The Fountain

[pzyktzle]

ha. finally saw this last night. in love with the visuals of course, but have decided to reserve overall judgement for a second viewing.

[Derek237]

Good thing they fixed up the shitty artwork. I liked the movie, I didn't LOVE it, but the improved artwork gives more motivation to buy the DVD.

[MacGuffin]

http://img120.imagevenue.com/aAfkjfp01fo1i-19729/loc599/44128_fb_122_599lo.jpg

Image not working. Was the back cover of the DVD.

[Kal]

image not working here mac (at least for me)

[MacGuffin]

Just say Noah
Darren Aronofsky finally got eternal-life epic The Fountain made through sheer belief. Now he's turning to the Bible to resurrect another great survivor, he tells Ryan Gilbey
Source: The Guardian

In the Romanian mountain resort of Sinaia, two hours north-west of Bucharest, the film-maker Darren Aronofsky is contemplating the extinction of mankind. An extreme response, you might think, to a few uncomprehending reviews of his last movie, the ecological science-fiction fantasy The Fountain. After all, it has as many passionate fans as it does sniggering detractors; it's that sort of film. But the 38-year-old Aronofsky isn't in Romania to escape anything. He is accompanying his fiancee, the actress Rachel Weisz, who is here shooting a movie. And his thoughts have turned to the demise of civilisation because he is several drafts into a screenplay about Noah. I hear the narrative has an impressive arc.

Aronofsky and Noah go way back. When the writer-director was 13, he won a United Nations competition at his school in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn; it was for his first poem, a little effort about the end of the world as seen through Noah's eyes. "That story has interested me ever since," he says, squinting through his yellow-tinted shades and pulling a striped woolly hat on to his head. We are on the decking in front of his hotel, with the snow-dusted mountains spread out before us. Henry, Aronofsky and Weisz's 10-month-old son has just been whisked off on a sightseeing trip with his nanny, and all is tranquil.

The script, Aronofsky tells me, is no conventional biblical epic. "Noah was the first person to plant vineyards and drink wine and get drunk," he says admiringly. "It's there in the Bible - it was one of the first things he did when he reached land. There was some real survivor's guilt going on there. He's a dark, complicated character."

Frankly, it would be a surprise if he wasn't. Aronofsky doesn't do lightweight. His heroes tend not to be happy-go-lucky souls with a spring in their step, unless it's a chemically boosted spring, like the frazzled junkies in his adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr's novel Requiem for a Dream (2000). Take his punishing 1998 debut Pi, about a paranoid maths genius discerning numerical patterns in the stock market in between suffering sanity-eroding migraines. Or The Fountain, in which a conquistador, a scientist and an astronaut, all played by Hugh Jackman and none of them with much use for laughter, search for the secret of eternal life in a story that reaches from 15th-century Spain to deep space over 1,000 years later.

Even Aronofsky's only brush to date with mainstream material didn't dent his sombre vision. Long before Batman Begins was made, he was asked by Warner Bros to jazz up that ailing superhero franchise. "It was a hard, R-rated Batman," he reflects. "What I pitched them was Travis Bickle meets The French Connection - a real guy running around fighting crime. No super-powers, no villains, just corruption. For the Batmobile, I had him taking a bus engine and sticking it in a black Lincoln. Real low-tech geek stuff."

Aronofsky's work has been characterised by an unfashionable seriousness, but in person he is a breezy fellow. And he probably deserves his lightness of mood, after the years he spent trying, failing and trying again to get The Fountain flowing. Aronofsky first had the idea for a triptych cutting between distant past, present day and distant future before the millennium. At the same time, he conceived an audacious image - flowers bursting out of a man's face and body - that no one who has seen the film will forget. Through all the countless script revisions and production difficulties, that image survived.

"It's the essence of the film for me," he says. "New life emerging from old." As with the rest of the picture, which relies on "in-camera" effects rather than CGI, Aronofsky was determined to render that shot as organically as possible. "I wanted the skin to actually rip. We had this type of latex that shreds if you stretch it and throw water on it. We had bladders coming out, and this whole puppet bursting open." You would swear he's almost smacking his lips.

The first few times the project fell apart were down to humdrum financial reasons. Fortunately, the casting of Brad Pitt in the lead role ensured that most obstacles could be overcome. Except, that is, for Pitt's decision to bail on the film in 2002, weeks before shooting began. "I didn't see it coming," Aronofsky says, simply and quietly. Press reports cited creative differences, but he blames the way the production was structured. "I had been prepping in Australia for six months, on and off. They send films over there to save money, but you end up being thousands of miles apart from your team. Whispers started that might've created fear and doubt. Creatively, the film was always what it was. You either take that risk and do something that's 'out there', or you don't." Perhaps you read that as a polite way of calling Brad Pitt a coward, perhaps not.

Aronofsky doesn't seem overcome with rancour. "I'd had a big letdown in my 20s at film school, a huge row with the administration over procedures. I was living alone in LA, unemployed, broke, depressed. They were dark times. I was thinking: 'How do I create a place for me on this planet?' Having gone through that, I realised somehow I'd get through this, too."

When it became clear that initial attempts to recast Pitt's role were doomed, Aronofsky grabbed his backpack and travelled around China and India for a few months. On his return, he dabbled in several other projects, including early versions of the Noah script. But he couldn't get The Fountain out of his head. One night, unable to sleep, he sat in his office surveying all the books he had amassed as research for the picture. "I asked myself, 'What's the no-budget version of this film?'" Three weeks later, he had a radically pared-down draft of the screenplay, which retained the story's core themes. Rather fittingly, this film about eternal life was refusing to die. I tell him how romantic it all sounds, though he's possibly unconvinced by this. "There was a lot of pain," he smiles. "But I guess there's pain in romance too."

There was still a fair bit of begging, pleading and crying tears of blood before the studio agreed to resurrect the film on a drastically reduced budget with Hugh Jackman in the three-part lead role. After the collapse of the original production, Aronofsky had also lost his lead actress, Cate Blanchett, but was in no hurry to replace her with his own partner. No reflection, of course, on Weisz's acting abilities. "I was just dead against mixing business with personal stuff." It was Jackman's idea to cast Weisz, and when the two actors clicked instantly, Aronofsky knew it was the right choice. "Rachel and I agreed to be professional, and to not talk about the film at home. There were a few potholes, but I think it worked, pretty much."

At that point, Weisz strolls past us on her way to the film set. "I'm talking to the Guardian," Aronofsky calls out to her. "All the way out here? That's so glamorous!" she hoots. When she's gone, I ask him what he thinks her best performance has been. "The Fountain, of course," he shoots back, mock-offended. Informed that he's not allowed to choose his own film, he modifies his answer to The Constant Gardener, for which Weisz won an Oscar. "In the glimpses I've seen of things she's got coming out, like Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights, she is really pushing herself to some interesting places."

Aronofsky's relief at finally seeing The Fountain come to fruition insulated him against any negative reactions the movie prompted - such as the reports of booing at the Venice film festival last year. "When I first heard about that," Hugh Jackman told me, "I was worried for Darren. I know it's an amazing piece of work, and that Darren is a complete visionary. But the film is his baby." What actually happened was that a scuffle broke out between some audience members who loathed The Fountain, and others who considered it a masterpiece. "Darren must've been thrilled about that," Jackman said, laughing.

Indeed, Aronofsky exudes a state of serenity about The Fountain that no bad review can jeopardise. "After all I've gone through," he says, "any other negativity hardly registers. It's an extremely earnest movie, and that makes it a target. But to be cynical in these times seems to me inappropriate. The tragedies we perform on each other are so well reported. Quite clearly, the planet is dying, and we are dying on it. To find that funny, or to find Paris Hilton's partying interesting, is beyond nauseating. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with comedy. My goal, though, is to give people something they can appreciate for a long time." He smiles before making his first insincere remark in our conversation: "I haven't yet been able to pump out a teen drama. But I really do hope to one day."

Björk says: With Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, maybe it was a relief to see him portray a spiritual world that was so idiosyncratic at a time when I feel so overwhelmed by religion. It's so strange that the inner- most secret place in a person is their spiritual belief, and something as mass-produced as organised religion can just storm in there. The Fountain is not Christian or Jewish or Muslim - it's areligious; not against or with it. It's just alternative.

[Pozer]

civilisation...  characterised...  realised...  jeopardise...  organised...

does this guy's z key not work or something?

[matt35mm]

civilisation...  characterised...  realised...  jeopardise...  organised...

does this guy's z key not work or something?

No, he's just English.

[modage]

Englizh.

[Pubrick]

Björk says: With Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, maybe it was a relief to see him portray a spiritual world that was so idiosyncratic at a time when I feel so overwhelmed by religion. It's so strange that the inner- most secret place in a person is their spiritual belief, and something as mass-produced as organised religion can just storm in there. The Fountain is not Christian or Jewish or Muslim - it's areligious; not against or with it. It's just alternative.

uh.. where'd she come from all of a sudden?

[Pozer]

Björk says: With Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, maybe it was a relief to see him portray a spiritual world that was so idiosyncratic at a time when I feel so overwhelmed by religion. It's so strange that the inner- most secret place in a person is their spiritual belief, and something as mass-produced as organised religion can just storm in there. The Fountain is not Christian or Jewish or Muslim - it's areligious; not against or with it. It's just alternative.

uh.. where'd she come from all of a sudden?

journalist is English.  that's how they do.

[MacGuffin]

DVD review:

http://dvd.ign.com/articles/786/786367p1.html

[squints]

the poor transfer quality makes it hard to recommend purchasing this for your library

What?!!

[Xx]

...

[mogwai]

dvdbeaver's review of "the fountain":
"the image is briskly clean and free of annoying artifacts"

full review:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews30/the_fountain.htm

[The Red Vine]

This is quite simply one of the most thought provoking movies to be released in recent memory. I won't bore anyone with a lengthy review, but to sum it up - Aronofsky is able to balance the three stories beautifully. The visuals and performances by Jackman and Weisz help give the film a sense of over-whelming emotion.

I'm very sad the film flopped financially and received so many negative reviews.