Interview: Darren Aronofsky on mother! — “It was written as a fever dream.”

Love or hate it, Darren Aronofsky’s mother! has been a topic of conversation. From Pi to Black Swan, his filmmaking style takes us inside the minds of characters, often achieving that effect by using tight closeup shots or shooting over the shoulder of the actor. mother! is no different, using these techniques throughout the entire film, perhaps more effectively than ever before. Aronofsy says its the exceptional performance of his leading lady Jennifer Lawrence whose performance immerses us into a surreal dreamworld. Lawrence plays the title character who most agree is an allegorical symbol of mother earth, whose home is invaded by strangers and all hell breaks loose as her world slowly begins to unravel.

For fans of Aronofsky’s work, this film is yet another of his masterpieces . He delivers a film that is wildly imaginative, visually extravagant, and profoundly thought-provoking. It feels like a culmination of his lifelong exploration of obsession and probing the human condition. The last act of the film erupts in a 25-minute climax of sheer chaos and violence as everything we know in mother! is systematically destroyed. He says it was “technically the most difficult thing that my team and I have ever attempted to do.” It’s an extraordinary film unlike anything we’ve seen before. There are very few filmmakers who could carry off a film like mother!

You wrote this while Obama was still President, in five days. It was released when America had just suffered back-to-back hurricanes, two the worst natural disasters in the country’s history — and we have an administration in D.C. that doesn’t believe in climate change. How frustrated you must have felt writing it in light of all that.

I do think some in the administration believe in climate change, but there’s just tremendous corruption and lots of special interests that are keeping people away from saving us and potentially making a planet that’s inhabitable for our children and our grandchildren because of personal interests. Outside of that, it’s just tragic. The irony was not lost on me. It’s really sad to see so many people having to deal with the actions of humans on the planet mostly over the last hundred years. These incredible warning signs are cascading on us and bombarding on us and yet you still have people turning their backs on clean air and economic success stories trying to shut down benefits for clean energy and really setting us, at least competitively, behind the rest of the world which is driving full force into the clean energy economy. It makes sense and the results as far as what it means for the destiny of our story with mother nature needs to be rewritten and recorrected and we need to clean up on this.

When I wrote this two years ago it wasnear the end of eight years of Obama and we still weren’t doing enough. It was just incredibly scary and frustrating to see how slow we were reacting to such an existential threat and that’s the passion that came out of anger, frustration, and rage that inspired me to make this cautionary tale in mother!

And with that, there’s so much to the film layered with allegory and symbolism. How did that evolve through the process of that first draft to filming?

It was an interesting one. The script went through so many drafts. The story of the five-day writing spree was sort of taken out of context, and what I really meant by it was that the initial energy came out of this fever dream window of five days.

What happened differently than most films was that the energy captured in those five days was enough to make the movie start to happen. So suddenly we were making the film a lot quicker than we normally would and that’s because people were responding to the allegory, the human drama of this marriage falling apart, the home invasion genre. People were responding to it and they wanted to make it. That didn’t stop us from doing a lot of work on the script after that.

It was a weird one because it was written in this feverish dream state that as I started to pull it apart to dissect it to try to figure out how to improve it, it was like waking up in the morning from a dream and you’re trying to remember it and it’s dissipating into pixie dust. There was something about the way this one was written with cause and effect. I would write a scene and I would take it as far as I could and as soon as I couldn’t figure out where to take it any longer, I would figure out how to then turn it and escalate it into a new scene and that was the pattern and rhythm and the music of the film. Something’s happening, it gets weirder and weirder and weirder and it turns. The next thing happens, it gets weirder and weirder and it turns, and the result of that is when audiences see the film it’s very much a mystery, you think it’s a mystery for a little bit and suddenly it becomes a different type of movie and that’s what gave it its difference in the marketplace.

It was definitely technically the most difficult thing that me and my team have ever attempted to do.

I think came out of that saying it was one crazy-ass rollercoaster ride, but it was one of the best rollercoaster rides I’d ever been on and that climatic sequence was the craziest part. How did it all come together from the script to you planning and filming it?

Thank you. It’s funny because that’s all on reel five of the movie and when we finished reel 5. My editor and I looked at each other and thought it was one hell of a reel. It was probably one on of the best reels Andrew Weisblum and I have ever done in all of our movies together. We call it the fever dream and that’s funny because the film was written as a fever dream, it’s the climax of the dream.

It was definitely technically the most difficult thing that my team and I have ever attempted to do.

We have done crazy surreal nightmare scenes. In Requiem For a Dream when the apartment comes apart and the refrigerator attacks her, that was a two-minute sequence.

In Black Swan there was that four-minute sequence when she transforms into the black swan, but to try to maintain that energy — where there’s energy on top of chaos on top of chaos on top of chaos — was just super hard because it just meant every department from hair to makeup to stunts to performance had to work together in sync and had to build on top of each other.

It happens in real-time so everything had to be grounded in reality. As the house was torn apart and raped we had to follow everything consistently. So something as simple as hair, she goes from this beautiful style where her hair is up and pinned up to just each scene where it’s slowly falling apart, decaying and getting dirtier and shredded.

You shot on 16mm. How did that help with creating the texture of the film?

I’ve been doing it for a while and I shot The Wrestler and Black Swan on 16mm. I like the format because it’s very cinematic. The moment you work in film, things are stylized and they give you a certain feel than everything else that is out there.  The potential of digital is amazing because the images are so incredible as far as what you can work with, but a lot of these films out there in the marketplace are starting to look alike. I’ve always tried to create stuff for audiences that is different. Sometimes it works for audiences and sometimes it doesn’t, but we’re always pushing the envelope to do different things.

The house in the film is another character. What did you and Phillip Messina, your production designer, talk about when it came to the design to help with your camera movement to achieve your vision?

The character of the house was such an important part and it wasn’t something we had spelled out in the script. I always knew it was going to be from the Victorian era in this vast landscape and I never fully understood how the floors work, where the rooms were and that was something that Phillip worked with me on to create.

It started with a scout looking for a real house because it’s always better to start with something real that you can build off of. So, of course, we found nothing, but the one thing we did find was an octagonal shaped Victorian house which I guess was common in that era and only a few still exist. The really exciting thing about it was that you get all these weirdly shaped rooms and Phillip went beyond that by putting in entry and exit points in each room so that it became a labyrinth and that allowed us to move through the house.

Over the two hours of the movie, the audience would get a sense of the house and when the house was finally destroyed they would emotionally feel the different parts and sections they had gotten to know being attacked and ripped apart.

Also, the idea, at the beginning of the film, everything is what it is. The wood is represented as wood, the plaster is represented as plaster. There was no paint, there was no wallpaper. We wanted everything to be of the earth.

When humanity starts to show up, that’s when we start to introduce new materials such as plastics and different colors. It happened in wardrobe and costume. In cinematography, we wanted this transformation from something natural and organic like the Garden of Eden that then turns into 21st-century America.

You used a limited range of camera angles in the film. How did that present challenges for you, if any?

It was mostly challenges, but we’ve always been into creating boundaries for ourselves. I really wanted to do a film that was purely in the mind of one character. It’s something I’ve always played with, in Pi and Black Swan, but I’ve never fully tried to make a full subjective movie that is only from the perspective of mother! That’s what I wanted to do, to tell the story of mother earth and from this character and see how it’s experienced to see everything taken from her.

So everything from not having any score, because score is very much an objective decision by the director to make the audience feel a certain way. So, typically music would be put in a place to create love or to create suspense. I didn’t want to do that because it’s from the outside and I only wanted to create sounds that came from the inside of mother!

That’s why we chose to restrict the shots we had and there are only three shots. They’re either over Jennifer’s shoulder, on her face as a close-up, or as a pov. The danger of that is going to the editing room and you have nowhere to escape to. If Jennifer Lawrence wasn’t working at every moment and if we didn’t have her reaction to every moment and something that the audience could relate to, we were dead. A lot of people don’t pick up on it, but the difficulty of a performance like that is exceptional.

You worked with the actors for an extended time in the rehearsal period so how did that help and what did you learn?

There’s no way it can’t help to work with the actors to work on camera shots, talk to them, and feel it come together on set to get that sense of what was going to work and what wasn’t. It’s a crime and a shame in filmmaking that we get so little time to do that, especially with how expensive the actual film shooting is.

Doing rehearsal is much cheaper time and it’s my favorite time because my favorite time of filmmaking is working with the actors. As a director, I only get to do it for a few months every two or three years so this was a little way to cheat and get actors to work with me for an extra three months.

This is a really unique film that’s in your face, that’s punk in your face, and it’s screaming at the top of its lungs, if you want that kind of headrush, then come and take that ride with us.

You wanted people to react to the film, and react whether they love it or are on the other side of the fence. Is there anything in particular that analysts have said that bugs or amuses you?

I don’t read reviews and I’ve been trying to avoid them completely. My mentor Stuart Rosenberg always said, “The bad reviews are bad, the good reviews are worse.” It’s hard in today’s world to totally avoid them because of the amount of social media and communication that we are involved in. Things leak in. I want to get t-shirts made of it because it’s a badge of honor, someone said last week that “it was the worst movie of the century.”

Goodness.

I love it. I think it’s fantastic and he’s hated everything I’ve done. He called Black Swan “an ugly duckling.” We always knew we were making a very aggressive film and anytime you are making a reflection upon what’s happening in the world, if you read the New York Times cover to cover it’s so much more disturbing than anything that’s happening in mother!

Exactly. It’s terrifying.

There’s nothing inhumane in this movie, it is humanity and I knew certain people were just not going to hang with it.

Do you think people didn’t want to see that violence and reality?

A big pet peeve is fetishizing violence. Movies do glamorize violence and it’s not cool. Violence is bad and just to see how people flippantly approach violence and the use of guns in movies is bad and wrong. When I deal with violence, I always want to be truthful. I think it’s important to know what a gun sounds like when you shoot it. It shouldn’t be turned into something that’s tolerable and acceptable.

In a glowing column in The Hollywood Reporter, Scorsese praised mother! saying, “Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture.” He was commenting on its CinemaScore.

It’s a strange time. CinemaScore is a joke, they’re talking about five cities in the world, but we always knew it wouldn’t be for everyone. I’ve been saying from the beginning that if you want to go on a rollercoaster ride that’s super intense then come out for mother! I’ve been trying to be clear with people on that, I think when you have movie stars in it and it’s released by a big studio, people don’t always get that messaging.

This is a really unique film that’s in your face, that’s punk in your face, and it’s screaming at the top of its lungs, if you want that kind of headrush, then come and take that ride with us.

It did make me scream at the world after.

That’s what movies are meant to do. You shouldn’t be leaving a movie saying I did like it or I didn’t like it. Anyone, who tells me,”I liked it,” I know they haven’t seen it because it’s not that type of movie. I feel like Madonna in Truth or Dare when Kevin Costner tells her, “Your show is neat.” That’s not what we’re trying to do. We want to make something super-intense.

There have been so many people who left the movie so angry and two days later they’re still thinking about it and they can’t, they’re so obsessed with it and that’s been the thrill for me. Unfortunately, the story on things gets written way too quickly. There are so many examples of films that have played in theaters for a year back in the day and it takes a while to find the narrative. This is probably a film a little bit out of normal distribution-channel history.

What’s next for you? Or are you taking a break?

I don’t know. I’m definitely taking a break [laughs]. I was taking a break and Barton Fink came on and I was inspired. You go back and see one of your hero’s great films and it gets you inspired and gets you starting to think again.