With a standing ovation after their second screening and
industry electricity surrounding this metaphysical portrait of
man¡¯s nature and numerology, "Pi" is one of the more talked
about films in this year¡¯s Sundance dramatic competition. Inspired by the Japanese surreal, sci-fi
film ¡°Tetsuo¡± and influenced by Rod Serling¡¯s ¡°Twilight Zone¡±
and Frank Miller¡¯s comic book ¡°Sin City,¡± writer-director
Aronofsky, a Harvard and then AFI grad, came to Sundance two
years ago ¡°very lost,¡± but now returns with this visually
enticing, paranoiac flick.
More than just a constant 3.14 to find the circumference of
a circle, "pi" is a cinematic experience that follows
Maximillian Cohen, a repressed, young mathematician, searching
for a numerical pattern in the chaos of the stock market. With
¡°offers on the table,¡± Aronofsky is confident that the film
will be distributed, ¡°it's going to be a company that wants to
do business with me. It's going to be a company that makes
films. I'm ready to go.¡± He assures me, ¡°We'll get
theatrical.¡± With Sundance more than half-way through, we¡¯ll
likely see very soon.
Darren Aronofsky: The idea behind ¡°pi¡± was to make a
fully subjective movie -- meaning never to cut away to the bad
guys going "We're going to control the stock market" so we
made up all these bogus rules, me and the D.P., Matty
Libatique, so we can only shoot over Sean's shoulder, so that
we are in Sean's story. We can shoot the other actors almost
P.O.V., almost straight-on, but Sean was almost always shot in
profile, so he was more of an objective and the audience was
seeing his point of view more subjectively. That was the
intent, at least, we tried to stick to that from the music to
the lighting. . . The one thing we got out of the American
Film Institute was the Art of the Story. I had a great teacher
there Stuart Rosenberg, who did "Cool Hand Luke" and some of
the original Twilight Zones. And Rod Serling is clearly the
patron saint of the movie. So, the Art of the Story, was
basically a shot doesn't mean shit unless it's inspired by the
story. Because we were trying to be subjective, every little
gimmick we did we tried to have a reason for.
indieWIRE: But the themes you
are dealing with are not exactly cinematic. You take certain
philosophical, epistemological questions in this movie and I
would think it would have been a hard sell, but it seems to
have been successful.
Aronofsky: I think we tried to visualize it as much
as possible and trying to not make it esoteric. People seem to
be responding that they get it. People who hate math are like,
"it's not a math movie, it's a mystical movie." It's pop math,
really, everyone bought "Chaos," that chaos book that everyone
first the first three pages and then it became a doorstop or
something. That's what the film is. It's like the first three
pages of those cool math books.
Sean Gullette: It is also a character piece. There's
layers. There's the Kabbahl layer, there's the number theory
layer, there's the mysticism layer, but beneath all that,
there's a layer of the lonely, alienated character. . .
Aronofsky: The mad scientist, the Faust story. . .
Gullette: There's the knowledge layer too. But I
think the bottom most layer there is a real emotional
character -- a lonely guy who thinks if he discovers this,
it'll fix everything that's wrong with his sad life.
iW: There's also the
engaging visual element. Even if you don't follow the theory
or you don't get into the character, you are responding
viscerally to that black and white photography.
Aronofsky: Matty was brave enough to take on
Reversal film, which many of us shot in film school, and its
black and white Reversal, extremely hard film stock to expose.
We didn't want it to end up looking like "Clerks" and be all
gray. We wanted it to be black or white. We were inspired by
"Sin City" by Frank Miller -- he just does white scratches
into black ink. Matty was a master of exposure. . . I can't
tell you, we did three hundred feet of test. That's all we
could afford. Three hundred feet of 16mm test, on a Bolex,
which is absurd. We shot most of it on an Aaton. But then,
Matty just nailed it, there was some reshooting, but I'd say
90% of his exposures were nailed, which is amazed. Like on
paper, he's shooting newspaper on Reversal and to get the
black black and the white white, I mean, if it's off half a
stop, it's unusable.
iW: Did you do a lot
of post-production sound?
Aronofsky: Tremendous amount. I think a lot of
independent films fail because of bad sound. Finally, that's
getting around. Because if you don¡¯t spend the money on sound,
even if it's a great movie, there's something missing, there's
this weird claustrophobia and I don't think the audience knows
what it is, but there's something wrong. . .
iW: Well, you can't
hear.
Aronofsky: We were very, very detailed. We knew we
were going to have this really abstract imagery and the only
way to get the audience in was really layering sounds. We had
this incredible composer, Clint Mansell, from this band called
Pop Will Eat Itself and they split up, he has been around,
hibernating creative energy just building, and it just burst
on the screen for us. He wrote 70 minutes of original music
for us. The rest of the soundtrack was filled out by a Who's
Who of electronic music from Orbital to Electric Sky Church.
And the sound design was done by this guy named Brian Emrich,
who is a bassist for Fetus and Brian is good friends with
Clint, so they were able to collaborate on those headache
scenes, exchanging sounds, so the landscapes, sound design and
the score could totally intertwine.
iW: It's not an easy
film. It's a bold, brave film. Lot of people are still making
cliche, formula stuff. . .
Aronofsky: The great thing about Sundance is that I
came here two years ago. Very lost. I had been trying to set
up a film in New York for a long time. It's just too big for
me. You can imagine what ¡°pi¡± looked like on paper. I came to
Sundance and I really saw the films they were praising were
really great films made by directors who were really doing
their films. Here are these bad-ass people who went out, made
out their own projects and Sundance is praising them, and you
know what, if you go out, you do what you want to do, if
you're not a copycat and you just do it, you'll get
recognized. That's the only way to do it well.
iW: You had a lot of
producers on your film, didn't you?
Aronofsky: That's the only way to get it done. A
film made for $60,000, the only way you get it done is with a
tremendous amount of favors. Every single filmmaker on the
film from the P.A. to me to Sean to the producer to the first
A.C. are all equal profit sharers in the film. There¡¯s a pool
of 50% of the film which all of us share equally. That¡¯s the
way to do it. That¡¯s how we got their passion.
Gullette: It is the way to do it and that fucking
Republican Vinny Gallo (who also has a nice ass) was saying,
"Oh, you hippie, commie, pinko, faggots, oh, you¡¯re always
talking about making your films as a labor of love and
everybody¡¯s working for free and all so gay and left." I don¡¯t
want to dispute that, but if you¡¯re not already a movie star,
it¡¯s an important business model that the people who are
working on the film think it¡¯s their film. Period.
From www.indiewire.com