The Fountain

[picolas]

And the whole thing about not geting a variety of films is mainly about DVDs. I have only seen one place (an HMV ) that sells criterions and whatnot.

Future Shop sells criterions.

[Gold Trumpet]

And the whole thing about not geting a variety of films is mainly about DVDs. I have only seen one place (an HMV ) that sells criterions and whatnot.

Future Shop sells criterions.

Yea, exactly the store in Vancouver where I bought The Leopard. Seems like forever ago...

[Astrostic]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/film/jackmans-scifi-film-gets-a-cool-response/2006/09/04/1157222072099.html

Jackman's sci-fi film gets a cool response

Garry Maddox
September 5, 2006


HUGH JACKMAN'S new science fiction film, The Fountain, has divided viewers at the Venice Film Festival.

The first screening, a late-night session for the media, brought a smattering of boos and responding applause at a festival where audiences are known for making their opinions felt.

Jackman plays a scientist trying to find a cure for the cancer that is killing his wife, played by Rachel Weisz, who won an Oscar this year for The Constant Gardener.

But a time-travel element to the film was more enigmatic. Jackman's character, Tomas, is at times a Spanish conquistador searching for the Tree of Life in 16th-century Mayan culture. At other times he is a shaven-headed monk-cum-astronaut travelling to a distant nebula in the 26th century. Weisz also plays the Queen of Spain.

The director, Darren Aronofsky, who has previously directed f and Requiem for a Dream, has said The Fountain is about love and coping with mortality during three vastly different time periods.

"The desire to live forever is deep in our culture. Every day people are looking for ways to extend life or feel younger," Aronofsky said.

The film was originally have been shot in Australia with Brad Pitt in the lead role and Cate Blanchett in the Weisz role, but the plan collapsed.

Aronofsky reputedly scaled back the budget to get it made and cast Jackman after seeing him on stage as Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz.

Jackman has joked that after reading the script for The Fountain he slept outside Aronofsky's door until the director gave him the job.

"The story presents a modern myth," he said.

[MacGuffin]

Partners Weisz, Aronofsky brave film collaboration

Film collaborations between real-life partners are not always happy affairs, but Rachel Weisz and Darren Aronofsky say it is 'so far, so good' after making "The Fountain" together.

Weisz, who won an Oscar for her role in "The Constant Gardener," plays Izzi in her fiance's new film about a man in three different eras seeking to save the one he loves.

Australian Hugh Jackman plays the lead in a fantasy film about love and coming to terms with loss and death.

"I'd be honored if she'd work with me again," U.S. film maker Aronofsky told a news conference on Monday, when asked if the fact that he was engaged to the female lead might work against him.

"Who knows? I've got to call her agent and see if we can get a deal," he joked.

Director and actor Peter Bogdanovich had an unhappy career slump when he cast his then partner Cybill Shepherd in films like the 1975 flop "At Long Last Love."

Director Guy Ritchie was widely derided for film projects starring his wife Madonna, particularly "Swept Away" in 2002.

INTIMATE SCENE

Asked about his reaction to filming an intimate scene between Weisz and Jackman, Aronofsky replied:

"I'm a pervert, so I had no issue with it. I enjoy shooting sex scenes very much. She's an actress, he's an actor ... when you call 'cut', it's over."

Briton Weisz, who has a young son with Aronofsky, added: "Actually, Darren was shouting to me: 'Take his trousers off!"' during a scene in which a clothed Jackman gets into the bath with her.

Aronofsky has little experience to date of bad reviews, with his 1998 movie "Pi" and 2000 follow-up "Requiem for a Dream" widely praised. The Fountain is his first film since then.

Critics' reaction to his latest movie, however, could be more mixed after the film was booed by some in the audience during a press screening in Venice, where it is one of 21 films in the main festival competition.

The project was delayed for several years after Brad Pitt, originally cast in the leading role, pulled out, according to Hollywood trade publications.

Aronofsky used unusual filming techniques to conjure up a clear "bubble" craft drifting through space in the futuristic storyline set in the 26th century.

Rather than using only computer-generated images, his visual effects team enlisted a photographer who shoots photographs of tiny chemical reactions on a laboratory Petri dish.

"We didn't want anything to be from the inside of a computer," Aronofsky said, adding that science fiction movies had become "super-dependent" on special effects. "You don't know if you're watching a cartoon or live action."

The Fountain is due for release in November in the United States.

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Excerpt from Premiere Magazine:



Premiere: In the most futuristic scenes in The Fountain, you're floating in a biosphere bubble in deep space, talking to a tree, and your head is completely shaved. What was that like?
Hugh Jackman: I used to be called Pea Head at school. The moment I saw myself, I started laughing hysterically. All I could see were my mates going, "Pea Head! Pea Head!" I'd always dreamed of shaving it, because I love swimming, and with my head shaved, it was the most exquisite feeling.

No pangs of vanity?
Never. I like experimenting. I also had to shave my legs, chest, and arms. After the first couple of days, it became a real pain: wrists, underarms, everything.

But we hardly see your skin.
I know, but we weren't sure when we might, so I had to be ready.

How did your son like you bald?
He was pretty freaked out. I told him beforehand, "If you want, you can cut your hair off with me." He thought that was a great idea—until he saw me. Now he's obsessed with growing his hair long and never having it cut.

And shaving your head was minor compared with other things you did in that film—I think you played every possible emotion.
I haven't before, and I doubt I'll ever again, have an opportunity to do so many different things in one movie. Just to give you an example of Darren's commitment, the whole year I was on Broadway, we would meet once or twice a week. He would come with me to do research, he would send me books, I was doing tai chi, yoga. I had to do the lotus position in a scene; it took me about 14 months to get there.

What part of the research interested you most?
I watched surgeons remove a brain tumor from a woman. They told me she was going to die anyway, they were just trying to extend her life. What I didn't realize is they'd have her awake. They had her doing these video games the whole time, so they could make choices as to when to stop cutting out the tumor. The moment I met her—she had blond hair just like my wife—my blood literally went cold. All I could think of was my wife on that table. As much as I'd read the script and theorized and practiced philosophy, I knew in that moment that I was so not ready for death. It was probably the most scared I'd ever been. I remember going all cold. I couldn't look at her for a while. Then they started operating, and I cut my vision to just the brain so it became more clinical. But it certainly moved me, made me appreciate what I have in my life so much more.

What was the hardest scene to film?
The scene in space where my character finally admits, "I'm scared." I had to break down. We started first thing in the morning, and right up till lunchtime, I was just crying. Darren would stop shooting, and I couldn't stop crying. It was late in the film; I was already exhausted, almost broken. When he called, "Lunch," I thought, "Thank God." I didn't even know if I could walk to my trailer. I literally lay down on the floor, couldn't eat. At the end of lunch, Darren said, "Okay, mate, we're picking up where we left off." I almost threw up. [laughs] The first take after lunch is the one that's in the movie. What Darren wanted was, here is a conquistador, a guy who will fight and fight no matter what the odds, and here's the one point he admits, "I don't know if I can do it." Darren needed to see in my face that utter exhaustion. Well, there was no acting required. There are moments in this movie that I'm uncomfortable watching myself.

Why?
I felt emotionally as naked as I ever have been, and it happens to be on film. But I've got to tell you, I loved it. I couldn't have done any more, I don't think. And Darren was there every step of the way—not at a monitor, right by the camera.

He doesn't watch through a monitor?
Well, he does in terms of setting up the camera. God, talk about finicky. Every shot is a piece of art. He's obsessed with symmetry. I think a couple of times Matthew Libatique, the DP, wanted to head-butt Darren. We were shooting one scene in a doctor's office, and Darren kept saying, "It's wrong, it's wrong." It turned out that one of the X-ray screens was 1.5 percent off being level. No one else could see it. But Darren would not have been able to look at that in dailies, let alone in the movie. He would have dropped the shot. So he would watch things in the monitor, but when it came to the meat of the story, he was always right there.

Was that awkward during your love scenes with his girlfriend?
When Rachel and I were making out in the bath, she was naked, and Darren was sitting on an apple box next to the camera, four feet away from us. The scene as written just said we kiss, she pulls me into the bath, and it's clear we're about to make love. So she pulls me in, and we're kissing, kissing, Darren's right there, we're kissing, kissing. Eventually Rachel took off my shirt, we're kissing some more, I'm on top of her. Finally I hear Darren going, "Take his pants off!" [laughs] So no, it was never a worry for me. Darren was at pains to make me know that the film would come first; he would never make me feel like the third wheel, and I never did.

The movie is so romantic, it's almost like he wrote it to call her to him.
To me, it's a love story. She looks so beautiful in that film. I think she's extraordinary, so fantastic and vulnerable. And how she conveys that sense of accepting her death. That's a very difficult thing to play. None of us have really had to face it. It's so affecting. It goes back to that original quote in the movie about Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden because they ate from the tree of knowledge, and God hiding the tree of life. The tree of knowledge is also known as the tree of good and evil. Basically, duality. So the moment Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge, or good and evil, humans started to experience life as we all experience it now, which is life and death, poor and wealthy, pain and pleasure, good and evil. We live in a world of duality. Husband, wife, we relate everything. And much of our lives are spent not wanting to die, be poor, experience pain. It's what the movie's about.

I think the message of that Bible quote is that there is a place . . . the garden of Eden is available to everybody now, and it's a place beyond duality. Where you can recognize that there is an essential truth to life that exists beyond good/evil. And that is knowledge and God. I think occasionally all of us experience that. It may happen on a Tuesday afternoon, when all of a sudden everything feels fine, for no particular reason. Nothing's really happened, but you feel a sense of bliss.

I studied philosophy myself. Before the myth of the Garden of Eden and eating the fruit, the moment you take a bite of that apple, and you choose to live life in duality, where God is separate from you, the journey we have in life is to get back to that unity, rather than duality. So what Rachel's character realizes in the end, [is] that in a way there is no death, in the same way there is no birth—we exist for all time. Always. So she's not afraid of it, nor is she denying it. In that way, the love story exists beyond time.

True love is not actually bound by our bodies or the length of time we're alive. Love exists always. The gift of falling in love, we recognize the truth: We're all unified. It happens to us rarely in life, but it probably most often happens when we fall in love. Or when you have a child. They can cling all over you, and you're amazingly in love.

[Gold Trumpet]

Jackman's sci-fi film gets a cool response

"The desire to live forever is deep in our culture. Every day people are looking for ways to extend life or feel younger," Aronofsky said.

I'm not surprised. The more I read about this film the more I am scaling back my expectations. If this is Arnofsky's greater idea than the film could be a major dissapointment.

[modage]

let me spoil the mystery.  you wont like it.

[MacGuffin]

'I knew we were going to get attacked ... '
When Brad Pitt pulled out, Darren Aronofsky's new film looked doomed. This week it was booed at Venice. But the director and his partner Rachel Weisz tell Geoffrey Macnab why they're still smiling
Source: The Guardian
 
Late afternoon in an upstairs ballroom in the Excelsior Hotel in Venice, and Darren Aronofsky is talking about his new film, The Fountain. Two days on from its world premiere, the film has already divided audiences: at the press screening, it was booed; at its public screening the following evening, the film was given a 10-minute-long standing ovation.

Aronofsky doesn't appear surprised by the mixed reception. A thin, bespectacled figure in a striped shirt, he is in a wry, philosophical mood, pointing out that his first two features, Pi and Requiem for a Dream, experienced similarly rocky births.

"Requiem got slaughtered by the press," Aronofsky cheerily recalls. "We had a 30-minute standing ovation in Cannes and the next day Variety said I should go into therapy instead of making movies. The New York Times trashed Pi. I am totally used to it."

It's not hard to see why The Fountain has proved so contentious. A hugely ambitious story about love and death, it defies easy categorisation. At its simplest, it is a melodrama about a scientist (Hugh Jackman) who can't come to terms with the fact that his wife (played by Aronofsky's partner, Rachel Weisz) is dying of cancer. So far, so straightforward, but this is also an action movie and a sci-fi film. The narrative opens with Jackman as a hirsute, bloodthirsty 16th-century Spanish conquistador in Central America, trying to find the tree of life. With a manic glee in his eye reminiscent of Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he fights the natives and attempts to kill a Mayan witch-doctor who tells him "death is the road to awe".

On top of this, the subplot about the conquistador searching for the tree of life to save his queen is taken from a novel that Isabel (Weisz's character) is writing on her deathbed. And then there are futuristic sequences in which we see Jackman as a bald, 26th-century astronaut, looking more like Buddha than Buzz Aldrin, still trying to bring his beloved back to life.

Visually, the film is extraordinarily rich and just a touch eccentric. There are sequences showing the galaxy that rekindle memories of old Carl Sagan documentaries about the mysteries of the cosmos. Aronofsky's futuristic world, filmed without recourse to CGI, also has a freshness that carries echoes of old Georges Melies silent cartoons from the dawn of cinema.

Aronofsky doesn't apologise for the film's complexity. "I think it is a really simple story." As in the sci-fi novels that he loves, the plot simply takes some time to come into focus. "A man and a woman are in love and the woman has this tragic problem - she is going to die. The man is your typical man and he tries to fix it [her condition]. She gives him this incredible gift - she writes him a book which is a metaphor for what is going on in their life."

The Fountain has been in gestation for a small eternity. It is seven years since Requiem for a Dream, the director's last feature. Brad Pitt, Aronofsky explains, is to blame. In 2002, The Fountain was weeks away from shooting in Australia, with Pitt starring. "We started working on The Fountain in 1999. We had spent $18m - and then the lead actor quit."

Even today, the film-maker can't quite explain why Pitt withdrew. "It is like breaking up. If you break up with someone after two and a half years preparation, it is hard to say if it was one thing. It wasn't like he left the toothpaste cap off the toothpaste."

But Pitt and Aronofsky remain friends. "The only reason the film was happening was because of Brad. I think creatively we grew apart. By the time it was ready to go, he wasn't ready to go - and so it fell apart."

The Russian-American film-maker from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, made his debut feature Pi for $60,000 and still can't quite get his head around the fact that $18m was spent on the aborted first version of The Fountain. For seven months afterwards, he tried to muster enthusiasm for other projects, but couldn't get the film out of his system.

"One night I couldn't sleep. I was sitting in my office and across from me were all the books I had read for The Fountain. I realised that the film was still in my blood."

Aronofsky began to reconceive the project as a low-budget feature - something he could do without studio interference. In time- honoured fashion, the potential financiers balked at backing such an unconventional project. "Pretty much everyone in the world said no to this film several times." In the end, with Jackman and Weisz aboard, the film did attract studio backing. It was made for $30m. Aronofsky and his crew prepared just as diligently second time around. Weisz spent several weeks at cancer hospices, observing how the terminally ill are prepared for death.

The director has little patience with the American way of dying. "We spend a fortune keeping people alive who shouldn't be alive and we don't allow death in any way into the hospital setting," he says. "At 93, my grandma had a heart attack and we brought her to a hospital. They tried to bring her back three times. They broke her ribs. There is something wrong about that."

Aronofsky reveals that he began to fret about his own mortality when he reached his early 30s. At the time, his parents had become ill. "That freaked me out - to have people that you really love start to deal with big issues. I started to think about what it would mean to lose someone."

On one level, The Fountain is Aronofsky's love letter to Weisz. The first time we see her, she is shown in a huge, lambent close-up. She is constantly portrayed wearing white, as if she is some kind of Madonna-figure. "We had an intimacy that we were able to translate into work as well," he says. Weisz, who has arrived in Venice fresh from filming with Wong Kar-Wai, tells me that "who we are when we work is very different to who we are around the house". Of the curse of couples who work together, she says: "There are success stories and people who end up splitting up - but we did OK."

Aronofsky is a cerebral film-maker who throws himself into each new project as if it were his latest college course. As he puts it, Pi gave him the chance to steep himself in "math and the kabbalah". Requiem for a Dream taught him everything he ever wanted to know about drug addiction. Now, thanks to The Fountain, he is an expert on Mayan culture.

Yes, Aronofsky acknowledges, some audiences might find The Fountain outlandish. "I know we're going to get attacked by some cynics, but it is time for some sincerity and just to talk about the things that make us human."

One of the paradoxes about The Fountain is that Tom (Jackman) is so busy trying to save his wife's life that he doesn't actually have time to pay her any attention. When she asks him to come outside to see the first snow, he is too preoccupied with his work that he refuses, little realising that they won't enjoy many such other moments together. Weisz says: "For me, that is what the movie is about - the moments in life we can do something that is very simple and what can be more simple than taking a walk in the snow with someone we love? I think on our deathbeds, we're not going to regret that we didn't work more. We're just going to regret that we didn't spend more time with the people we love."

This isn't a mistake that Aronofsky seems in danger of repeating. Not so long ago, he was offered the chance to direct an episode of Lost. He was keen to take the job but he put the work on hold. At the time, Weisz was nearing the end of her pregnancy (the couple now have a three-month-old son, Henry Chance) and she made it very clear where his priorities should lie. "I didn't know what it would be like being away from a seven-month pregnant woman, but I learned quickly."

[Pozer]

let me spoil the mystery.  you wont like it.

so, SO true!

[grand theft sparrow]

Did Requiem really get even close to a 30-minute standing ovation at Cannes?  That sounds like it should have come from Brett Ratner's mouth about The Family Man or something.

[MacGuffin]

[polkablues]

Sweet whistling Jesus, that's awesome.

[Pozer]

i just got a ahold of a poster with that beautiful image above. 

[squints]

¿Dónde usted lo encontró?

[Pozer]

friend at the double u b.
i won't mention the invite to the screening on the lot.

[MacGuffin]

Fountain Wins Sloane Award
Source: SciFi Wire

Darren Aronofsky's controversial SF epic The Fountain will receive the $25,000 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, to be presented at the Hamptons International Film Festival, which takes place Oct. 18-22 on Long Island, New York.

The cash prize is awarded to a feature-length film that explores science and technology themes in fresh, innovative ways and depicts scientists and engineers in a realistic and compelling fashion.

The Fountain tells the tale of a man's efforts to save the woman he loves over the course of 1,500 years. It stars Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz and Ellen Burstyn and was written and directed by Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream). The film garnered raves in its preview screening at Comic-Con International in San Diego in July, but has been blasted by critics at film festivals in Venice and Toronto.

"Although its themes and characters sprawl over 1,000 years, from the 16th to the 26th centuries, and invoke myth and fantasy as well as science, Darren Aronofsky's powerful central story is about a contemporary scientist who tries to save his beloved wife from cancer through scientific research and experimentation," the Sloan foundation said in a statement. "In accurately depicting the enormous potential—and very real limits—of modern scientific efforts to cure disease and extend human life, this beautiful symphony on what it means to lose someone you love pushes the frontiers of time and space to reveal that humanity and mortality may be inextricable, and only art, for now, can bestow immortality."

The Hamptons/Sloan feature-film prize comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program in public understanding of science, which also includes the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals, to form part of a broader effort to stimulate leading artists in film, television and theater to create more credible works about science and technology.