Darren Aronofsky Quotes

'Angel Heart' was one of my favorite films.

The only way I know as a director is to figure out what the film is about. And out of the theme and the sense of what the film is about, all those decisions start to make sense. But to find that truth within it, you have to limit your possibilities and limit your choices. That's where this visual language grows out of.

Every film had its own grammar. And it's your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story.

My hope is that I'm going to continue to make more and more challenging work that's going to come out more and more interesting. I don't know if that will always continue to happen, but every one of my films has definitely been a progression as far as complexity of narrative, character, and plot.

I wasn't a big fan of social anthropology. And, luckily, that created room for me to work in visual arts because I sort of ignored my requirements. I think I was attracted to social anthropology because I liked to travel and was always interested in far-off places.

At the end of Requiem all I wanted to do was get a DV camera and just do a small film. But then the hunger comes back.

I was 12 or 13 years old. So I started to write poetry and fiction, even though I was really into biology because my dad was a science teacher. I kept writing all those years.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

I'd like to do a lot of different stuff. I think it's important as a creative person to keep challenging yourself and keep doing new stuff. If you end up trying to repeat yourself it's death. It just becomes boring and takes the passion out of it. You gotta find stories and characters that you really want to hang out with.

I have a team, the same team of filmmakers I worked with on 'Pi' and 'Requiem'. Which is my cameraman, and my composer, and my producer. We've all worked together for a number of films.

The whole visual language of the movie is developed way before we get to set. Especially when you're doing visual effects and you don't have a lot of money to mess around, which we didn't, you have to really preplan everything. Pretty much every shot in the film was figured out months before we got to set.

CGI means, just to be clear, creating any type of image with a computer. Basically, starting off with nothing, or with images and manipulating them. The way we did it, everything was actual photographed images. A lot of that stuff was shot through a microscope of chemical reactions, yeast growing, lots of weird things, by Peter Parks. We put it into a computer and collaged it, manipulated it. Meaning we digitally shaped it to fit with other images. But there was no computer-generated imagery at all.

Classical scores go up and down; they're kind of hysterical in a way. And movie scores are much more - they just drive and move forward, and they build and can't go up and down at that same speed. It's a big job to turn that into something that pushes the movie along.

I've spent a life loving women and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to.

I was always writing about the connection between man and nature. I grew up in a neighborhood that was right on the beach, but the beach was not like a beach you would imagine - there was a lot of pollution. And the most magical thing to me as a kid was sea glass, so I wrote about that a lot.

The '90s were a party, I mean definitely maybe not for the grunge movement, but people were partying harder in the '90s than they were in the '80s. The '90s was Ecstasy, the '80s was yuppies. There was that whole Ecstasy culture. People were having a pretty good time in the '90s.

I think people are people and if their feelings are real and truthful, they can connect.

Casting ethnic characters is a very hard thing to do, but it's important. It's also interesting.

Also expressionistic filmmaking - making the audience feel like they were inside the characters' heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.

I don't make films that are easy to market, unfortunately. I think that 'Pi' was the easiest one, because we had that symbol to stick up everywhere, so that was a good gimmick, and created a good mystery, and we didn't have to do huge scale.

But steady-cams are very different than hand-helds, because hand-held gives you that verite feel.

Noah was this sort of patron saint in my life. When I finished Pi and I started to think about what was next, I was like, "Wow, it's interesting that no one has done a film of one of the greatest stories ever told." Even if you're not a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian, you likely have a flood story in your culture.

You can't look at the Noah story and not see some kind of environmental connection. The Creator wants to start over. He wants creation to be given a shot at survival, and the true enemy is the wickedness of men.

I grew up in a family with two very strong women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life. I've spent a life loving women, and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to.

People have been screaming about the end of times forever, it's always the end of times. But there's just so much evidence that the world is changing so radically right now. How much can the world take?

I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking

I think it's important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you've got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances.

I remember the few times that happened to me in writing, where you basically start writing and you look at the clock and six hours have gone by and you're, like, "Whoa! What the hell just happened?" And that piece ends up in the final product even though the final product is three years away. It doesn't get rewritten. It came out the right way. But that's happened to me so few times in my life.

It would be nice to make a movie that other people want to make, because every one of these movies, I basically have to find the only company in the world that's willing to make it, and it's always a big challenge. I end up spending a tremendous amount of energy and time trying to get money to make these movies and it's exhausting.

Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.

I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.

I think that there's an infinite amount of places where you can stick a camera. There's an infinite amount of choices of what could be going on. There's an infinite amount of places for so many things, so you have to figure out how to do your job.

Now there is so much expertise and brainpower it's hard to be at the cutting edge of what's cool and not do something that's totally geeky.

When I go to movies I generally want to be taken to another world.

I've always wanted to introduce hip-hop filmmaking to film. There's hip-hop art, dance, music, but there really isn't hip-hop film. So I was trying to do that.

Noah is the battle of justice versus mercy. In Genesis it says that Noah was righteous in his times. You think you sort of know what righteous means, you know, if you listen to a lot of Bob Marley. According to all the biblical scholars we talked to, righteousness is the proper balance of justice and mercy. If you think of that, as a parent, you know that if you have too much justice and you're too strict, you destroy a child. If you have too much mercy, as a parent, you destroy a child as well. A big part of this movie is Noah finding mercy for man.

In seventh grade I had a magical teacher, her name was Mrs. Fried. She wore only pink, she drove a pink Mustang, and she was half out of her head. But very inspiring. And one day she said, "Take out a paper and pen and write something about peace." For some reason I wrote a poem on Noah - I don't know why I chose Noah - and it turned out it was for a contest for the UN. I ended up winning and reading the poem in front of the UN. I remember Mrs. Fried telling me, "When you write your first book, dedicate it to me." That was like, "Whoa."

I had some big ups and downs when I was in my 20s and the one thing I learned was, no matter how low it gets, something good will come along - something always comes out of that dark period.

I think it's my nature to try and make original content, and that's what I've done, is just try and approach things in an original way, and do things differently.

I hope that Requiem is better than Pi. I hope that Pi is better than my student films, and I'm hoping that I'm getting better as I get older.

I think people are people and, if their feelings are truthful, they can connect. It doesn't matter if you're an aging, 50-something wrestler at the end of his career, or an ambitious, 20-something ballet dancer.

I couldn't sleep one night and I was sitting in my office and I realized that I was an independent filmmaker.

I only want to work with actors that really get it and make it work. I didn't want it to be a star-driven thing anymore.

Right after I did 'The Fountain,' I wanted to go make a documentary or something that was less constructed - more natural. I was searching for a project, and sniffing around, 'The Wrestler' fit right in

I feel that so many sci-fi films and films in general have just become really dependent on and addicted to CGI, and that some of the big CGI films of the summer, you see these effects that look like crap. You don't know if you're watching a cartoon or something that's real. And I didn't want to fall into that trap. I really thought there was a way to use a lot of these old techniques to do some new and really neat stuff.

For too long we have been taking, and the Earth has been giving. But that free-for-all, that all-you-can-eat buffet, it's over. The salad bar is closed.

I think religion is often very different from spirituality. Religion is often about rules and people trying to control our lives who are actually very unspiritual... God can be found anywhere, and in fact, everywhere. And you don