For the few moviegoers who braved “mother!,” they’re likely spending the day still unpacking Darren Aronofsky‘s madhouse thriller. No matter what side of the fence you’re sitting on with regards to the film, there’s no doubt that it’s packed with ideas, and unafraid to provoke. However, what might surprise you is that before the writer/director turned his creative attention to a movie about the Biblical creation, toxic masculinity, and god knows what else, he was working on something far tamer.
“…after ‘Noah,’ I was working on a kid’s movie, actually. And it’s sort of based on my youth and out of my friends that I grew up with in South Brooklyn. And I was having some problems with it. I couldn’t quite break it,” he told Vulture. “And I had this other idea floating around my head, and normally that’s a very normal thing that is usually like a form of procrastination. Like, you get the great next idea and then … When I was younger I’d be very amateur and I’d go off and write that, and then you don’t get anything done. So a long time ago, I made a rule, when that happens: Just write out the idea and then put it away. And if it’s a really good idea and sticks with you, eventually you’ll get to it. So I was working on this other project for a long time, and then I sent it off to a friend to read, to get some notes. And I had a week alone while he was digesting it, and I kind of had this breakthrough figuring out how to structure [the script I’d put away]. And so I sat for about five days and I pumped [‘mother!’] out.”
So what was that movie? According to a report from Variety from 2015, it followed “a boy living in Staten Island whose drawings come to life” but budget reasons kept it from moving forward. Once Aronofsky cleared the creative cobwebs with the kids movie — which we’re still pretty curious about — he just cranked out “mother!” From there, everything moved very fast to get it in front of cameras.
“….after I finished it, I sent it to a few people and they were like, ‘Wow, there’s something here that’s kind of a reflection on what’s going on. I think you should make it.’ So then we just sent it off to Jen[nifer Lawerence] and it all sort of started really, really quickly. And it came out of a place where I was … I’ve been very, very jealous, I guess, of songwriters who in a day or in a week, they can write a song that represents an emotion. But as a filmmaker, it’s like two, two-and-a-half, three years at a minimum to get an emotion out. So I was really curious if there was a way to sort of try to capture one type of emotion and put it into something and see if it would work,” Aronofsky explained.
Certainly, “mother!” captures a certain spirit, but whether or not it works, depends on the eye of the beholder. Will that kids script be the next project Aronofsky pulls out of the shelf? Guess we’ll see.