A trip to the
By George Robinson
FOR DARREN ARONOFSKY, filmmaking is a cross between a family reunion and
old home week at his alma mater. In his first feature film, Pi, he gave roles to his
Aunt Joanne, his college roommate and a friend from film school --- and he
financed the flick with contributions from just about everyone he knows.
The resulting film is an eerie, unsettling mood piece perched somewhere
between Hitchcockian suspense, Twilight Zone sci-fi and David Lynch
weirdness. The protagonist, Max Cohen (Sean Gullette, who co-authored
the film's story), is a renegade mathematics genius who, defying the
wishes of his mentor Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis), has been exploring the
seemingly logical notion that number patterns can explain the universe,
with the intention of using his knowledge to conquer Wall Street. Max is
a reclusive and increasingly paranoid character, seemingly hunted by
both a gang of stock analysts with mysterious government connections and
a no-less-determined group of Hasidic students of Kabbalah who are
convinced that the mathematician has the key that can bring Moshiach.
Gradually, the migraine-plagued Max begins to disintegrate.
Was Aronofsky drawing on personal experience in concocting this dark,
brooding tale?
"It's a scrapbook of all kinds of stuff I think is cool," the
29-year-old director said in a phone interview. "I've used
experiences that happened to me, things I've heard about from other
people, things I've read. Then I squeezed together into a narrative."
The Hasidic subplot grew out of one of those "experiences that happened
to" Aronofsky. When he was 18, he volunteered for work on a kibbutz but
ended up, much to his dismay, working in a plastics factory. After a
few days of agony, he ran away to Jerusalem, where a Hasid offered him
food and lodging in exchange for a few hours of Torah and Talmud classes
each day. It was his first exposure to gematria, the
method of Torah exegesis based on the numerical value of the Hebrew
letters. Needless to say, gematria is at the heart of Pi.
"That was really the seed of my interest in Kabbalah," Aronofsky said.
"I found the stuff I learned there interesting and very convincing. When
I started working on Pi, I did a lot more research. Almost everything in
the film [relating to Kabbalah and gematria] is true."
In fact, Pi is one of the first movies to boast a "Judaica consultant"
in its credit (although he was primarily responsible for assuring the
correctness of scenes involving tefillin and Hebrew).
Aronofsky's interest in Kabbalah is a far cry from his upbringing in
Brooklyn and his education at Harvard and the American Film Institute
(AFI).
The son of New York public school teachers, he was raised as a
Conservative Jew but, by his own admission was "not too religious."
He didn't plan on a career in filmmaking either. His major at Harvard
had been social theory, but his junior-year roommate was an animator
working in the college's film department. "At the end of the semester, I
would have a bunch of papers and he would end up with a bunch of
movies," Aronofsky says, laughing.
Yearning for more concrete results, he took his first film class and
received his first A. Clearly he had found his métier.
It was at Harvard that he also found his first star. His best friend in
college was the wiry Gullette, who appeared in Aronofsky's thesis film.
That film, "Supermarket Sweep," was a national finalist in the 1991
Student Academy Award competition, and helped secure the director
admission to the AFI's master's program.
Which is where he found his cinematographer, Matthew Libatique.
Libatique is largely responsible for the unique look of , a haunted
black-and-white in which the grain of the film itself becomes a major
character.
"Matty wanted to shoot black-and-white reversal film," Aronofsky
explained, "and it has a unique and different kind of look. We wanted to
make a black-and-white movie, no gray tones. And we wanted the dancing,
chaotic grain that's prominent in the image. The image is made out of
this incredible chaos, and out of the chaos comes this ordered image."
In other words, the film's very appearance is based on the same
principle as Max's search for the numerical secret of existence. Even
the unusual choice of a 1:66-1 aspect ratio (the relationship between
the width and height of the frame) for the film is motivated by
mathematics. As Aronofsky noted, "That ratio is very close to the Golden
Ratio" proclaimed by Pythagoras and affirmed in Renaissance art by Da
Vinci.
Aronofsky's film was made on a minuscule budget of $60,000. James
Cameron probably spent more than that catering one day's lunch on the
set of Titanic. But the young director has expectations
of moving up the ladder yet again. His next projects are somewhat more
ambitious, but no less personal than Pi.
And, as he observed with justifiable satisfaction, "We've showed we
know how to make films."
Darren Aronofsky,
the next 'Spielberg?'
gematria zone
New JWR contributor George Robinson is a New York-based writer.