Interview with Darren Aronofsky Director of The WrestlerBy John Delia I do not know if all my readers know Darren Aronofsky, but if you have seen his work then that is all a director can ask for. As a Director and writer he is most noted for the films Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dream (2000), Below (2002) and The Fountain (2006). His films have garnered 16 wins at various film festivals, critic circles, Independent Spirit Awards and film organizations. His film The Fighter is in production and stars Mark Wahlberg with an unknown release date. His next project is RoboCop which is in pre-production at this time. Darren is a very likeable guy and the interview I had with him went real smooth. He is outspoken and pulls no punches when it comes to his filmmaking. The Wrestler has just opened in wide release and both Marisa Tomei and Mickey Rourke have been nominated for and Oscar for best supporting and best actor respectively. The following is the interview I had with him recently.YET: Tell me about Randy The Ram Robinson the character that Mickey Rourke plays in the film. How did the character come about and is he based on a real life wrestler?Darren Aronofsky: As far as the character I don’t think there is anyone who is close to him. The more research we did the more we heard the same story over and over again. It was a lot of research and a lot of hodgepodge of a lot of different characters and fiction and a lot of the old timers. A lot of these guys use to sell out arenas in front of thousands of people and then end up performing in front of a couple of hundred. We just kept hearing the same stories.Q: So Randy is a made up character. Where did you come up with the idea for the film?DA: This character was an original idea I had when I graduated from film school. I just wrote down the idea and was curious why no one had ever done a wrestling picture in a serious way. There are so many other sports movies that every other sport is covered. Boxing has its own genre. No one has ever looked at wrestling and I think people think wrestling is a joke but you try hitting the ropes or the concrete and you are going to feel it the next day. Then when you meet these guys and they are in their forties and fifties and can no longer tie their shoes. They are theatre performers but they are also real athletes. It was just a real dramatic story.Q: Were you familiar with the sport when you came up with the idea?DA: I wasn’t really familiar with the sport of wrestling when we started as an original idea. But then when we started to research it and were allowed back stage we could see how it worked and that got to be really exciting.Q: In The Wrestler, Randy has to take a job in a supermarket to pay for his rent. You know he doesn’t want to be there but that is the only way he can provide a living for himself as wrestling pays very little on the small town circuits. How did you come up with the supermarket idea for Randy?DA: The super market aspect came up because we knew he had to try to get a job doing something someplace that was fairly humiliating. Very early on I had the idea that he would do something very violent to himself to remind himself how he likes to perform. The meat counter was an early idea and it just kind of stuck because it is something that is realistic, sad and shameful and we could all relate to the rotten little boss.Q: Marisa Tomei plays a stripper that is over the hill when it comes to her strip joint. How did you get Marisa to play the role and get nude in several graphic scenes?DA: Tomei was a very interesting and unexpected choice to do this dark, ambiguous character. She is very sexy and made it very interesting and had a lot going for her. She did all her own shots and we did not have a double for her. Q: What was the most difficult scene you had to shoot?DA: The supermarket scene was one of the toughest because Mickey really connected to the shame of The Ram and he could feel the embarrassment and it made it very hard for him to be there. It took me a while to figure out why he was resisting it but it turned out great because that shame he felt as an actor pours into the character a little bit and made it pretty interesting.Q: How did you come up with the name for you character?DA: The characters name is Randy The Ram Robinson, and I was looking at some of the old drafts as I was preparing to come on this tour to remind myself how the character development went back in 2002. One of the original names we came up with was `Gene The American Dream Stark and that did not work too well. So it took a while to work out and I liked Randy because it is such an eighties name. The Ram is not too clever and not too original that it is possible someone could have been named that. It just seemed to work. The logo Mickey designed that. We kind of sketched it out and then he had all the stuff like the belt buckle and jewellery made out of it. Mickey added a lot to the character.Q: Did you choose Rourke because he was an ex-boxer and that he took a lot of punishment in the past?DA: Part of the reason we chose Mickey was because he was an athlete and that made it interesting. Him being an ex-boxer made it twice as hard to learn to be a wrestler because in boxing you don`t want your opponent to see the punch. You want to hit them and they don`t even know what is coming. In wrestling you want people in the bleachers to see that punch coming three minutes before it does. Mickey had to unlearn how to be a boxer because the second he stepped into the ring he was a boxer and it took about two months for him to be able to take on the theatrics of wrestling. Mostly I chose Mickey because I felt in my gut that he was the right guy for this part.Q: In one scene you see Mickey Rourke cut himself in the ring. Did he really cut himself or was it a prosthetic?DA: He did really cut himself, yes. We spent a lot of money on trying to develop a prosthetic to do it and it looked really good. Then the day of shooting he did not want to put it on and wanted to do it without the prosthetic. I was telling him he couldn`t do it because it could cause huge insurance problems, but then the stunt coordinator was saying he could do it and it would be fine and he did it in one take.Q: Did Mickey get any other injuries beside the cutting of the forehead?DA: Mickey was quite good about not getting too injured. During training he had to get a couple of MRI because a lot of old injuries started to appear. Because he had put on thirty five pounds of muscle, which is a lot of weight to put onto your knees, an old football injury he had in his knee showed up and he had to deal with that. Then he had a couple of disc issues that were old and he had to get the right kind of treatment. But during filming he did not hurt himself and got through it even though he did some crazy stunts. The stunt coordinator was very good.Q: What was it like to be picked up for distribution by Fox Searchlight?DA: It was wild to be picked up by Fox Searchlight in Toronto as they have the best distribution in the world for a film like this. It will be going nationwide but I have no idea how many theatres.Q: Evan Rachel Wood plays Randy’s daughter in the film and although she is not in it for a long time, she gives a superlative performance. How did you get that performance out of her?DA: Evan Rachel Wood is great and has so much talent. She is a young twenty-one year old in soul and body and came to the set totally prepared and just rocked it. I was lucky and blessed to get a performer like that. Q: Does she in real life have a broken family similar to that shown in the film?DA: I think she has a few issues she was able to tap into. She talks about it in the press so I think it is not bad if I mention it. I don’t know much about it because it is not my business really. Actors they do there thing and I do mine. But, she really brought it, she was able to tap into that sadness and that energy. Q: Have you had any feedback from any wrestlers on the film?DA: Roddy Piper has given us feed back at one of the screenings. The Samoan, Mickey`s trainer, said to him after that there was not a wrestler in the world who won`t believe you are a wrestler. So that means a lot. We haven’t shown it to any of the legends yet and that will be coming and I can`t wait to see what they say.Q: Have you ever been offered a script that you know you didn’t want to do but felt you had to for a favour?DA: As a director in Hollywood you get offered all different types of stuff. A lot of people have ideas for making movies so we`ll see what happens. The job is too hard to take on anything you really don`t want to do. It is too hard to wake up every day and do something that you don`t believe in. I keep my life simple so I don`t need that much money to live so I don`t get caught in that trap. Mickey went through that trap. You end up getting too many things and then you have to support it and then you are doing stuff you don`t want to do. I don`t ever want to be in a place economically where I am forced to do something I don`t want to do. I just want to have a security so I can keep doing these small films or big films that I won`t get paid a lot to do because in general that is where my tastes lie.Q: How do you prepare your actors for the roles you have to fill?DA: As a director you prepare your actors as much as possible and give them some guidance and then you let them loose. Then you give them guidance a bit along the way but it is a balance. You don`t ever want to stifle them as you want them to bring what they can to the table, but you want to make sure what they are doing fits the bill so it is a balance. We do a lot of takes even on the easy stuff to try as many things as you can get.Q: How did you choose your wrestlers for the film?DA: Everyone auditioned even the pro wrestlers and we chose the best people for the roles but it was a long audition process. For the auditions they came in with their gimmicks on and did a couple of scenes to see if they could act. It was fun and my office smelt like Ben-Gay for a couple of weeks but it was cool.
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