Quite often auteurs don’t lose sleep over whether their movie will connect with a greater audience or not. It’s always about what they want to say to the world at that given point in time. You’re either along for the ride, or you’re not.
Darren Aronofsky has built his canon on a string of edgy yet eerily grounded features, i.e., Black Swan (which just had an Imax rerelease this past weekend, grossing $850,000), The Wrestler, Mother! .. the list goes on. These have been audacious swings, and in the case of Mother! was polarizing with a rare F CinemaScore.
But don’t think that the audience is never on Aronofsky’s mind.
“(Filmmaker) Stuart Rosenberg, my mentor, use to have a sign on his desk, ‘Where is my audience now?’ I think that it’s super important for a filmmaker to constantly be making a film for your audience,” says the director, whose Austin Butler-starring comedy caper Caught Stealing, opens over the Labor Day box office weekend. “That’s our artform, it’s not for a vacuum, it’s not for an audience of one, it’s for an audience of hopefully millions, if not bigger than that. It’s so expensive to make movies.”
While critics have looked to thread a motif through Aronofsky’s work, the director’s response to that is: “I’ve always tried to challenge myself with new things whenever I can. I guess Madonna is a big influence where you just try to reinvent yourself every time, and be truthful to the story that you have to tell and try to figure out a new kind of film grammar, and try to surprise people.”
“I have noticed over the years, people kind of connect [his movies] and see themes that go through them, but there’s no conscious overlord thinking through this. It’s more like, ‘Oh, that’s a cool story. I think that sounds like a lot of fun. Let’s go for it.’ “
We talk with Aronofsky on this edition of the Crew Call podcast about his adoration for adapting Charlie Huston’s 2004 novel about a bartender/former high school baseball prodigy who becomes embroiled with myriad crime gangs and the cops in 1990s New York City in their pursuit of his punk neighbor’s multimillion-dollar loot. We also converse about why he selected Butler to star, the Black Swan Imax rerelease and its resonance, and more.
Listen to our conversation with the Oscar-nominated filmmaker below.