Darren Aronofsky Talks Jennifer Lawrence & 'Mother!' [Interview]

Darren Aronofsky’s “Mother!” isn’t really the thriller it’s been sold as. Paramount Pictures clearly want a return on their investment – it is the movie business obviously – but the filmmaker’s latest is perhaps his most artistic film since “The Fountain” and, in many ways, his least commercial.

From this writer’s perspective “Mother!” is clearly a metaphor for the circle of life and Jennifer Lawrence is playing the embodiment of Mother Earth as it experiences the intrusion of humanity on its existence. Others believe its Aronofsky finding a way to express his regret over the end of his marriage to Rachel Weisz and there are some who see it as a crazed indictment of cults and religion. A few critics even think it’s a comedy (I guess anything can be funny to someone).

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Speaking to the auteur Thursday following the film’s New York City premiere at Radio City the night beforeI asked him if he was amused at all by the varying reactions from audiences so far.

“I mean, I don’t know if amused is quite the right word. It makes me happy,” Aronofsky says. “The whole idea, for me, of filmmaking is to start conversation. I want people to be moved and moved enough to talk about it and discuss it. That’s dope.”

That’s not to say he always wanted to film to be a Rorschach test for audience.

“I completely had intention when I made this one,” Aronofsky clarifies. “You can’t really go into a movie and just make it, cuz your actors, if they’re good actors, are going to be like, ‘Why am I saying this? What does it mean?” So you have to really know what you are doing and I always have an intent or thematic and definitely what you’re talking about [the Mother Earth metaphor] was a major part of it. But there were definitely other themes that were running through it because I don’t feel that films have to be that thin that they only carry one message, I think they have room to have a lot of richness to them. That’s what we try to do. Once you have like a genre core, which this is a home invasion film, that people can sort of rely on, I think you can hang as much ornamentation on it as you want.”

“Mother!” is Aronofsky’s first film since his passion project “Noah” hit theaters three years ago.  That biblical epic received mixed reviews while earning a profitable $362 million worldwide. He says this endeavor came to him much more quickly than some of his other films.

“I had been thinking sort of about the allegory you were talking about, which had to turn this really global issue into something in human terms,” Aronofsky says. “And then I had some personal heartbreak in my own life that I decided to blend them together into this one beast.”

He continues, “I just wanted to play the line of what’s real and what’s simple because I think I was much more interested in the symbol of the metaphors, but people come to movies to have human experience and I think you need human characters. I had to make it realistic that these were real people, and then, you know, hint that there was other stuff going on.”

The “mother” in question is played by Jennifer Lawrence who Aronofsky may or may not still have a relationship with. He says when he was writing the screenplay he didn’t think she even had the time in her busy schedule to consider the project.

“I got a phone call from her people that should go and talk to her about it,” Aronofsky says. “I’m like, ‘Is she available?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, she may be.’ I remember flying down to Atlanta totally complaining to my producers, ‘Oh, what a waste of a day. I’ve got so much work to do. I can’t believe I have to fly to Atlanta.’ Not to be any bad about Atlanta, I just don’t like flying, but I do love Atlanta. There’s a great, great, apple pie I eat down there (which I did get on the way out). Then I went to see her and I told her about the project and it was just a connection that was immediate. She loved the themes, loved the ideas, loved the story and signed on, on the spot.”

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While Javier Bardem, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer have major roles in the film, but a major character is the uniquely designed Victorian house Lawrence’s character is renovating throughout the picture. While the production filmed on a soundstage the original intention was to film in a real house because as Aronofsky notes, “You get a certain amount of realism that sometimes is hard to recreate on stage.” They weren’t able to find an adequate existing house to film in, but it did lead to the discovery of a restored, eight-sided, octagon, Victorian home in Yonkers, New York.

“I was sort of really intrigued by that because I had never heard of it, but then I did some more research and it used to be a very popular design in the Victorian times and that there was a science to it,” Aronofsky says. “The scientists back in the day felt that the octagon was the perfect shape for the brain to exist in. And, of course, the number eight represents a lot of different things in a lot of different cultures and a lot of them have to do with reincarnation and recycling and loops and so that also worked thematically with our movie. We just decided to emphasize it.”

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Moreover, although it may not seem obvious at first Aronofsky says there are more visual effects in “Mother!” than in “Noah.” They’re hidden and subtle things sometimes, but it led to an incredible complicated post-production process.

“It was a 53-week long post and the shoot was, I believe it was about 45 days? Which is kind of normal for me,” Aronofsky says. “But it was very technical. The fever dream at the end, and the kind of last third of the movie, was some of the more challenging film making I’ve ever done. I thought, I did a similar thing in Requiem for a Dream in Sarah’s apartment is flipped apart and the fridge comes alive, or like when Natalie Portman turns into a black squad. But I never really tried to maintain that fever pitch for 30 minutes, before.”

And no matter what your thoughts on the film overal that “fever pitch” sequence is hard to get out of your head which probably makes Aronofsky, somewhere, happier than anything else.

“Mother!” is now playing nationwide.