create original content – that’s not showing up on streaming first – that lives as a movie experience? I think that’s what we’re trying to do with this film. We want people to have a good time at the theatre and, hopefully, invent a new a new character that people want to hang out with.”
So Hank Thompson could return? We are seeing the launch of the Hankiverse.
“The audience will decide if they want to see more of this character.”
It is clear he misses the cinema he and I grew up with.
“It’s bringing people into a dark room that are total strangers – and have all different types of political persuasions or ideas – and hoping they can come together and take a journey with a character for two hours.”
Preach, brother!
“The empathy machine is a real thing. Storytelling lets you escape your own mindset, your own phone, and take this trip for a while.”
Caught Stealing is on general release
