E

ven before this project came around,

I was very interested in doing a
movie set in the ballet world. My sister
was a dancer when we were kids, so I
grew up with it in the house. I've always
been interested in unique, interesting
worlds, and the ballet world definitely
felt different. Few filmmakers have
dealt with it in a serious way, so I
started looking into it. At the same
time, I was working on a film version
of Dostoevsky s The Double, about a
man who wakes up to discover that
his doppelgnger is taking over his
life. Then I went to see Swan Lake,
which involves a black swan and a
white swan played by the same dancer,
and that's when everything came
together in my head.
The original ballet of Swan
Lake is a very Gothic tale, as it's about
a woman who actually transforms into
a swan by night she's half-swan,
half-human. So very early on, I knew
this would be a type of werewolf
movie. That concept motivated all the
Gothic overtones we eventually incor-
porated into the look. We weren't
really paying homage to anything
specific, but Matty and I definitely
drew on a lot of our infiuences:
Roman Polanski's Repulsion and The
Tenant, David Cronenberg, the
Dardennes for the camera style, and, of
course, The Red Shoes.
We wanted to update Swan Lake
and make it more modern, and we were
working with choreographer Benjamin
Millepied of the New York City Ballet.
I would explain to him what I wanted,
especially in terms of the emotions I was
trying to draw out of the actors, and he
would turn those emotions into move-
ment. Natalie Portman danced till she
was 13, which was actually pretty
important, because early training allows
your body to sort of get back to it. A lot
of professional dancers have been doing
it since they were 5 years old, and their
bodies actually transform. If Natalie
hadn't had that background, and then a
Directing Black Swan
year of training before we started, she
could never have done it.
I used Super 16mm on The
Wrestler [viCJan. '09] because I wanted
to use a cinema vrit feel to tell a story
about a pro wrestler, and I really enjoyed
the long, sweeping takes that were
possible when we just had a man wdth a
camera following the actors. I thought it
would be interesting to bring that
approach to the ballet world because it
would really capture the energy onstage.
We wanted to bring the camera right
onto the stage and make it dance along
with the dancers. We were very nervous
about mixing a vrit approach wdth
the horror aspects of the film, because
we thought the documentary feel might
destroy the suspense of those scenes.
We tried to find other films that had
taken a similar approach, but we
couldn't, so we just decided to roll the
dice.
We used a lot of close-ups. For
me, the close-up is one of the great
inventions of the 20th century; it allows
an audience to sit in a dark room and
stare into the eyes of a person who's
emoting without being self-conscious.
I'm always about getting close to the
actors and feeling their emotions and
their presence.
Mirrors are omnipresent in the
film, as they are in the landscape of the
dancer. When dancers are training,
they're constantly observing them-
selves in mirrors, so I knew that would
be a big visual motif. People have used
mirror gags in all kinds of movies, so
we tried to figure out creepy and weird
ways to use them in new ways.
Sometimes those shots involved visual
effects; there are almost 300 effects
shots in the movie. The visual-efects
supervisor, Dan Schrecker at Look
lifFects, has worked on a bunch of my
films. We were actually college room-
mates, and we used to run an effects
company. Amoeba Proteus. Now I
collaborate with him through Look
Effects, and it's worked out really well.
I don't think my relationship with
Matty has changed that much over the
\ ears. We've both become so busy that
there's less time to just hang out, but
1 )ur work relationship is very similar to
the way it's always been. We clicked in
film school; we were among the
youngest kids in the school and came
fi'om similar backgrounds, so we had a
very easy rapport, and that's continued
through all of our fdms together. We
now have more experiences together to
draw upon, so we can say, 'Let's try to do
what we did with that other thing,' or
'Let's not screw this up like we screwed
that up.'We have a lot of common refer-
ences.
I think both of us have found that
as you become more experienced, you
get more relaxed, and that allows you to
accomplish more. There's less adrena-
line, and you're more present.
Darren Aronofsky
34 December 2010 American Cinematographer
Copyright of American Cinematographer is the property of ASC Holding Corporation and its content may not
be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.