7

DARREN ARONOFSKY

Requiem for a Dream

‘Hit them with emotion after emotion’

Darren Aronofsky burst on to the US independent scene with Pi (1998), a paranoid thriller shot on a shoestring budget. The film won him the Best Director prize at the Sundance Film Festival and Aronofsky went on to win an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. His follow-up, an adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel Requiem for a Dream (2000), won critical praise for the writer-director with a brave performance from the Academy Award winning actress, Ellen Burstyn.

Synopsis

Brooklyn, New York, an unspecified time. Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow, learns she will be making an appearance on a TV game show and, determined to drop some of her flab, starts taking weight-loss pills. Meanwhile, her son Harry and his girlfriend Marion start dealing heroin to make some money with their friend Tyrone, in the hope that they can open a clothing store. Each battles their addictions: one lands in hospital, two find prison, and the other starts a devastating new line of work.

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KEVIN CONROY SCOTT: Darren, did you get involved in any kind of creative activity when you were a teenager growing up in Brooklyn?

DARREN ARONOFSKY: When I was a sophomore in high school, fifteen or sixteen years old, we had these things called Sing. The different grades, everyone competed and put on a play: the freshmen versus the sophomores. A bunch of girls would come in as the dancers, a bunch of kids who played instruments would form a band, and some kids who thought they wanted to be actors would come in as actors; so you cast it and then you wrote it, and it had a director and a producer. And that was really the first thing I directed, I somehow convinced the producer to let me direct this little musical. I think it was written by committee, so I’m sure I had a contribution there. And we actually made a film of it – I’ve always wanted to see a videotape, but I have no idea where it is.

So I did do a little directing, but I think I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was into writing. I wrote a lot of poetry and some prose: more poetry, though, in high school. I was probably better in school at the sciences and maths, but I did both. Then when I went to college I figured I would get a good liberal-arts foundation, which was probably a smart thing to do, because you miss a lot of stuff in New York’s state school system. The education is haphazard.

You took your undergraduate degree at Harvard.

In high school I never really thought of Harvard, it wasn’t a possibility, but my guidance counsellor encouraged me, so I figured I’d try. My grades weren’t great, but somehow I got in, probably because I did a lot of interesting extra-curricular activities in high school. I was involved in a big organization that I’m an alumnus of now. It’s called the School for Field Studies and what they do is take mostly college students and some high school students and they do on-site research: science, biology, field studies. And I went with the School to Kenya, south of Nairobi, and did research on ungulates, which are animals that stand on their hooves. And I went with them to Alaska the summer after that, and spent six weeks kayaking around Prince William Sound, studying seals. So, I don’t know, I think I spent more time out of school than I did in school. And then I got to Harvard, it’s a hard place to turn down because of the name and the prestige. I graduated high school early, I had enough credits, so I left in January, when most people graduate in June, and I went to Europe and backpacked around. And I turned eighteen in Europe.

Your Before Sunrise experience …

Exactly, except I didn’t fall in love with a French girl, unfortunately. But I started off in Jerusalem and about six months later I ended up broke and sick with pneumonia in London. I hitch-hiked and saw everything.

Outside of your coursework, who and what were you reading at Harvard?

I discovered Hubert Selby Jr there. I was in Lamont Library, the freshman library, and I stumbled upon it. I also met the guy who started Pi, Sean Gullette, who was a big literary guy and he turned me on to William Burroughs in freshman year. So those writers didn’t really hit me until university, although I think I had heard of Naked Lunch in high school. A friend of mine told me that in the back of Naked Lunch they had drug recipes and it said that if you eat nutmeg you get stoned. I think we all got very sick one day … So I knew of Naked Lunch but I’d never read it, and then Cities of the Red Night was given to me by Sean and I read that, I was pretty impressed. I started writing prose after reading Selby, and I wrote a few short stories in college.

And when did you start experimenting with writing screenplays?

The summer after freshman year, I didn’t really know what I wanted but I went to NYU and took a film history class, just randomly, and a drawing class. And I remember watching Raging Bull and a bunch of other great films on the projector. Then I came back and I took a drawing class at Harvard that had a great teacher who taught you how to perceive things, how to turn three dimensions into two dimensions of drawing. We learned all these great techniques. And it just kind of blew my mind because it was a new way of using visual meaning to look at the world, a new way of analysing the world. And then in my junior year I started working on film. It was a documentary course so it was cinema-vérité. We had a bunch of film directors who started their own documentary movement, like Ross McElwee, the guy who did Sherman’s March. It’s sort of that school of filmmaking, ‘personal documentary’.

So they started our education by having us do a documentary. And then the second year of film, my senior year, that’s when I started doing narrative filmmaking. I probably wrote a screenplay, but not in script format, I just wrote it how I thought it should be written. Then I graduated from Harvard and my film teacher said, ‘You should go to the AFI because you’ll learn a lot.’ So I took a year off, didn’t do anything, went back to Brooklyn and spent the year writing; I thought I was going to write a novel. My parents said, ‘You’re not writing a novel, you’ve got to do something.’ I was just hanging out with my old friends from Brooklyn, guys who’d never left Brooklyn, which was probably not a good influence, and I ended up applying for film school because I didn’t know what else to do. And I got into the AFI and they said, ‘When you come out of here you should have a few screenplays written’, so I spent the spring writing screenplays in Brooklyn. I wrote a screenplay called Protozoa which I ended up making at AFI, which is now the name of our production company. I also adapted The Fortune Cookie which was the Hubert Selby Jr. short story. After film school I started working on a script called Dreamland, I probably spent two or three years on it, and it was a pretty miserable experience because I went round and round. I find that to be a repeating pattern amongst my friends who write screenplays. Maybe it’s actually good advice for screenwriters, that your first screenplay sometimes you can’t finish because, at least for me and a few of my friends, there’s a good idea there but the whole sense of how to structure it isn’t quite there yet. I was nowhere near budget or the possibility of having it made, so I was just trying to make it work. In some ways, before you make a film you really don’t know what you need to put in there, what it really needs to work. And you find out that, at least for me, the screenplay’s really a blueprint. There’s an old cliché that if it’s not in the screenplay it’s not in the movie. You can read my two screenplays and there’s barely anything in those screenplays that’s in the movies, because to write everything visual that’s going on in my mind or what we develop as a screenplay just wouldn’t make a screenplay. Once we get the screenplay, my team and I just rip it apart. Basically we just figure out how to tell the story with images and sound.

What’s the hardest part of writing screenplays for you?

Probably the loneliness of being in a room alone and facing the computer. And then the best part is when you actually start writing, and you forget about time.

What’s the easiest part about writing screenplays? Is there something that you find comes naturally?

I don’t think there’s anything easy about writing screenplays, [laughs] I mean, there are easier parts of the process. You break it down; first you start with an idea, then you start to flesh out the structure, and that’s a long process. I think that’s where we spend a lot of time, just figuring out the structure and figuring out all the acts and figuring out all the beats of the story. And then comes the great leap which is the first draft, I call it ‘the muscle draft’, where we just muscle it out. You don’t worry about what you’re missing, you just get through it, get to the end.

I think the best metaphor I’ve heard for screenwriting is that it’s like sculpture; in sculpture you start off with a big lump of clay and if you focus too much on the head or on the hand then that head or hand is going to be grossly out of proportion in detail and in size to everything else. And the way to do it, I think, is to carve it slowly, and to go through it over and over again and keep picking at things and getting it better and better. You find that a lot of novice screenwriters will spend years on the first act and it’ll turn into the best first act in the world, but you need to have the whole picture. I think I read an interview with George Lucas saying that the best advice he got from Coppola was, ‘Just get through it.’ And I think that is really good advice. When you sit down, just go all the way through the entire scene in one pass. It doesn’t need to be poetry each time. And sometimes poetry hits when you’re going through it, you get like a moment. It’s funny because in Pi there were things that I wrote in the first draft, the ‘muscle draft’, which I wrote in a cabin up in the woods by myself, all alone and terrified. Those creepy scenes I wrote in that first draft made it into the movie and didn’t change at all because they just worked.

Pi was an original screenplay. Can you tell me about where that idea came from?

There are ideas in Pi we were probably thinking about in college or right after college. I think when I write original screenplays I always describe myself as a tapestry maker; that’s the closest craft I can come up with. I take a lot of different threads from a lot of different places and try to weave them together; so the Kabbalah, and the conspiracy, and the paranoia, and the sci-fi and the Twilight Zone elements all came from different places. Even the idea of a spiritual element of Pi comes from my high school teacher who taught a spiritual maths class.

A ‘spiritual maths class’?

Yeah, it was a weird elective I took, and it was a really cool class – all about Pythagoras and weird math things. More like history of math class but with spiritual elements, because you know if you take the height of a circle and divide it by the radius you get pi, things like that. All those weird things just stayed with me in the back of my head. Then there was a friend of mine who worked at the Voice Literary Centre and he started to write on the Village Voice Literary Supplement, and he got sent this one manuscript by a totally paranoid guy who just saw all these numerical patterns out in the world. It became a cult book amongst me and my friends, we would just pass it round. I was also reading a lot of Philip K. Dick at the time. The Twilight Zone I grew up on, the Kabbalah stuff came from my trip to Israel after high school when I met some weird spiritual mystics. And so it all just tied together, and it was Sean Gullette the actor and Eric Watts the producer and me who wanted to make a thriller. So we just structured a very simple thriller, that’s the core of Pi – it’s just a chase film, the guy has a piece of information and two groups want it, and he’s dealing with his own personal demons. I think the initial idea of Pi was of Sean standing in front of a bathroom mirror digging into his head with an razor blade to plant a microchip. I was into the idea of microchips in the head …

When you were at film school, thinking of your future as a filmmaker, did you always see yourself as a writer-director?

Everything I was doing in film school I was writing and directing, and I enjoyed the writing process a lot. But in film school I probably had little sense of what that meant. My heroes probably aren’t writer-directors, like Martin Scorsese seems like a writer-director but he doesn’t really write his stuff. And there’s very few who actually write and direct. It wasn’t that I wanted to have a voice or something, it was more just like the only way I knew how to do it. And I enjoyed the process, I enjoyed writing the words, putting them in the actors’ mouths, and then shooting them.

After Pi and before you started doing Requiem, were you at all interested in directing someone else’s screenplay?

I’m always interested in it. We read many, many screenplays at our production company and there’s just been very few that have hooked me; that I can find a passion for. For me, making a movie takes about two or three years of your life and to wake up every day and find a passion to do something, to get out of bed and do it, there needs to be a very deep well of purpose or something that connects to me. I don’t know how people get out of bed and do it because it’s a very hard job. I wish I could do that, I would make a lot more money, but it’s just not for me unfortunately. There’s been a couple of things that have come in that we’ve been into, but usually we’re not big enough to get them. Much more established filmmakers usually get the really good scripts.

But what about creating your own original screenplays? It worked very well on Pi?

That’s what I’m doing now, and have been for the last three years – writing an original screenplay with the help of friends.

What was your method for adapting Selby’s Requiem for a Dream? How did you physically go through and adapt the material?

I started off with a great novel so that was the gift. I remember Sean never got Requiem. He was like, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I told him that I always had a lot of passion for it. I really looked at the book as a bible, I really believed in it, and I was very true to it. The first four months was taking a 480-page novel and reducing it to a 110-page screenplay. It was more finding out a structure first and then identifying which scenes belong to the structure, and how beat after beat after beat follows.

Do you have a routine that you follow when you’re writing a screenplay?

Yeah, I mean it’s become a routine to me, I remember the frustrating times of being a beginner, not really knowing the process and really having to invent everything. I was aware enough to know that those Syd Field books were evil, I was always anti-establishment enough to resist those. And I sort of developed a process which is the first job of trying to identify a three-act structure, which I do believe in. I’d love to see if there’s anything beyond the three-act structure but I think it works very well as a narrative structure of a film. And for me the narrative is my mantra, it’s the one thing I can believe in, that you can create something that works on a narrative level and it can work for almost every person on the planet. So I try to search for that perfect narrative within the material. First I do the large things of just organizing what the general structure is and then you slowly break it down beat by beat, and then I move on to index cards, which is a very useful thing. And I usually try to order the index cards with colour and try to find patterns going on within the index cards, so I can try to understand how the whole thing works. I’ll usually take a wall out in my apartment or in my office and just put them across and try to structure them on the wall to make a meaning.

So index cards are scenes?

Yeah, one card per scene. And then when the index cards are in a good place, it’s the writing and I sit there at the computer with the cards next to me, and look at the card as I do each scene.

You and Selby collaborated on the screenplay. How did this work, since he lived in LA and you in New York?

Well, Selby had written a script when the book was published in 1978. It was a hundred-odd pages and I don’t think it was a proper screenplay format but this was the seventies when that stuff was a little less known. When he sent it to me I had finished my version of the adaptation, and about seventy per cent of what he had used I had used. There were a couple of themes in the book that I really enjoyed following that he didn’t follow, and he chose a couple of others, but we were definitely both going to the same place, the same outcome. So then I just basically fused them together. From there I’d send him each draft and get some notes from him and adapt them and there were a few scenes that needed writing. Those scenes were where I needed some bridges made; I’d cut out stuff and I needed connections made.

So when it came to inventing scenes to help bridge the gaps …

I think Hubert wrote a couple of those. He wrote a few things that were original.

How many drafts of Requiem did you guys go through?

Official drafts? Three. The official one is the one that goes outside of the family. But how many did I go through? Probably twenty. Oh yeah, it’s always about twenty drafts every film, every film from short film to long films. Every once in a while from draft twelve to thirteen it might be just a small change but it is generally decent sized changes between all the drafts. I mean, the script we’re working on now I’m on draft twenty-two and we don’t have a start date.

You’ve talked about Hubert Selby Jr.’s generosity of spirit and his kindness. Was there ever a time when you two had creative differences?

You know, I don’t think so. Selby really trusted me, and really let me roam with it, and was open to an interpretation. I don’t know why, but that’s just the way he was.

When you’re writing on your own and things aren’t going well, it’s going to happen to any writer, do you ever experience any self-doubt about your writing?

Oh yeah, self-doubt is a daily exercise and that’s why you need to be passionate about the material. You’ll wake up many mornings over those two or three years and you’ll be totally at a loss as to why you’re doing this, what is the purpose. And you have to hate your project. My dad used to say, ‘A man without doubt is a man without wisdom.’ You have to constantly keep doubting yourself because otherwise you’ll get cocky and that’s what destroys you.

Peter Biskind’s book about Hollywood in the seventies, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, demonstrated that that kind of cockiness destroyed a lot of careers.

That’s a great lesson for young filmmakers. Luckily for me that book came out right after Pi. I think after Pi, before I would go to sleep I would write ten times ‘I’m just an idiot, I’m just an idiot, I’m just an idiot’ to just remind myself that it’s about the struggle and it’s about being a student, it’s about constantly learning new things. And that’s a great thing about filmmaking, about screenwriting, about making movies – is that you get to just dissolve yourself into a completely new universe every two or three years and you get to see whole new concepts of thought. That’s the exciting thing about our work; we don’t have to be pressing the same buttons for twenty-five years.

What do you do when the writing isn’t going as well as you like? Is there a certain thing?

I think there’s nothing you do; I think you just have to understand that it’s like manic depression. There are crests and troughs and you have to be able to cope. And just have to know that when you’re feeling it’s going well that at some point in the near future it’s going to be a struggle and that’s just the reality of it. When you’re down, just be kind to yourself; go buy a CD, go see a movie, wait until the inspiration comes back.

When you’re working, do you ever set yourself a page-per-day count?

I’ve done that with ‘muscle drafts’, ten pages per day. I did that on Pi just to get through it and I think it’s totally fine to just push yourself and get through it because, I’ll tell you, as you’re writing it you can say ‘This is junk, this is crap’, but when you go back and look at it, it’s totally useable, and you’ll be amazed. You know what? It’s filling up the pages and there’s something there and it’s sort of describing the idea that you’re trying to get across. Then you just have to shape it into what you’re really trying to say. It’s just really working away at it. With the chisel you can’t get that fine detail – at first you have to work with the big fat chisel, then you get to the fine work.

You are from Manhattan Beach, the neighbourhood near Coney Island where Requiem was set, however the novel was set in the Bronx. What’s the reason for the change of setting?

I asked Selby why it was set in the Bronx. He told me the characters were based on some people he had heard of in the Bronx, so for him there was no real reason. I didn’t know the Bronx, when you’re from Brooklyn the Bronx is the other side of the world. And I just knew it would set really well in the neighbourhood I grew up in, there was great translation there. That way, I would be able to show off my neighbourhood, shoot places I really knew, and it was once again going back to the root. And that for me is really important, it’s a creative root. All these details of your own youth, and all the locations I chose for Requiem all meant something to me; and because they mean something to you, you know how to photograph them. So it’s kind of like cheating.

So, for example, where Harry and Marion kiss on the beach, you used to go there as a teenager?

Yeah, exactly.

So, thinking of that in your head when you’re writing the screenplay, does that help you describe the moment better or is it more to help you shoot the film?

More to shoot the film. I might have chosen the locations in my head but they don’t really come into it until later. Like that scene when they’re out on the rocks, I’ve spent many hours of my life out on those jetties, that’s what we did. For instance, the scene where they go to the top of the tower and they throw the paper aeroplanes, that’s not in the book, that’s just based on something my friends and I used to do. And in fact setting off the alarm and everything was an actual adventure that we had, and it was purely me, it was in those towers that we did that, we got chased by the police and everything. So I was able to see things from my youth, to put in things that I knew we needed in the movie but weren’t in the novel.

Music is used to great effect in the film. At what point during the writing process does the music come into play?

Clint Mansell was involved early on in the process of Pi, he wrote this overture of Max before we even shot it. I remember the day he came in with it, the whole crew was there and I went into the side office and listened to it and I brought the whole crew in and it was great. It was that slamming jungle music. And then in Requiem, before we even started shooting he put a CD of some ideas together and when the film started to get cut he started to create music and it just wasn’t working. And I actually got really scared because he was living in New Orleans at the time and I went down to New Orleans to work with him and we went back to the original CD and that’s where we found the main part of the Requiem score. All those pieces were from that original piece he wrote, so it’s interesting that those initial instincts with Clint really, really worked.

And when you were writing did you listen to any music to establish a tone for a scene or was there any stuff you would do while you were writing to help yourself?

When I write I have music always blasting, usually. During Requiem I listened to a lot of Sleater Kinney, just because I find they’re true artists; they’re not pop, they’re not trying to sell records, they’re just trying to make their music. And every time I see them live they’re an inspiration to me just because they’re out there doing really good music. But I listen to a lot of different things when I write.

I was reading the novel and there’s this great passage where it describes Harry picking his nose while high on heroin and how much he’s enjoying it, and I thought, that’s great but how the hell do you get the audience to appreciate that?

I had to cut that scene out but the point of the scene was how much he was enjoying the high, how much he was just enjoying nodding, how much he was just enjoying that thing. I didn’t think it was too sympathetic. But you could see how Selby paints that inner-monologue so it’s about how to pull that inner-monologue out and showing it.

Knowing that you’re adapting a book that dealt with the use of drugs, were you worried about how to dramatize the effects of these addictions?

Well, that was the challenge; that was probably the whole reason I made the film. It’s so deeply about addiction and the way Selby captured addiction and the internal struggle, it was about how to visualize that. That was the great excitement of it. I knew there was a way to visualize it, and it worked really well with what we started to develop in Pi, which was a form of subjective filmmaking, of really pushing film away from theatre and objective camera angles, helping the audience get into the character’s head.

So you were thinking when you were writing that if you had a series of extreme close-ups, and you were using a lot of visual effects in the film, that you could conquer this problem of subjectivity?

Yeah, like that scene where the food disappears, it was a way of just expressing how quickly it goes away for her character and just how one second it’s there and then it’s all gone and she’s all alone again, there’s that emptiness. And it was explained in the book but there was no visual way of expressing that.

Of the four characters, which did you have the hardest time writing?

They were all so well written in the novel, I don’t think any of them were hard to write. I think updating a bit of them was hard, like in the book Harry wants to open up a coffee shop and I sort of felt that was a bit outdated because of Starbucks and stuff. I invented Marion having a fashion background, I changed a few things.

This notion of not really being sure whether it was contemporary or period, how did you approach that in writing?

Well, the question was, ‘Do we or do we not update the dialogue?’ And we started to think about updating it and we realized that one of the great things about Selby is his ear for language. It would just be a big mistake to try to change the slang. So we decided to keep it and try to mix when it was. Clearly they’re using cordless phones so it is the nineties but we tried to give it a seventies feel with their clothing. That was completely conscious because we wanted to make it a timeless film, it doesn’t matter if it’s the eighties or the nineties, it’s addiction and it could be any time.

Was this also why you didn’t see much of the background of the film’s locations?

I think the film was supposed to be more wide at the beginning when it was summer and things were a little bit better; there were some landscape shots of Brighton Beach and Coney Island and stuff, but with a very conscious effort to make it more and more claustrophobic as the film progressed and to get deeper and deeper in their heads. In fact, in the third act, what we were really trying to do but didn’t pull off was to just have it all in extreme close-ups, all the size of an eyeball in the end. We couldn’t really quite tell the story that way, but that was the idea to go from wide to tight.

Did it worry you that the novel has four different characters who are all given a subjective point of view by the third person narrator? I guess, in other words, there is no clear protagonist for the audience to get behind in the traditional sense.

While structuring the film I was trying to figure out who the hero of the story is, whether it was Harry or Tyrone or Sara. And while structuring it, I sometimes used a graph to plot the ups and downs of the character, and every time something good was supposed to happen to the character, something bad happened. I started to get this upside-down arc, and then I realized that the hero of the story was not any of the main characters, it was addiction, which is the monster in the movie. Whenever something bad happened to the character, something good happened to addiction, and I started to look at addiction as an outside force that was a character. It was a monster movie, but the monster wins. So what we tried to do always in the movie was always show addiction and what addiction was doing in each scene. Make addiction part of the film.

You said that the novel has an amazing structure and it translates very well into three acts. What did you mean by that?

The novel was written like a movie. In fact, I think Selby said he was trying to write a movie, and then just started writing, and two weeks later there was this novel and that’s what it became. But I think it really has the three acts; there’s summer, fall and winter, and it really progresses over those three.

You did the character arcs for the screenplay. How does that work?

I do it all on paper. I start by putting the character’s name at the top and sort of follow the different beats of the character through the progression of the film. Sometimes I would graph it as I was telling you. I would have a graph with the time on and different events that happen and then where each character was and then I would draw with different colour pencils, so I am able to look at where each character was. It was sort of a visual representation of what was going on.

And then you took the screenplay to the Sundance workshop – was that helpful?

Yeah, it was tremendous, because the script was read by five or six established screenwriters who basically gave me notes. The main thing that came out of it was the scene between Harry and Marion on the telephone when Marion cries, because everyone felt that they needed some contact in the third act which doesn’t happen in the book; they never talk again once he leaves for Florida. So we had different discussions and there were different responses and it was interesting to see them. I got to sit with Robert Redford, he came down and met with me for two hours, and originally I was like, ‘What’s this guy gonna know? He lives up here in Utah, he’s a cowboy.’ Actually, he’s an unbelievably intelligent guy and completely identified with two or three big emotional points of the film. And one of them pointed out a moment that I didn’t realize was such a huge emotional point, and it became a seminal moment in the film for me.

Why did you start the film with the closet scene, where Harry steals his mother’s television and she locks herself in her closet?

Well the closet scene is the first scene of the book. I think it’s a great scene because it introduces the dual world of Harry and Sara being separated. And when I started reading the book and thought about translating it into a film I thought about the split screen and creating that as a grammar in the movie. It was a way of showing characters in the same scene but totally separated.

And where did Tappy, the tacky quiz show host character, come from?

Tappy was a character that I created for Dreamland, that screenplay I worked on for four years. TV was a main character in the book, but I realized that getting TV shows to licence would just place it too much in a particular time, that’s why I used Tappy instead of actual TV footage. When I first read Requiem I always put it down because it was something I was thinking about, TV addiction was something I was already writing about. In fact the novel I was writing after college was about TV addiction. So here was a character that came to represent that and his whole persona is about a way of conquering, getting control of your life, and that sort of became a metaphor for the film.

In the book it’s pretty important, this relationship they have where Sara won’t give Harry money but he’ll come in and steal the television, which is a great hook for the story and a great way of introducing the relationship. But did you ever consider changing it?

A lot of people critiqued it, saying, ‘Here are your two main characters and they’re pathetic in the opening scene, you can’t do that.’ But the hero, once again, is addiction, and addiction is brave and bold in that scene. Look at the horrible things he’s making these humans do. But whenever you try to do something a little different … I mean everyone was like ‘No, no’ about this movie. Even after it was premiered in Cannes to a standing ovation, the studio wanted to cut it. They barely released it.

Many successful literary adaptations make use of voice-overs. But you decided against that, why?

At some point we thought of voice-over. At one point there was a writer we approached to think about writing this instead of me, a guy we found who was very interested in the book and he wanted to do a voice-over and I sort of avoided that. I think it worked really well in Pi because the whole idea was to make a silent movie and have all the dialogue in his head. But this I felt was a lot to pull off.

The scene where Harry visits his mother and notices that she is on a version of drugs herself was very powerful. It is a ten-minute static scene in a film that has quite a few inserts and quite a bit of tempo and pacing. Were you worried that this scene would throw off the rhythm of a very fast film?

Well, that is the emotional heart of the film. Probably one of the other major reasons I wanted to make this film was for that scene, because when I read this scene I was just crying. It was such a beautiful scene and it’s so human, and even though I’ve never been a junkie I could identify about that generation gap and about the loneliness of a mother and separation between mother and child. I think that is the scene that gets everyone and it’s kind of the centre of the movie, it’s ten minutes long and I just loved shooting it and watching Ellen’s performance and I knew it would be great. There’s just so much going on which keeps you interested, this information that they’re not sharing.

Ellen Burstyn made a nice choice in the way she played that scene because when Harry tells her she’s got a TV set in the book she gets really excited and grabs him. But she chooses just a very tender moment and doesn’t make it such a huge gesture, it’s more like just a nice hug, like, ‘That was a sweet thing to do for me, Harry.’ It was a great choice for her, it really humanizes the character and makes her non-materialistic.

If you watch Ellen in that scene you’ll notice she then becomes very mellow. And I kind of gave her a hard time because it’s not how it’s scripted in the book. I can’t figure it out but I really like the choice she made there. So when he hears something, and in the book I still remember the whole thing where he heard something and couldn’t figure out what it was: What is that noise? And then he realizes it’s her teeth grinding. So we created a camera move where we went around, crossing the line, and ended up on the other side of their faces. For me, I put us on the dark side of their faces. This is scripted exactly as it is in the book.

That’s quite an interesting moment for him too as a character because that’s obviously the path he’s going down, the path of drug addiction.

Exactly, but he’s just ignoring it.

So he can see it in his mother, but he can’t see it in himself.

Exactly. It’s one of the only true points in the film where the characters are really saying what’s really going on. In fact, I was concerned a little, Ellen and I talked about this, it suddenly made her a lot more intelligent than she is anywhere else, it’s almost the writer of the novel writing what’s really going on. It’s a little like breaking character because it’s an incredibly honest real moment but sometimes we have those. And I think Ellen’s performance takes you right across any worry about that. It’s a beautiful thing, the way a performance can do that to the writing, I always think that, how the blocking just sort of created itself on the set. We were running out of time and we just put the light in between them.

And the empty chair between them is where the father would have been sitting.

Yeah, the three seats.

What’s so true about what’s going on in his life is that if he was listening to anything his mother was saying he’d know that the part to pay attention to wasn’t the drugs, it’s the fact that she was lonely. If he was to take care of that in some way or another the other problems would probably go away.

And that is the big scene that Redford was into, the big, emotional moment there. How lonely it is. It was just about how heroin makes it all right.

Harry has some success as a small-time dealer, but after the drug deal in the limo goes wrong, the film shifts into a very dark mode. That scene also sets up the last half of the film. Were you worried that the shift from good times to bad times would be too abrupt?

Well, I think the hope scene is where the turning point is, you think that things are going well, and then you see the real truth behind Sara and really what’s going on with these characters. And then you see Harry in the cab and he’s getting high just to get over his sadness, and realizes that it is no longer fun. It is an abrupt moment, everything suddenly changes. But that’s how things happen, just one day, that’s the whole point. Looking back, I think I would have covered it differently now, I would have given it a bit of a wide shot to give it a moment to establish itself.

Immediately Tyrone’s in a scene with a dealer and in a way you don’t deal with his apprehensions about getting in that car with the dealer. Is that intentional?

My whole thing is get in late, get out early. In most films, you have to see the car drive, get up to the house, cut to the house. My whole theory is that audiences are so sophisticated now they just want to get to the meat of the emotional story and you can hit them with emotion after emotion, they’re not really interested in the whole set-up. And unless you’re doing something dramatic with the set-up, the audience doesn’t need to know where the hell they are or what space they’re in; they just want to know the story.

And hopefully not make it too confusing so that the audience doesn’t shut off and put the book down or walk out of the movie or turn off the DVD – that’s the balance.

Well, if you’re a filmmaker in sixties Europe then that’s what you want.

Exactly, graphic novels do it too, where they start off in tremendous confusion and then you slowly piece them together as they go on. Alan Moore does that a lot as a writer. But for me it’s just, ‘Let’s get in it.’ If the apprehension was interesting enough to fill the fear and the tension, if I think we needed it, but that’s not where Tyrone’s coming from. He’s not coming from apprehension, he’s coming from cockiness. These guys are going out, they’ve got the drugs and they’re going for it, so apprehension may actually give away the gag, so I probably wouldn’t have chosen to do it even if I wanted to. I was going for, ‘Let’s get into the beat of it right away.’

In the book, Tyrone is all about the love. How did you update his character?

It was a tricky thing, because Selby wrote the book in the seventies and wrote their language in a kind of Blaxploitation-ish thing. And when we sent the script out to Hollywood and I sent the script out to black actors, I actually wrote a cover letter explaining that this was from Selby’s writing and that Tyrone is actually a really deeply human character; that it’s just the author of the novel trying to capture the language, it shouldn’t be perceived as a two-dimensional device, because that’s not how I perceive it. And that got a good response, because there was a big sensitivity to that in America and in Hollywood, which there should be, because there has been major exploitation. I think Selby can sometimes be accused of writing clichés, I think Sara borders on a cliché of an old Jewish lady. But I don’t think Selby’s making fun of them or abusing them for that, I think he’s just trying to find the beauty of that particular culture, Jewish or black. I think prejudice and racism is about intent. You can sit there and make jokes about all cultures and if there isn’t an intention to exploit, that’s fine. It’s just when it becomes about one culture or race being better than the other, that’s when there’s a problem.

Your use of transitions in this film is quite fluid. Are transitions something you think of a lot as a writer or does that come in with the editing?

I do think a lot of it as a writer, especially in this film: this film is all about transitions and how to get in and out of scenes. And we became very clear in opening up scenes with extreme close-ups, and getting you right into the middle of it. Because I’m a writer, there’s a definite sense of how it’s going to get cut when I make it. When we attack a scene, I picture how it’s going to be cut before we ever get to the shooting phase.

I’ve noticed a lot of Hollywood screenwriters will include expressions like ‘smash-cut’, things that get the rhythm, but then they’ll also write in camera angles.

I think there’s no need. Unless it’s telling something in the narrative, the writer shouldn’t really write where the camera is, unless it’s really important that we’re really tight on something, or if he’s trying to make a particular appeal for a character, because it has something to do with the material. That stuff turns a director off, I think.

I thought the ending in the book was beautiful.

Yes, it goes something like, ‘They stared at the grey walls and lifeless trees, and with tears falling from their eyes, they hugged each other. They stayed for an endless hour and then reluctantly but with a sigh of relief, left.’ It’s beautiful. And this is the best I could do as far as a happy ending goes. It’s a delusional happy ending …

It’s true to the character of Sara.

The book ends with Tyrone being hugged by his mother which I always thought was an interesting way to end, because in some ways Tyrone’s the one most likely to survive. At least he has all his limbs and he’s not a whore and he’s not in an insane asylum – he’s just in a prison, and one day he’ll get out. I kind of liked it, the most minor of the four characters having a private moment representing what the whole thing was about. But it just wasn’t enough – I had to put in a scene with Sara.

 

New York, New York

‘How are we going to know what’s going on in Spider’s head?’ Spider (Ralph Fiennes) reconstructs his past.