Darren Aronofsky Interview, The Wrestler

MoviesOnline sat down with Darren Aronofsky to talk about his new film, “The Wrestler,” directed from an original screenplay by Robert Siegel. In a bracing comeback, Mickey Rourke stars as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a down but not out wrestler who is rallying back from the brink of obscurity as he attempts to reinvent himself while doing the only thing he knows how to do. The film also stars Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood.

“The Wrestler,” which garnered the coveted Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival, shatters the mold of the against-all-odds sports comeback story. At the film’s raw, tender heart is a man who is wrestling not only in the ring with his comic-book villain opponents, but with the damage that life has inflicted on his body and soul. The film unfolds against two starkly compelling landscapes. One is the sheer spectacle, visceral action and underground intensity of one of America’s most unusual and emblematic sports. The other is the haunting inner terrain of a man desperately seeking, in defiance of all his flaws, to matter.

Although it has been a major part of American culture for decades with its unlikely mix of comedy, pathos and raw reality, no one has ever made a serious film about professional wrestling. That is something Darren Aronofsky has wanted to change since he first started making movies. His first three films as a director, each acclaimed, took him in vastly divergent directions. His debut, “PI,” a thriller about a mathematician searching for a number that could change the world, won the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival and an Independent Spirit Award for Aronofsky’s inventive screenplay about the quest for knowledge, power and God. He next directed the searing, Oscar-nominated drama based on Hubert Selby’s novel, “Requiem for a Dream,” about four people whose lives are sent out of control by addiction; and followed this with the richly stylized, sci-fi fantasy “The Fountain,” an epic story of love and mortality spanning more than 1000 years.

Now, with “The Wrestler,” he makes a stark departure, with a gritty, direct, intensely moving drama. Although Aronofsky was never a diehard wrestling fan, he does remember going to see Hulk Hogan and Tony Atlas square off at Madison Square Garden as a kid – and, ever since, the compelling question of what it would be like to really live in that world has stuck with him.

“The idea of doing a movie about a wrestler has been floating around in my head for six or seven years,” explains Aronofsky. “I started to develop some of the ideas with producer Scott Franklin and discovered he was a bigger wrestling fan as a kid than I was and knew something about it. And the more we looked into that world, the more interesting it became. Then, I met this great writer Robert Siegel, who used to be editor of The Onion, and I told him about the idea and he just got it instantly. The three of us spent the next three years together developing the story into the movie it has become.”

Darren Aronofsky has directed one of the year’s best films and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his new movie, “The Wrestler”:

MoviesOnline: Can you talk about the visual style of the film and specifically why you chose to shoot Mickey Rourke from behind during the opening sequence?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: I don’t know. It just sort of came. The first time I kind of went in and I did a lot of preparation but I didn’t come to set with a shot list.  I just waited for the actors to create what they were going to do on set.  I really wanted to be open to what they were doing and then figure out how to photograph it.  If you’re doing naturalism, there’s really no way to walk backwards with an actor on their face because, first of all, to move a camera backwards that quick, it’s a pain in the butt, but also the actor has to sort of block it out because it’s right there.  So it’s much easier to go right behind him and this whole documentary approach just made sense at the beginning of the film.  You’re going to be with Mickey’s character for 100 minutes and I think people are curious about Mickey and what he looks like and I wanted to give it a slow introduction.  And the way he uses his physicality is so unique.  I mean, he’s such a full-body actor.  He’s not just a face, you know?  So I think that I wanted to emphasize that.

MoviesOnline: Why was this an important film for you to make?  What made you want to do this project?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: That’s always the hardest question because it’s not something you’re really conscious of. It’s something that you feel in your belly and you know if you make a film, you’ve got to live with these characters for 2 years and you’ve got to listen to many, many people say no to you. So you’ve got to feel it down there.  You never know why it happens.  It just sort of percolates up.

MoviesOnline: Did you have a particular interest in wrestling?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: No.  I mean, when I graduated film school in ‘93 or ‘94, I made a list of ideas for films.  And one of them was called “The Wrestler” and it came out of the observation that no one had ever taken a serious look at this yet.  It’s such a major phenomenon in the United States.  It has such a long history and it’s such a huge, popular sport.  And no one’s ever documented it.  I think that’s mostly because people hear it’s fake and they think it’s a joke.  But for me the whole line of what’s real and what’s fake is, you know, if you’re 250 pounds jumping off the top rope, no matter who you are, you’re going to feel that, so it’s not really fake. There’s the whole reality happening.

MoviesOnline: Recently, a lot of the professional wrestlers from the ‘80’s have begun dying because of the damage they inflicted on their body over the course of their career.  How much did you know about that?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: The ones who have made it this far are far and few in between.  I mean, these guys have lived a really hard life and, you know, when you meet someone who 10-15 years ago was playing in front of 50,000 people and now they’re suddenly in front of 200 people, they’re not just doing it for the money.  They’re doing it also to hold onto their craft and hold onto the glory.  It’s really dramatic.  We’re going to do a premiere and we’ve got some legends coming down and one of them is in a wheelchair and it’s very, very sad.  They’ve got no protection, no pension, no worker’s comp, nothing.  And they worked 350 days a year and by the time their bodies were used up, you know, their real lives were basically in shambles.  So, it’s a story that hasn’t been told and we wanted to tell it.

MoviesOnline: Did you spend much time going to the matches and were there specific things you picked up that wound up in the movie?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Oh, everything.  I mean, well first of all everything you see with the…every wrestler you see in the movie is a real wrestler. All the fans are real fans.  We put on real live wrestling promotions and put on the matches and then when the match was over me, Mickey and the camera woman would run out into the ring, shoot a piece of the match and we’d leave and a match would be put on.  We kind of leapfrogged through the night.  My co-producer became a wrestling promoter to get it done.  And so they were all real moments.  And, you know, Mickey’s speech at the end, that we witnessed someone from the Hart family—one of the young Hart offspring’s that made the speech and we looked at each other—me and the writer—and we’re like we’ve got to use this. This is great.  And actually 2 days before Mickey did that, he re-wrote it and made it a little bit of his own.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk a little about the tone of the film?  It could have been so phony and over the top but when the wrestlers are onstage during a match, I didn’t feel that. Was that hard to do?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Yeah, I mean we were just being realistic.  It was very tough.  It was an interesting sound issue because the hits are fake in one way but they’re real as well in the sense that Mickey was actually getting hit but he wasn’t getting hit full-force like a real wrestler…and neither do real wrestlers.  They’re holding the punches but they’re still hitting each other and making huge noises.  So, when we got to sound design, because those noises were underneath crowds and the camera noise and all that other noise, the question was what type of sound effect to put in.  You want to put a sound effect in that’s real, but not John Wayne real, you know?  Or John Wayne fake.  So this whole line between fake and real was a real challenge as a filmmaker because you’re showing something that’s scripted and you’re showing something where these athletes are taking care of each other, but they’re also putting on a show and they are actually hurting themselves and each other, so that line was really a big challenge of how to get that right. But, once again, we were going for something that was naturalistic and realistic.

MoviesOnline: I was thinking more about their performances onstage, like a Hulk Hogan who is so over the top. I didn’t feel you did that in this film which I really liked. 

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Well, I mean Hulk Hogan happens to be the biggest of the biggest performance and that’s why he’s the biggest star, but there are wrestlers that definitely were the level of Randy the Ram that we were…I mean Randy was never supposed to be Hulk Hogan style fame.  He was supposed to be like a middle ranged star.  He was never supposed to be that famous.  And, you know, none of these names will mean anything to you, but like a Brutus Beefcake, Greg the Hammer Valentine level. Yeah, yeah I know.  Everyone knows I love him.   It’s not the super-duper level but anyone…I mean have you ever heard of Greg the Hammer Valentine?  No, you haven’t, but all the people who were in wrestling for a little bit you’ve heard of them.  So he was famous within that world but never really broke out of it.  And I think Hulk started this whole other type of wrestling where it became as much about the performance as about the athletics, but there were a lot of guys that were just more about the athletics and on the same type of level of performance as The Ram.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk about why Mickey was your best choice for this role?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Well, in retrospect it seems obvious, but you never really know that when you’re casting.  It’s very hard to put your finger on it.  It was a very hard role to cast because there was the emotional end of the role, which someone had to pull off the humor as well as the sadness and the tragedy. And to find an actor that surprising, it’s hard, you know? When you meet Mickey, he’s got all this armor, you know, and he’s got all these flashy colors on him and they’re basically all to distract you from looking in his eyes, which are just alive with so much soul and a lot of pain.  And, as a director, when you look in them, you just see the fire burning and you’ve just got to…it gets exciting. You want to capture that when you see that.  And the physicality was tough.  Now it seems obvious, but normally he’s about 195.  He’s a big guy but he’s nowhere the size of these wrestlers, and he had to put on 35 pounds of muscle. So when I first met him, I didn’t know if he could do something like that and, you know, 6 months of lifting and 5,000 calories, he did it.

MoviesOnline: How different would the movie have been with Nick Cage?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: I mean, if I were a painter, it would be…it’s about color, you know? The actor is the color.  I mean, it would have been a completely different film. Who knows what it would be?

MoviesOnline: The first match that we see, where Randy cuts himself, seemed to have a grittier, more underground feel to it than the other fights that we see later in the film.

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Grittier than the hardcore match? I think it had to do with the room.  It was the room. The room was a dancehall in Jersey.  It was a place where they actually threw wrestling events and the lights really never come down.  There’s no big spots and that’s how they do it there.  So I think it feels less of a stadium than the…the next 2 matches were bigger arenas and more traditional wrestling places.  And I think that’s what gave it that feel. You could see really deep into the stands and stuff.  CZW and the ring of honor fights where you could see 4-5 rows into the fans and that’s it.  And I think that’s what gave it that feel.  It just feels very low rent, but it is low rent.

MoviesOnline: The backstage camaraderie that exists between these wrestlers and how they choreograph their events really compliments the tone of the film.  Was that important to show?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Oh absolutely.  I mean, you know…yeah. I wanted to show as much of the world as possible.  A lot of that was improvised and it just sort of happened, you know?  We were backstage with the wrestlers and I said “Hey guys, just talk about your matches” and we just shot it.  The scene with Necro Butcher—the guy with the staple gun?  That was just an improvised scene when they talked about it.  We were waiting to go onstage and I said “Oh we’ve got some time.  Let’s just shoot you guys talking”  and I said “Mickey, ask him where he’s from, where he got his name and ask him what you’re going to do tonight” and the Necro just made up those lines and it came alive. 

MoviesOnline: Is he a real guy and is that his act?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Oh yeah.  He’s the Necro Butcher.  He’s kind of this underground cult American hero.

MoviesOnline: He was really tame in the movie.

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Yes, exactly.  Got to YouTube and look up Necro Butcher.  If you want to—if you want some more gore.

MoviesOnline: If you dare.

DARREN ARONOFSKY: If you dare.  He’s kind of this top-billing marquee name.  He’s always the last match pretty much and he’s underground and the crowds go crazy when he comes because they know they’re going to get blood.  But he’s the sweetest guy in the world.  He’s actually changed his name.  CZW now calls him Hollywood Dylan Summers.  Dylan Summers is his real name and he’s got a manager named Aaron Aronofsky.  I’ve finally been mocked by the…yeah.

MoviesOnline: The parallels in the story between Randy and Pam are central to the film, can you talk a little bit about developing Marisa Tomei’s character and how her situation mirrors that of Mickey Rourke’s character?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Yeah, well, when you’re doing an independent film and a stripper shows up, a lot of red flags go off because it could be a cliché.  But there are similarities between a stripper and a wrestler.  First of all, the truth of the matter is that when real wrestlers are done with their matches, they usually take their gate and go to the strip club.  So that’s probably where the idea started, but then the more we thought about it—an aging stripper and an aging wrestler have a lot of similarities, you know? They’re both onstage using their bodies and they both have stage names.  They both create a fantasy for the audience, you know?  They’re both endangered by time, you know?  So it just became very interesting.  And, for us, as much as she is a romantic interest, she is [also] a mentor for him because she’s kind of got a better sense of what’s real and fake while his whole sense of real and fake is he kind of ignores it.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk about the casting of Marisa for this role?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Well, you know, I think she’s always talented, often underused, and brings a lot of complexity.  I thought it would be a very surprise performance from her because she’s often cast as being very sweet and I liked the fact that she played against it, you know?

MoviesOnline: Did you or Rob Siegel draw from the documentary, “Beyond the Mat,” because Jake the Snake Roberts and Randy’s stories parallel greatly, especially the estranged daughter angle and the recreational drug use?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Well, we were working on the film for a long time before that came out, and when that documentary came out, we were a little concerned because we saw the parallels, but then again I was relieved because it meant that a lot of people would see that documentary and would be introduced to that world so it wouldn’t be so alien.  Unfortunately, a lot of these old-timers that we met, a lot of these legends, Jake the Snake’s story aren’t very original.  There are many, many guys out there with the same story, so it’s almost a cliché, you know?  They work 350 days a year and by the time, as I said, their bodies are done, their home lives are destroyed.  Then they’re just sort of driving on fumes, you know? Rowdy Roddy Piper came to a screening the other night and he was the first legend to see it, and he said “It’s not my story, but it is my story.”  And so I think a lot of legends are going to relate to it.

MoviesOnline: He’s seen the story over and over again.

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

MoviesOnline: Why do you like jumping from genre to genre?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: I didn’t know I did any genre films.  What would be a genre? 

MoviesOnline: “The Fountain” is sci-fi.

DARREN ARONOFSKY: “The Fountain” is sci-fi?  Is it really?

MoviesOnline: Could you talk about the big sci-fi film you’re scheduled to do next for MGM, the remake of Robocop?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: I don’t know what you’re talking about. (smiles) No, no.  I never heard about that.

MoviesOnline: You alternate between big budget and low budget films, can you talk about the challenges of both and was doing “The Wrestler” a relief after the long slog of “The Fountain”?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Well, for me, “The Fountain” wasn’t a long slog.  Every minute of those 6 years I worked on it was filled was excitement (laughs) and it was.  It was a long trek and it’s all part of the journey to make a film and it was what was necessary to get the film made.  But, you know, this one was exciting because it was all about actors and that’s something that I’ve always loved doing is working with actors.  And you get to do so little as a director that when I started it, that’s all I really was interested in was just unleashing Mickey, Marisa and Evan onto celluloid and see what would happen.

MoviesOnline: Is there a big budget film coming next? Will you be rebounding?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: I have got no idea what’s next.  I don’t have a script yet so I’m waiting.  That’s the first step.

MoviesOnline: With respect to “The Wrestler,” what can fans look forward to on DVD/Blu-Ray?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Well, the guy who made the documentary on “The Fountain,” which was a really good documentary which is on the DVD, did one on “The Wrestler.”  And he really outdid himself.  It’s a great documentary.  I just saw the first cut yesterday and it’s fantastic.  There’s some really cool stuff, some nice bloody wrestling extras.

MoviesOnline: Are there deleted scenes?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: I don’t think I’m going to do deleted scenes.  Although in the documentary there’s a lot of deleted stuff.  Niko, the guy who directed it, asked for it so I gave him a lot of the really cool shots we weren’t able to use.  In fact, I just remembered one I’ve got to tell him to use.  [writes a note to himself in pen on his hand]  Sorry.  I’ve been meaning to tell him forever, sorry.

MoviesOnline: What are your thoughts as a filmmaker about future projects in 3-D and IMAX?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: I think it’s great and, you know, all these new technologies are great to try and draw people in, but the bottom line is it comes down to stories, you know?  You’ve got to hook them with stories because they’ve been trying to put 3-D into the world for…I remember in the 80’s, I don’t actually remember the year, but they put out a bunch of 3-D movies, and you go and you see one of them, and if the film sucks, it’s just a gimmick, you know.  You can only do that much type of stuff reaching out in front of you before it’s flat.  So it’s all about the stories.  You’ve got to figure out interesting things to tell them -- 3-D and how that technology works and interesting things. I mean this film in IMAX would be no better, you know?  It really wouldn’t.  It would be impossible to shoot really because of the size of those cameras, so you’ve just got to find the right medium for the right story, and ultimately, hopefully those mediums will be used for good stories. 

MoviesOnline: In terms of all the research that you did on wrestling and the wrestlers, was there something in particular that really surprised you that you weren’t expecting to learn?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Oh yeah.  The complexity of the brotherhood and the sisterhood—because there’s a lot of sisters in it—not just the fraternity that they were all friends and all of that stuff, but they all kind of respected each other and it’s a real craft.  They have a whole language of moves and there’s a whole history of it.  They speak their own language.  I think the whole history comes out of carnivals and I think they probably have “Come fight the Strong Man.  If you pin him, you get a dollar.”  Whatever it is -- and then it evolved into something, but they speak in their own language where the audience is the mark.  They call it “the show” for the event.  The good guy is “the baby face” and the bad guy is “the heel”.  They have a whole language about it that’s their own which is very much like carney language.  So just the complexity of the world was interesting.  It’s not as silly as most people think it is. 

MoviesOnline: How do you feel about Mickey’s personal journey? He’s come through a lot to have this comeback opportunity and there’s a lot of talk about awards.

DARREN ARONOFSKY: Yeah, yeah. I’m psyched for him, you know and I’m more excited as a fan because I’m really curious to see how other directors use him, so it’s great.

“The Wrestler” opens in theaters on December 17th.