Artist and illustrator R. Crumb did a whole illustration of Genesis. And he didn't go away from the text; he was totally truthful. Reading through that, I was like, "Oh, wow, it's a comic-book version of the Bible." There's a lot of heavy-duty stuff that goes on that doesn't make it into Sunday school.
Darren AronofskyI think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.
Darren AronofskyThe 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.
Darren AronofskyNoah 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.
Darren AronofskyCGI 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.
Darren Aronofsky