The film director Darren Aronofsky was honored last night as part of the New Museum’s annual Visionaries series, which presents artists from different mediums and interests in conversation. Joined by the writer Lynne Tillman, the Brooklyn-born Aronofsky was engaging and erudite, speaking about his entire body of work in front of a small, intimate audience. Tillman, in opening up the conversation, literally started at the beginning, with the opening passages from the Book of Genesis (alluding to the numerous biblical references in Aronofsky’s work) and from there explored his creative process, from his earliest inspirations in drawing and sculpture, the changing nature of his hometown of Brooklyn, and how all films are really about artists.
— Drawing class inspiration:“When I was a student, at a certain point I realized I wanted to go into visual arts, or as my parents called it, ‘arts and crafts’ [laughs]. When you’re paying for Harvard it’s a fair critique. But I started to go down that path and I had taken a drawing class sophomore year which was fantastic, it was a great drawing teacher named Will Ryman, and he changed the whole perception of how to look at the three-dimensional world and try to represent that two-dimensionally. It was incredibly exciting. The next year, there was a sculpture class I was interested in and there was a filmmaking class. I didn’t get into sculpture but I got into the film class. So that kind of chose my path.”
— On first meeting the writer Hubert Selby Jr., author of “Requiem for a Dream”:“His writing is so violent and so upsetting. When I first met him I actually cold-called him. I was a film student in Los Angeles, and the school said, ‘shoot some of your favorite authors’ short stories and turn them into short films.’ I called the WGA, got his number, and called him up, and that’s the type of guy he was. He said, ‘Come on over!’ He lived in Los Angeles at the time, and I was expecting a huge, massive guy with an ax [laughs]. He was so skinny; he was a beanpole wearing a pair of tighty-whities, that’s it. We hung out, and he handed me a poem he had just translated by Sun Tzu, and it just made no sense. I got out of there really quickly.”
— Film school vs. making a film:“I’m teaching now at NYU, and I was like, ‘How much do they charge you a year?’ It’s $57,000 a year to go to NYU grad school, which is how much ‘Pi’ cost. I was like, something’s weird about that.”
— Striving for perfection:“In filmmaking, the height of the art form is to have every element of the story and of the production pointing to the same idea and the same thematics. People like Kurosawa or Fellini are able to do that, or get really damn close, where every emotional choice is saying the same thematics that the entire film is.”
— Early days in Coney Island:“Growing up in Brooklyn back when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, and not the creature that it’s become now, there were two types of people — people who were going to stay in Brooklyn for the rest of their lives and people who wanted to get to the big city. I always wanted to get to the big city.”
— The influence of visual art:“When you have a project it helps a lot to see everything, how every artist has represented it. For ‘Noah,’ the production designer and me looked at every single representation of the arc in religious art, as well as any Old Testament art, from masters 2,000 years ago to Robert Crumb’s ‘Genesis’ book. It was great research. When we did ‘Black Swan’ we looked at all the Degas at the Met. Anything that’s connected to any of the films we’re checking out, any kind of images can help inspire and start a conversation. That’s what it’s about, just getting a spark of something that leads to something inside you that connects back to the story at hand.”
