FILM

He might have made a mint and wowed the critics with ‘The Wrestler’, but if Darren Aronofsky was expecting an easy ride with his next project, he was in for a nasty shock. Robin Askew reports on the obstacles the director faced in getting ballet thriller ‘Black Swan’ onto the big screen. 

You've silenced the naysayers, revived a washed-up actor's career, bagged heaps of awards (including two Oscar nominations) and delighted the money men with a huge box office return on their modest investment. The world is now your lobster, as the saying goes. No more worries about raising finance ever again. That's how Darren Aronofsky must have felt in the wake of the commercial and critical success of 'The Wrestler', which re-introduced craggy Mickey Rourke to a delighted world. Needless to say, this was an erroneous assumption. 'Black Swan', Aronofsky's enjoyably OTT psychological thriller set in the ballet world, very nearly didn't reach the screen at all

"This was a really difficult film to make," he sighs. "After making a film about wrestling with Mickey Rourke, we thought it would get easier having Natalie Portman and Vincent Cassel and Mila Kunis and Winona Ryder. But it was very, very difficult. Raising the money was harder than raising the money on 'The Wrestler'. And two weeks in, the money fell apart. I don't know if my actors knew this, after training for months and months. But then we were very lucky and we quickly got Fox Searchlight to come in after a bit of hands and knees begging. But because we had so little money, every day was difficult. So it was 42 days of a huge hustle. Then, of course, there was no money left for post-production - and we have over 300 visual effects shots. Basically it was really, really hard until now. Now we’re here at this fancy hotel" - he laughs and gestures at the rather chintzy surroundings of his expensive Knightsbridge stopover - "and suddenly there's money!"

'Black Swan' stars Natalie Portman as a New York Ballerina locked into a bitter rivalry with newcomer Mila Kunis during rehearsals for a production of 'Swan Lake', discovering her dark side as she endeavours to inhabit the role of the White Swan's evil twin. There are plenty of serious themes here - sexual abuse, drugs, bullying, mental health issues - but while Aronofsky is happy to encourage superficially unlikely comparisons with 'The Wrestler' ("One's about the highest art and the other's about the lowest art - if you want to call wrestling an art - but they're both about performers who put their bodies before their health"), he resists any suggestion that the film has any important message to impart. "We were trying to do a movie version of the ballet Swan Lake," he says bluntly. "And we went back to the source material, which is about a maiden who's captured by an evil force and turned into a half-swan, half-human creature. Then we just tried to dramatise that as a movie. Connecting it to real mental health issues or real drug abuse issues or any of that was not really our intent."

Much has been written about the rigours of the rehearsal process and the injuries sustained by Kunis and Portman in their physically demanding roles, but simply persuading the ballet world to open up to the production was the first major challenge. "Usually when you make a movie, doors open. The ballet world really couldn't care. I think they're just very, very insular and self-involved."

Perhaps realising this statement might appear rather brutal on the page, he corrects himself: "You know, they're very, very focused. So it took a very long time. Slowly but surely we met a few dancers that were interested in sharing their stories and we did a lot of research. Eventually, choreographer Benjamin Millepied came on, and that gave us a stamp of approval because he's very well respected in the ballet world."

New York City Ballet star/choreographer Millepied also proved invaluable when it came to working out the dance sequences. "You couldn't really storyboard them because the camera was too fluid,” explains Aronofsky. “So first we would talk about which scenes of Swan Lake we wanted to do for story points. Then I would tell him what was happening in the story. It was interesting because he would turn that into movement. Usually when I work with actors, I tell them what the story is and I get to watch them turn it into emotion. We would eventually bring the video camera out and start moving with it - so it was almost a third dancing partner. Then when we got to the stage, it would get really complicated because there would be spotlights and other dancers and shadows and all these issues would come up. Our DP would have to work out how to make it feel as though the camera wasn't there."

It would, perhaps, have been easier to film all the hoofing action from the wings, like most ballet flicks, but "very early on, I knew that I wanted to get the camera on the stage with the dancers. I think when you're in the audience, dance is very effortless. These dancers train their entire lives and basically make all the effort disappear. And then when you go backstage, you suddenly see all the muscles and tendons and blood and sweat."

Ever since the film was premiered at last year's Venice Film Festival, critics have been poring over its influences as well as its content, citing everything from Polanski's 'Repulsion' to various Hitchcock flicks and, more obviously 'The Red Shoes'. Intriguingly, he denies only the 1948 Powell and Pressburger masterpiece. "I saw 'The Red Shoes' really late in the game. Maybe I'd heard of it, but I think we were pretty deep down the road when Scorsese did that restoration. I was actually blown away that the stories are kind of similar. But I think it's because they're both based in the ballet world and there are certain characters and certain themes that emerge. But there are a lot of references throughout. Of course, Polanski's work and Cronenberg's work - even the Dardennes, who were a big influence on 'The Wrestler'. That visual style kind of carried through into 'Black Swan'.”

 The film's distinctive grainy look was achieved by filming on 16mm rather than the usual 35mm. Then there are those 300-plus visual effects shots, many of them so subtle that you may not spot them. But how many of these were planned from the outset, and how many were slapped on later? "It was a mixture. The complicated ones that you notice, like the goosebumps and the tattoo moving on Mila's back - those are all things that are difficult to do unless you pre-plan them. There would be no way to improvise them on the budget we had. But we started to really play with things when we got into post-production. Because I shot in widescreen, I started to think about where the audiences eyes might be - that we could manipulate the other side of the screen in very gentle ways and actually add to the tension and paranoia of the movie. So there are very slight manipulations of lots of different things throughout the film. Probably most people won't notice them, but they will sort of feel them."

'BLACK SWAN' OPENED ON FRI 21 JAN. FOR REVIEW, CLICK HERE.
 

Copyright Robin Askew 2011 

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