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Darren Aronofsky
THE ASK HOLLYWOOD INTERVIEW: PART 1

Hear a message from Darren Aronofsky!

Darren Aronofsky Pi is a $60,000 success story. That's all it took for writer-director Darren Aronofsky to make the sci-fi thriller. To fund the film, Aronofsky and his crew members constructed a plan in which they would ask their friends and family members each for $100. They agreed to return $150 to each of the contributors if Pi made a profit.

During Pi's premiere at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, Aronofsky won the Director's Award and the film was sold to Artisan Entertainment for $1 million. The film has gone on to make over $3 million at the box office.

Needless to say, Darren and his cohorts' acquaintances have all received their $150.

Pi is the story of genius Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) who is obsessed with the theory that all of life can be reduced to mathematics and therefore predicted. Max has chosen the stock market as the test to his theory. Max's efforts make him wanted by Wall Street businessmen looking to make a quick buck. Max is also being sought by a group of Hasidic Jews looking to solve the mathematic code of the Kabbalah, the Jewish bible. Max is caught between the two as he continues on his own search for discovery.

INTERVIEWER:
How did you write the complex concept and story of Pi?

Max inserts a chip into his supercomputer named Euclid
DARREN ARONOFSKY:
Basically when I write I weave together lots of different ideas that are around me, experiences that have happened to me, stories I have been told, things that I've read, things that I think are cool, and I just sort of try and fit and squeeze them together. It's sort of like a big jigsaw puzzle where I have these giant pieces and I try and sort of make them squeeze together until a picture emerges.

INTERVIEWER:
Do you have a background in math?

DARREN ARONOFSKY:
Not really. I studied math like everyone in high school but didn't continue with my studies in college. I'm just more intrigued with mystical mathematics.

INTERVIEWER:
How much of the story about the Kabbalah is true?

DARREN ARONOFSKY:
All the Kabbalah stuff is pretty damn true. Basically most of the stuff about the math and the Kabbalah is true. The fiction is in the glue that holds it together. That's what I created, the whole sort of tying it all together was my sort of invention. But all of the Kabbalah stuff is well researched and real.

INTERVIEWER:
What filmmakers have influenced you?

DARREN ARONOFSKY:
I'm a big fan of (Akira) Kurosawa and (Federico) Fellini. In this film in particular I think there's a lot of (Roman) Polanski influence and Terry Gilliam influence as well as a Japanese director named (Shinya) Tsukamoto he directed The Iron Man, Tetsuo. As far as being a storyteller I think my biggest influence was Bill Cosby and his comedy. And also as far as writing would probably be Hubert Selby, Jr.

INTERVIEWER:
This movie can be classified as many different genres, whether is be action, sci-fi, suspense or drama. Which category do you think best describes Pi?

DARREN ARONOFSKY:
We call it a Sci-fi thriller. Either that or a cyber punk movie.

INTERVIEWER:
Why did you choose to shoot Pi in black and white?

DARREN ARONOFSKY:
It was always a creative choice not really a budgetary constraint. Actually some people think black and white is cheaper. So few films are done in black and white these days that it's actually more expensive. So it actually cost us more money to do it.

It cost us even more than most black and white movies because we decided to shoot a film stock called "black and white reversal" which no one has ever shot for a narrative feature film before. And it's this very sort of hard to get film stock that actually comes up very, very, contrasty.

The concept was always to make a black or white movie as opposed to a black and white movie. Meaning that there are no gray tones but you want everything to be black or white. I was sort of inspired by (the comic book) Frank Miller's "Sin City" and the look of that and to try and capture something like that.

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