Russell Crowe, crewcut and burly in a woollen shift, arrived on set, marched to the video monitors, and planted himself behind the director. A musk of cigarettes and resentment filled the air. It was 2:30 A.M. at Brooklyn’s Marcy Armory, during an ice storm in November, 2012. The room temperature was fifty-eight, and Crowe, who plays the title character in Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical epic “Noah,” was scheduled to get really wet. He’d already shot a version of the scene outdoors, in slightly warmer conditions: Noah, soaked from the deluge, peers at a battleground where a barbaric army surges toward him, seeking shelter in his ark. But Crowe’s eye line, the place his stare fell, had been too low, so now he had to do it all over again.
Aronofsky gazed at Crowe, waiting. His eyes, slightly narrow-set in a broad face, consider the world like a hypnotist’s. When I snap my fingers, you will wake and remember my entire film. At forty-five, he can seem youthful, even delicate: he revisits every conversation that keeps him from sleeping and wears a scarf in all weathers, suggesting a susceptibility to drafts and auteur theory. But on set he is unwavering. “Russell doesn’t like getting wet, and it’s fucking cold,” he’d just told me. “I don’t want him to get sick, but”—he balanced scales—“I need the shot.”
In his deepest, most Australian voice, Crowe said, “Now, just bear with the logic—the fighting out there isn’t real.” Almost all of the sixty thousand people he was supposed to be looking at would be created by computers later. “So you could just move the fight.”
“The geography is very well established, Russell,” Aronofsky said, summoning the flat vowels of his Brooklyn boyhood. “Thank you, sir.”
Crowe stabbed a finger at the monitor: “You see how the rain makes my eyes roll back when I look up?” At the end of the shot, Noah watches a pillar of light soar to the heavens—the departing soul of one of the ark’s defenders.
“We’ll lower the rain,” Aronofsky promised, intending no such thing. As he walked Crowe toward his mark on the ark’s ramp, he was solicitous but firm, the manager of a luxury hotel guiding a volatile head of state to the elevator. Matthew Libatique, Aronofsky’s longtime cinematographer and friend, observed, “You come in with big shoes as a collaborator? Darren will take your suggestions, but he’s also going to give you a box the size of one shoe.”
As the rain bars began to shower, Crowe mustered a penetrating stare. Worry and calculation and determination shone from his eyes—he was suddenly a star. Breaking off, he shouted, “Don’t fucking do that to my eyes, all right, mate?” Aronofsky called to his crew, “Watch the eyes!,” then told Crowe, “Great, great! But you do have to look up.” The actor gritted his teeth and threw his head back, willing his eyelids open.
Crowe is just the sort of white-hot metal Aronofsky likes to beat in his forge. The director’s characters stare at the sun, slice their faces with razor blades, stab themselves with mirror shards. He weeps every time he sees Cirque du Soleil, amazed at what the human body can do; he is the ringmaster of too much. Aronofsky shot his first feature, “Pi,” the 1998 indie standout about a paranoid mathematician who ends up drilling a hole in his head, on black-and-white reversal film for its extremity of contrast; in “Black Swan,” his deliberately overwrought 2010 melodrama, the heroine, a dutiful White Swan, must locate the passionate Black Swan within in order to dance “Swan Lake.” The film seemed both stringently and pulpily uncommercial; Marco Müller, the director of the Venice Film Festival, where it débuted, called it “Bergman seen through a De Palma lens.” Tom Rothman, then the chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, still seems both proud and astonished that he planted Aronofsky’s I.E.D. in theatres: “It was a ballet film that’s a horror film where the central character is psychologically very damaged—and dies at the end!”
The film’s unanticipated success—it brought in nearly three hundred and thirty million dollars worldwide—gave Aronofsky access to new and dangerous toys. He had wanted to make the Noah story ever since he came to Hollywood. Now Paramount Pictures agreed to produce it, at a final cost of a hundred and thirty million dollars; the visual-effects budget alone was triple the entire cost of “Black Swan.” No longer would a succès d’estime count as a success. Aronofsky says that when his friend David Blaine, the magician, heard about “Noah” ’s budget, he warned him, “Don’t take that much money from anyone—then it won’t be yours anymore.”
There were grounds for concern, because Aronofsky’s vision was hardly the stuff of a standard studio epic. To begin with, the ark was not the jolly hulk of popular conception but a three-story, pitch-slathered pine box intended to resemble a coffin. The scenes on it, firelit and shot by handheld cameras, feel as intimate as a nine-figure film set on a three-hundred-cubit-long ark can. The script that Aronofsky constructed with his writing partner, Ari Handel, honored the Old Testament narrative—but that narrative is barely an elevator pitch. (Once the Lord takes against the creeping things and the fowls of the air, the rest is mostly rain.) So they added family strife, an epic battle, sci-fi—including pipe guns, six-armed fallen angels, and an explosive substance they called “tzohar”—and Darwinian evolution. When Noah tells his family the creation story, we see a time-lapse sequence of life morphing from amoebas to apes before, in a separate act, God creates man.
Paramount suggested that the film be shot in Hawaii or the Canary Islands. Aronofsky insisted on Iceland, and had his visual-effects team litter the flinty landscape with mine tailings, stacks of skulls, and metal artifacts that resembled David Smith sculptures. Aronofsky is a passionate environmentalist—in high school, he studied as a field biologist in Kenya and Alaska—and he told me, “There is a huge statement in the film, a strong message about the coming flood from global warming. Noah has been a silly-old-guy-with-a-white-beard story, but really it’s the first apocalypse.” His Noah, believing that God’s message privileges animals over men, becomes a scourging Earth First! activist. When the film’s characters call to the heavens for aid, all we see is lowering skies or wretches clinging to a crag before the swells wash them away. “It is,” Aronofsky said proudly, “the least Biblical Biblical film ever made.”
This was the director’s attempt to emerge from the art house and join his contemporaries Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Christopher Nolan as a mainstream visionary—and to show a Spielbergian touch with an epic. When Aronofsky worried that his film, “written by two not very religious Jewish guys,” might be too existential for either a mass or a Christian audience, he was reassured by the fact that Paramount’s vice-chairman, Rob Moore, a devout Christian, had said that he loved the script. Moore told me early in the production, however, “We’ll position the film using the pedigree of the cast, the visual effects, and the action.” In other words, Paramount wouldn’t lean too heavily on what audiences actually respond to in Aronofsky’s work: its stubborn, cussed Aronofskyness. Because how could it count on a crowd-pleaser from a director so suspicious of pleasure?
One of the challenges of turning the Noah story into a film is that the only conflict in the Biblical narrative is, implicitly, between Noah and God (whose impossible demands Bill Cosby famously answered with “Right. . . . What’s a cubit?”). Aronofsky was more interested in the tribulations that the Bible elides: the anguish of all the people denied room on the ark. What if one of them did get aboard—and then tried to thwart Noah’s plan? To deepen this tension, he and Handel played up the Biblical division of man into two teams: the descendants of Cain (wicked) and the descendants of Seth, including Noah’s family (righteous).
Just after soaking Russell Crowe, Aronofsky turned to submerging Tubal-Cain, a minor Biblical figure whom he and Handel had turned into Noah’s adversary. A warlord who murdered Noah’s father, Tubal-Cain combines brutality and wounded bewilderment: why does God speak to Noah but not to him? He’s played by Ray Winstone, a British character actor who is a master of the endearing thug. “Where Russell is an aikido opponent—you have to accept the force coming at you and work with it—Ray is a fun sparring partner,” Aronofsky said. He put his arm around Winstone and explained the scene: Tubal-Cain is climbing the ark with an axe, trying to hack his way in, when the flood hits. “It’s going to be ‘Oh, shit, here comes the wave!’ And then we’re going to dump a whole fucking lot of water on you, and you look around, amazed—this is the end of the fucking world!—and keep chopping.”
“When you want amazement or awe, it helps to silently work your lips,” Winstone said, his words a Cockney blur. “I say ‘cunnilingus.’ ”
“Beautiful!” Aronofsky said. After watching a take on his handheld monitor, he added an air mortar to the six buckets of water, so the actor would have to struggle to stay upright. Winstone, who got sunstroke and lost movement in his right arm during the filming, later told me, “I think Darren takes great pleasure in seeing you go through pain—you go again and again and again. He pushes you to the limit, looking for perfection.”
After watching several more takes, Aronofsky told Matthew Libatique, the cinematographer, to get even closer. In dramatic moments, the director brings the lens in extremely tight. (Ellen Burstyn, the star of his second film, “Requiem for a Dream,” told me, “I’ve never had anybody strap the camera on me before.”) Aronofsky said, “The best invention of the twentieth century was the closeup. That you could put a camera right in front of Paul Newman’s eyes and look into his soul changed storytelling.” Once Aronofsky is in close, he turns the camera around to put us into his characters’ heads. Since they’re scrabbling to get out of them, this is a disturbing place to be. “Darren can portray the inner mind better than almost anybody,” the studio head Harvey Weinstein said. “Whatever that character is feeling—the emptiness, the obsessiveness, the nightmarish—he gets it into your head.”
When Aronofsky screened “Requiem for a Dream”—a scarifying portrait of four addicts—at Cannes, in 2000, the audience’s prolonged discomfort swelled into catharsis. One of his executive producers, Nick Wechsler, began laughing hysterically during the film’s assaultive final barrage, which intercuts among the main characters as Harry has a gangrenous arm amputated, Ty is brutalized on a chain gang, Marion labors in a sex show to feed her heroin habit, and Sara convulses from electroshocks in a psych ward. When Aronofsky asked what Wechsler was laughing at, he pointed at the crowd: “Look what you’re doing to those people!” The French audience rose for an ovation that lasted fifteen minutes, overcome by the film and delighted that they’d never have to see it again.
At the Armory, Aronofsky watched as Winstone practiced steeling his jaw. “Maybe it’s two things,” he suggested. “Disbelief at what’s coming, and then defiance.” “Fuck you, you motherfucking cunt, giving me two seconds to do all ’at,” Winstone said. “I know you will amaze me,” Aronofsky said, radiating belief. Cradling his monitor, he crept so close that he was almost in the frame. When the flood hit Winstone, Aronofsky’s knees buckled, and then he surged up in unison with the actor, fighting back to life.
Aronofsky told me, “The closest I get to the unconscious is between ‘Action!’ and ‘Cut!’ When the actor is in the Michael Jordan zone, dunking high above the rim in super-high resolution, I become aware of what the camera is shooting without seeing my screen—I’m in the movie, feeling what the audience will feel.” He laughed. “And then, after ‘Cut!,’ the reality of limited time and money floods back, and I think, Fuck, can I get another hit before I’ve got to leave?”
Aronofsky writes his films on the second floor of his place in Manhattan’s East Village, at a custom-built desk of Bastogne walnut, inlaid with responsibly harvested macassar ebony and pink ivory. Twenty-five puzzles are concealed within it, cunning locks and springs and slides, and the front houses an octave of organ pipes you can play by sliding drawers in and out. As you solve the puzzles, you find hidden pieces of wood, each of which displays a few musical notes. When you put the pieces in order and play the resulting tune on the organ—an Irving Berlin song that was the first thing Aronofsky learned on the piano—it opens a secret safe: the final prize. It took him six weeks to pop the safe, and he had the plans. David Blaine told me, “The desk is a very cool thing that’s a lot like Darren himself—there’s always another twist and turn.”
Aronofsky enjoys the all-access life: introducing a speech by the Dalai Lama, or having his friend Patti Smith write a lullaby for Russell Crowe to sing in “Noah.” (Smith said she was so determined to meet Aronofsky’s expectations that “I wrote like a hundred versions of this tiny little song.”) But at his fortieth-birthday party the only celebrity present was the actress Rachel Weisz, who was then his fiancée. The room was filled by the friends he played Chinese handball with as a boy in Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach—a lawyer, a bar owner, and a gastroenterologist—and by members of his longtime production team, most of them friends from his college years at Harvard or from the American Film Institute, where he studied directing in the early nineties. (In an unconscious gesture of solidarity, Aronofsky’s team often adopts his current hair style—recently a shaved head and a thick beard—as if someone were mass-grooming them using the magnetic Wooly Willy game.) “His films are all about one character who’s very isolated—and that’s the opposite of Darren,” Ari Zablozki, the bar owner from the Manhattan Beach posse, said. “He needs people, interactions.”
When Aronofsky interviewed the famously low-key Clint Eastwood for the Tribeca Film Festival, last year, he said, “You make it seem so easy—and for me filmmaking is pain. I’m in pain the whole time. I’m in pain writing, I’m in pain shooting, and I’m in pain editing, and I just—how do you do it?” Eastwood drawled, “If it was that painful, I would consider myself somewhat of a masochist.” Away from the set, though, Aronofsky can experience a kind of withdrawal. In 1996, he wrote in his diary about going to a rave in Thailand: “The tide came in, the sun came up, everyone kept dancing; the tide went out, the sun went down, everyone kept dancing. I was miserable because I wasn’t making films.” Many of Aronofsky’s characters seek to escape themselves through drugs, either dulling the pain or opening the doors of perception. (In the new film, Noah’s vision of the ark is inspired by psychedelic tea.) When Nina, the rigid ballerina played by Natalie Portman in “Black Swan,” finally loosens up after rolling on Ecstasy, the camerawork, too, strobes and skips and melts, and we’re briefly having fun. “Darren’s not a druggie at all—he’s a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” Portman told me. “But he wanted me to try it before doing the scene. I said, ‘Just tell me what it’s like!’ ” So he did. When I mentioned Portman’s recollections to Aronofsky, he assumed an expression of exaggerated rectitude. “I would never encourage Natalie to do drugs,” he said. “Write that down. I think Google is an incredible research resource. C’mon, write that down.”
Harvey Weinstein said that, on the basis of Aronofsky’s films, “you’d expect him to be living in an attic with a door that someone shoves food under. But when he’s not making a film Darren is the kind of guy—so much fun, with a great, hearty laugh—you’d go out for a beer with and talk about kids, girls, anything but psychological obsessions.” On a recent vacation in Mexico, the director hid a rubber lizard under his older sister Patti’s pillow. After she screamed, Aronofsky cried, “That makes up for the butter!” Forty years earlier, Patti had told him to open his mouth and close his eyes—then placed a pat of butter on his tongue. He never ate butter again, and is now a semi-vegan. When he must drive, he drives a Prius, an unusual model painted Habanero orange, but much of the time he navigates the city on a scooter. It keeps people off balance: “You’re not a skateboarder, you’re not a biker, you’re not an asshole—they don’t know how to deal with it.”
It pleases Aronofsky that almost no one seems to like all his films. “ ‘Pi’ was a cult experience for the young,” he said. “ ‘Requiem’ was big with film students and drug addicts. ‘The Fountain’ appeals to those who’ve dealt with a painful or unexpected death. ‘The Wrestler’ attracted people who relate to Randy’s”—the hero’s—“outsiderness, that soulful sadness. And I don’t think the fans of ‘Black Swan’ are as committed. That’s more of a straight-up piece of entertainment.” He resists being overidentified with his biggest hit, and never revisits his old work: “My mentor, Stuart Rosenberg”—the director of “Cool Hand Luke”—“would say that watching your old films is masturbation. I did watch ‘Requiem’ later, because they turned it into a Blu-ray, and I thought, I do not know the person who made it—that’s not me anymore.”
In the mid-nineties, Aronofsky wrote down ten film ideas he wanted to pursue. All six of his films have come from that list, and all have been informed by his early years: the stress and the bloody toes his sister incurred in ballet practice became Nina’s in “Black Swan”; his parents’ cancer scares informed Izzi’s cancer in “The Fountain.” After he wrote a prose poem about Noah for his seventh-grade English teacher, Vera Fried, he got to read it over the P.A. system—“The rain continued through the night and the cries of screaming men filled the air”—and was transformed from a math geek into a writer. He rewarded Fried by giving her a walk-on in “Noah” as a one-eyed hag.
Yet whenever we were scheduled to visit his childhood home, near Coney Island, he’d disappear, sometimes for months. He worried that exposing his finite store of childhood imagery would sap its seminal force. “My parents will tell you my nickname was the Ostrich,” he said. “I don’t seem shy, but I am. Once you let all that stuff into the world, it no longer fully belongs to you.”
The final shoot for “Noah,” on a frosty late-November day in a meadow in Oyster Bay, Long Island, was a pivotal scene: the director’s first explosion. Noah’s eldest son, Shem, has built a raft to take his wife and leave the ark, preferring to brave the ocean than to remain with his increasingly genocidal father. Noah surprises them as they’re about to board and hurls a fire bomb at their raft, then cuts it loose. As Aronofsky’s special-effects crew soaked the raft with accelerants, he cried, “I love the smell of rubber cement in the morning!”
But arranging the pyrotechnics took hours, and blocking the scene for three cameras—for the first time, Aronofsky was using multiple cameras, to save time and money—took hours more. Aronofsky and Libatique, in matching black Arc’teryx parkas, wrangled with their customary intensity about the huge cranes overhead (in the shot? casting a shadow?). Even though Emma Watson, playing Shem’s wife, and Jennifer Connelly, playing Noah’s wife, had hot-water bottles under their gowns, they kept running to the heaters. Then the wave machine broke, and the raft wouldn’t drop when Crowe cut the ropes, because the hidden cable that actually held it up wouldn’t release. “This is a fucking ridiculous fucking shot,” Crowe groused, stamping his feet on the ark’s roof.
“Five hours in and no shot!” Aronofsky muttered. They hadn’t even broken for lunch, and already the light was waning. He sprinted a hundred yards through the mud to the far side of the water tank that held the raft, checked the view through a boom camera, and had the raft raised a foot, so it would be perfectly centered in the frame. Then he ran back: “Two hours of daylight—let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Douglas Booth, who plays Shem, announced, “This is Darren’s Michael Bay moment!” Aronofsky gave him a wry look.
The director intended the explosion not as mindless spectacle (or not just as that) but as an illustration of the family’s struggle to abide by divine command. As the raft burns, Shem cries to Noah, “I thought you were good. I thought that’s why He chose you!” His father replies, “He chose me because He knew I would complete the task”—wiping out humanity. Filial tensions vibrate through the film; while Handel and Aronofsky were writing it, Handel became the father of two children and Aronofsky of one, with Rachel Weisz. (Aronofsky and Weisz’s five-year engagement broke off in 2010, when she began seeing the actor Daniel Craig, whom she later married.) Aronofsky told me, “In the Bible, when Noah gets drunk and ends up naked, and Ham”—his middle son—“doesn’t cover him and gets cursed, there’s a lot of learned commentary about ‘Did Noah sodomize Ham?’ We didn’t subscribe to that interpretation, and getting into it explicitly might have been too much for our PG-13 film”—he laughed—“but we kept that fractious dynamic.”
Early in the film, when Noah refuses to find wives for his younger sons, Ham runs away. Once the deluge begins, Noah finds him frantically trying to remove an animal trap from the ankle of a girl named Na’el, whom he hopes to bring along—even as Tubal-Cain’s hordes are running to storm the ark. Noah grabs Ham and leaves Na’el to die. “That scene is the fulcrum of the movie—it’s when Noah becomes the antagonist and we’re almost rooting against him,” Aronofsky told me. “And the studio was terrified of it. They wanted a moment of empathy.” Paramount’s Rob Moore said that the studio wanted to insure that “you’ll feel like Noah has a singular focus on rescuing his son and that time is running out. You won’t feel he chose to abandon her.” Yet that wasn’t how Aronofsky shot the scene—he doesn’t give his characters excuses—or how Crowe played it. “Russell wasn’t afraid of that moment, the way a lot of actors would be,” Aronofsky said. “He was, like, No, that’s my decision, forget about the girl.”
On the set, Emma Watson, contemplating the prospect of a tzohar bomb going off ten feet away, murmured to Aronofsky, “Can we practice this?” He replied, “There is no practice. There’s only”—he called to David Poole, his special-effects foreperson, “Dave, is this safe?” Poole replied, “I’ve done seventy-four movies.” Aronofsky smiled at Watson and raised his arms in a benediction: This is the world I have made, and it is good and beautiful and reasonably safe.
Crouching in front of his bank of monitors, he murmured, “We’ve probably got one shot at this—forty-five people doing their jobs perfectly.” On “Action!,” Crowe hurled a beanbag representing the bomb, and the raft ignited so fiercely that the other actors started back. When Crowe cut the ropes, the raft dropped in synch, then drifted away, tugged by another hidden cable. Aronofsky watched the flaming scow, holding his breath, his eyes searching the frame as cameramen and actors hit their marks. “Fucking awesome, right?” he cried at last, his relief nearly epidural.
As the sun dipped behind the trees, he shook hands with the crew, saying, “Thanks for the day!” Then he told me, “O.K., one war is over. But you’re going to witness the real war in post-.”
In December, 2012, Aronofsky retreated to an editing suite near Union Square and began attacking a three-hour-and-six-minute assemblage of the film. As he talked his editor, Andrew Weisblum, through changes, trying to find a more direct and exciting path through a maze of more than seven thousand takes, he sometimes shuffled a deck of cards, pulling out the king of hearts and staring at it. He prides himself on constructing his stories so snugly that he’s never done a day of re-shoots, but there were clearly times when he longed to call everyone back into production. After they fiddled with a moment for an hour or two, he’d finally say, “Not terrible.” Weisblum told me, “It’s ‘Good,’ ‘Not terrible,’ and ‘That sucks!’ ”
Aronofsky was dissatisfied with the early scene where the boy Noah sees Tubal-Cain kill his father, Lamech. “It’s just too much information, too long,” he said. “I could do something you hate,” Weisblum offered. He made a few moves on his editing console: Noah sees his father on the ground, and then we jump cut—or “bounce in”—to a closeup of Lamech’s lifeless head. Brash cuts were a trademark of Aronofsky’s early work: in “Requiem for a Dream,” he established his characters’ compulsion to get high by repeating a rapid montage of teeth, cells, flame, bubbles, a syringe, a dilating eye, fumes, surging blood, and then a sigh of pleasure. He told me, “I was trying to get the idea of hip-hop sampling, which came from Brooklyn, into film—the power of the cut.” But not this cut, now. “Dude, I hate it,” Aronofsky said. “It works, but it’s not pure, it’s not the way the scene was conceived.”
“It’s punctuation,” Weisblum argued. “The French call it le cut Americain. It’s the direct result of shooting with multiple cameras.”
Aronofsky watched the bounce-in again, squinting. “Leave the cut for now,” he said, “and we can massage it a lot, later.” In the end, the bounce-in stayed.
Over the months, the two men put black shades over the windows, and Aronofsky rolled his office chair ever closer to the screen. The primary sticking point was the battle scene, which featured the film’s boldest conceit: the Watchers, angels whom God abandoned on Earth after they defied him by helping men. Aronofsky and Ari Handel had dreamed up these six-armed, sixteen-foot-tall creatures from a passing reference in Genesis to Nephilim, Hebrew for “giants.” The Watchers lumber about encased in rock and tar, outraged by the descendants of Cain, who turned on them. Once Noah convinces them that he’s from the righteous line of Seth, and that God has chosen him, they help him build the ark—and when Tubal-Cain and his army arrive they defend it with their lives.
Ben Snow, an executive at the effects house Industrial Light & Magic who served as the film’s visual-effects supervisor, told me, “The studio wanted lions and tigers and was very resistant to the Watchers, to these giant beings that you have to explain.” Aronofsky believed that if he could imbue them with dignity and suffering they’d become magnificent symbols of a degraded environment—outsized seagulls coated in oil. When he first watched the battle, though, it was twelve minutes and forty seconds long, and magnificence was far from view. Extras ran randomly through the rain, while stuntmen, perched atop football tackling sleds, swung sticks to simulate the swipes of the Watchers. “This is what’s going to change the most,” Aronofsky said, dolefully. “It should be six minutes, and kick-ass.”
He still wasn’t sure exactly how he wanted the Watchers to look: his early directive to the visual-effects team was “Stay away from the alien and go for a basic, six-armed, two-legged, some-type-of-head human.” Aronofsky had never worked with computer graphics on this scale, where entire scenes are digitally constructed; now three hundred and twenty visual-effects artists, mostly from I.L.M., would create not only the Watchers but also his animals, his flood, and his heavenly emanations. A long pullback shot of some twelve hundred pairs of animals entering the ark set an I.L.M. record for processing hours: it would have taken one computer more than thirty-eight years to build. (Once the digital animals come to life, Noah and his family waft them into hibernation with magic smoke, removing any suspicion that Aronofsky might be pro-zoo or pro-adorableness.)
Three months later, the scene had been pared to eleven minutes, and the Watchers, in an intermediate state of realization, resembled crusty SpongeBobs. “Yikes!” Aronofsky said, after running the sequence. “They feel way too human in their movements. O.K.—we’re going to film ballet dancers with yoga boxes taped to their arms and legs as a reference, to show how labored the movements should be. Because they ruined it. It’s just dead.” He was particularly concerned about the lead Watcher, the bearish Samyaza, who took his sufferings at the hands of men especially hard. “More emotion would help,” he muttered. “It always does.” He frowned when the Watcher dropped his war hammer and switched to hand-to-hand combat: “We need to see Samyaza’s decision to start grabbing people after his hammer breaks. Maybe he leans in a bit and his eyes get brighter?” Working with actors was one thing, working with digital zeroes and ones another. “How do you make something made out of rock and tar and energy emote?”
A few weeks later, he sought help from his composer, Clint Mansell, when he came by to discuss the score. The two men have worked together since “Pi,” and Mansell’s dissonant, pile-driving chords are a hallmark of the director’s work. They examined the scene where Noah’s family, captured by the Watchers and flung into their prison pit, gets its first look at the strange and soon-to-be-awesome beings ringed above. Mansell said the Watchers theme should sound primitive, and Aronofsky agreed, adding, “We need sort of an Ornette Coleman, free-jazz—”
“—what-the-fuck?, sound-of your-own-mind-melting—”
“—Jimi Hendrix feedback time,” the director said. “It should be tension-building, fear-evoking, and mind-expanding.”
Mansell nodded gravely: “I’ll just dip into my tension-building, fear-evoking, mind-expanding palette of sounds.”
Aronofsky fell into a brown study. “When Eric”—Watson, Aronofsky’s former producer—“saw ‘The Wrestler,’ he said, ‘Cut the first twenty minutes, because there’s no story.’ It’s the issue with all my films, because we’re setting up a world. Right now, the beginning is slow, the first twenty minutes, but after we get to the ark it’s great—right?”
Aronofsky has two traits that alarm studios. Though he is organized, conscientious, and fiscally responsible, he is also incorrigibly rampageous. In “Black Swan,” he shot Natalie Portman on a subway heading to Queens, at 3 A.M., without acquiring the requisite permits or even waiting for her contract to get signed. So it’s impossible to persuade him to adopt the studio mind-set—to persuade him, for instance, that a film should have a happy ending.
The other, related problem is that he insists that the audience come to him. Studios test films to make sure that people are comfortable with them; Aronofsky, whose great strength is creating a tone that people haven’t encountered before, wants his crowds squirming. When “Black Swan” was tested, he told me, “Fox used the scores to attack me with notes. They wanted me to cut the bird-legs thing”—the freaky moment when Natalie Portman’s legs become swan legs and then snap backward—“and the gore of Winona Ryder stabbing herself in the face. It was the best stuff in the film!” Aronofsky refused to make the suggested cuts, and argued with Claudia Lewis, the president of production at Fox Searchlight Pictures. Lewis understood that these disputes were intensified by Aronofsky’s longing to connect. “Darren has unabashed braggadocio about his work,” she told me. “But fiery conversations with him often end up in a quieter, more introspective yearning for understanding.”
In March of last year, Aronofsky screened his rough cut of “Noah” for Paramount and its funding partner, New Regency Productions. It was two hours and forty-six minutes long, filled with half-realized effects, and had only twenty minutes of music. Clint Mansell urged him to include additional “temp music,” borrowed from other films, to help sell the experience. “Darren said absolutely not,” Mansell told me. “He’s more comfortable with other people feeling uncomfortable with the film than with him feeling uncomfortable with it.”
After the screening, Aronofsky said that the performances and the story had gone over well, and that the executives had only a handful of concerns: “So, over all, a big win.” Paramount’s Rob Moore told me, “Though there were a lot of rough parts, we had no question that this was a compelling movie.” Arnon Milchan, the head of New Regency, told Aronofsky that the film had made him weep.
Then, in August, at a test screening in suburban Phoenix, the audience responded equivocally. Paramount, which had the right of final cut, asked for some radical changes before the remaining three test screenings. The idea was to see if the studio could placate the audience that had flocked to Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”—the twenty-nine per cent of Americans who, the studio’s research said, consider themselves evangelical or “Bible-minded”—even if that meant making the film less faithful to Genesis and more faithful to people’s sentimental recollections of Genesis. What if Noah, who gets drunk in the Bible, stayed sober? What if Ham, who gets cursed in the Bible, had a more upbeat character arc? Moore told me that the audience had no problem accepting the extra-Biblical introduction of Tubal-Cain as a warrior king, or with his leading an attack on Noah. “What makes the movie compelling as a piece of art is Tubal-Cain’s need to get on the ark,” he said. “But enough people had problems with him stowing away, sharing the ark with Noah’s family, that we had to test the film without that element—which Darren absolutely did not believe in.”
Aronofsky told me, “I don’t give a fuck about the test scores! My films are outside the scores. Ten men in a room trying to come up with their favorite ice cream are going to agree on vanilla. I’m the Rocky Road guy.” He added, “Problems with pacing, motivation, character development I would listen to. But I can’t respond to ‘Why do innocent people get slaughtered in the battle?’ They were trying to change the DNA of the project they had green-lit. I said to them, ‘What are you chasing? Russell Crowe is a brooding guy in every scene—that’s the movie.’ ”
Paramount assured him that this was standard process with big-budget films. “With a film like ‘World War Z,’ ” Moore said, “our screenings of it really changed the DNA of it for the better, from a very dark film to one where the third act offered the hope that people wanted to leave the theatre with—and the director came around and agreed with us.” (The director, Marc Forster, said that he wanted to change the ending even before he shot it.)
When Aronofsky refused to make the suggested edits, Paramount began putting together its own versions of the film. Arnon Milchan said, “It wasn’t the studio against Darren—nobody took the movie away from him—but when you’re spending a quarter of a billion dollars, including marketing costs, you have to think about marketing to a wide audience. And because Darren closed himself, and said ‘I’m not going to do anything other than my vision,’ Paramount had to try stuff in a heavy-handed manner.”
In 2006, when Aronofsky met Mickey Rourke for lunch in Manhattan’s meatpacking district to pitch him on playing the lead in “The Wrestler,” the aging fighter Randy (the Ram) Robinson, they were both at a low ebb. Rourke had no money and no career; Aronofsky was finishing “The Fountain,” a troubled film that ended up as a total bomb. And yet, Rourke recalls, “within thirty seconds he started reading me the riot act. He said, ‘You blew this part, and you never should have done that part, and everybody’s afraid to work with you—everyone except me. I want you for this role, because Randy had everything, and he threw it away, just like you.’ ” Aronofsky had conditions: he told Rourke that he could be nominated for an Academy Award, but only “if you do your work.” And, Rourke recalls, he said, “ ‘You can never fuck with me. O.K.? Never, ever fuck with me!’ He’s an old-style Jew gangster, and that’s why a lot of actors are afraid of him, because he won’t back down. And at the end of this tirade he goes, ‘And I can’t pay you.’ ” (Rourke got a salary of a hundred thousand dollars and asked to receive a portion of it in a brown paper bag.) Rourke admits that he inclines to laziness, but says that Aronofsky refused to allow it. “He’d pull me aside and say, ‘You can do better. I need one more.’ And then, ‘You’re still holding out—just one more.’ During the shoot, he’d call the bartender at the place I liked to go at 1 A.M. and ask to speak to me. ‘How many drinks have you had?’ ‘Come on, Darren—’ ‘One drink—one—and then go home. I’m going to call back in fifteen minutes.’ ”
“The Fountain,” which came out seven months after the two men met, was Aronofsky’s favorite film to that point. It was an ambitious epic that snaked among three time periods: in the present, Izzi (Rachel Weisz) is dying of cancer, so her lover, Tom (Hugh Jackman), searches for a cure, in mystic communion with his alter egos in the Mayan world and in the future. Or something like that. A version starring Brad Pitt had shut down in preproduction, in 2002, after Pitt withdrew, citing script issues—Hollywood code for “This doesn’t make any sense, and I’d rather go star in ‘Troy.’ ” Dan Schrecker, Aronofsky’s roommate at Harvard and his longtime visual-effects supervisor, said, “It was a drug movie. If you try to figure out what the bald guy in pajamas is doing in the soap bubble with the tree, you’re going to be confused.” Aronofsky told me, “I was reading a lot of Krishnamurti, and what came out, Eric Watson”—his producer—“said, was ‘a love poem to death.’ And I realized I expected it to make money!”
There had always been a danger that Aronofsky could go the way of Jean-Jacques Beineix after “Diva” or John Dahl after “Rounders”—that his devotion to montage and striking compositions, and his refusal to let his sense of humor leak into his work, would make him merely the world’s best student filmmaker. “The reception of ‘The Fountain’ was really, really rough on Darren,” Aronofsky’s agent, Bryan Lourd, said. “If he were a different person, he’d have drifted toward a safer project, like a superhero movie. But he kept himself vulnerable.” Aronofsky decided to keep portraying talented mortals called to self-annihilation, but—as he split with several of his usual collaborators—to film them in a looser, more handheld, more improvisational way. He would shift from playing Baroque harpsichord to leading a jazz quintet. “Early on, I was very observant of film’s rules,” Aronofsky told me. “Now I realize that audiences don’t care about that. They just want stories.” He added, “My whole thing is that the story dictates the visual style, as opposed to Alejandro Jodorowsky or Wes Anderson, where their strong style is part of every story they tell.”
Early in Aronofsky’s career, the shot—the elements in the frame—was what he cared about. Because he had only one camera on “Pi,” with its budget of sixty thousand dollars, he kept all the other characters’ eye lines tight to Max the mathematician, so it felt as if the whole film were seen from his point of view. This subjectivity was enhanced by using a “heat-cam,” which created ripples of body heat in front of the lens, and a “vibra-cam,” which shook to represent Max’s seizures. Aronofsky didn’t trust omniscience, the God’s-eye point of view.
He also didn’t entirely trust his actors. Sean Gullette, a college friend, played Max and helped Aronofsky develop the story. “Darren was very tough,” Gullette said. “There was a scene where I had to smash a cow brain in a sink, and it was foul and rotten and going to get all over my face, and I was cursing the crew as incompetent. Darren walked up and whispered in my ear, ‘You going to be a pussy now? I thought you were tough.’ I cursed him out in front of everyone, called ‘Roll’ myself—and did exactly what he wanted.”
While making “Pi,” Aronofsky took acting classes in the Meisner method. The other students were trying to open themselves to impulse; Aronofsky wanted to become unself-conscious enough to cry in class. The day he did, he said, “that’s the day I quit. I was never interested in being an actor—I wanted to learn how to speak to them.” On “The Wrestler,” he began to plan his shots after rehearsing rather than before—to capture instead of to ordain. Aronofsky had become an actor’s director, yet he didn’t relinquish his mordant edge. Rourke’s Randy Robinson was so lovable that you naturally expected him to have a “Rocky II”-like triumph, or at least a “Rocky I”-like triumph of the human spirit. You didn’t expect to see a doctor yank out staples gunned into his flesh during a match, leading to a near-fatal heart attack. And you certainly didn’t expect to see him essentially commit suicide by leaping back into the ring.
Natalie Portman, who won an Academy Award for her performance in “Black Swan”—where she, too, commits suicide in an aesthetically pleasing way—told me, “Darren was much gentler with the actors than with anyone else on his set; there was an almost paternal love. Usually, a director hates himself and projects that onto the male actor and is fighting him the whole time, and then treats female actors as an avatar. You’re either ‘The woman I wish women would be like’ or ‘The woman I hate women for being like.’ With Darren, it’s not a dream version or a projection; it’s just a character.”
That kind of clear-eyed care elicits tremendous loyalty. Rourke, who was indeed nominated for an Academy Award, said, “There was a move I had to do, a scissors kick around a guy’s neck, and I just couldn’t get it. I could have had the stunt guy do it, but I wanted to do it for Darren, to impress him. I would practice on all my time off. When I nailed it, first take, it was the most proud moment I’ve had in a movie, ever.”
When I asked Aronofsky about Rourke’s recollection, he gave a rueful shrug. “I didn’t necessarily want it,” he said. “It was (a) dangerous and (b) out of character—it was a young man’s bump. Also, it’s not perfect. If you look at it closely, there’s a little telegraphing from both of them that it’s coming. I have the curse of seeing those tiny mistakes very clearly. If I could stand a lonely room I’d be an editor.” Rourke said, “I feel for Darren—he doesn’t make life easy for himself. He’s always looking for the perfect acorn. And there is no perfect acorn.”
After six months of delays, Aronofsky took me to Coney Island. His tour included a spin on the bumper cars at Eldorado, where “guys would jack you for your quarters”; lunch at Totonno’s, whose coal-oven pizza he declared the city’s best; and a visit to the handball courts, where he shouted, “You gotta love this smell!”
“Briny and sort of decayed?” I said.
“It’s dead rat, is what it is.”
Then we went to see his childhood home, in Manhattan Beach, a few miles to the east. He recoiled at its new fake-fieldstone siding: “Jesus Christ, it is ugly! That’s not my house. No, it must be, because of this gingko tree.” The tree had heaved aside both sidewalk and telephone lines: “Look how great this fucking bad-ass gingko grew up!”
As a child, Aronofsky was watchful, “a slow, thoughtful eater,” his older sister, Patti, recalls. “We’d sit down to dinner at 5:30 P.M., and Darren would still be wrapping up when prime-time TV started.” Aronofsky’s parents, Abe and Charlotte, who were public-school teachers, noticed that he was an extra-credit sort of boy. When they took their children to look at a new house, Charlotte recalls, “Patti said, ‘Look at all those kids, I’ll have a great time playing with them.’ ” Abe took over the story: “And Darren, who was four, said, ‘You see those things coming off the roof?’ ”—meaning the drainpipes. “ ‘Where does all the water go to?’ ”
Aronofsky was the first of the Manhattan Beach posse to get a computer, the one who introduced Dungeons & Dragons: a nascent ringleader. In second grade, he and Eric Cohen created Monster Club, where they’d draw strange creatures—Aronofsky came up with Brick Man, who shot cement—and outline their origin myths. One of the unmade films in the director’s decalogue is about the Manhattan Beach posse, with Monster Club in a starring role.
Aronofsky understood that his childhood might not seem particularly unusual to anyone else; what mattered was that it continued to strike him as extraordinary. As a kid, he’d loved the way his neighborhood nestled between the mean streets of Sheepshead Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, loved navigating the local “Saturday Night Fever” culture and hip-hop culture, loved the safety amid the danger. He told me, “A lot of kids I grew up with became brokers for guys like Jordan Belfort”—the model for Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street”—“and a lot got caught up in crack. Brooklyn was just more extreme—everyone’s outcomes were polarized.” Later, studying social anthropology at Harvard, Aronofsky was known as the guy with the Brooklyn accent, representing rough but authentic.
Abe and Charlotte intended their son to be a doctor, but artists hatch from a cuckoo’s egg. In high school, Aronofsky haunted the local Video on the Bay, burning through all the Fellini and Kurosawa; it troubles him, as a matter of karma, that he still has a VHS copy of the long-defunct store’s “La Dolce Vita.” He loved “Breaking Away,” too, his sister said: “He had a passion for those character-persevering, happy-ending type of movies, which is funny, because he doesn’t really do happy endings.” When Aronofsky began making films at Harvard, he said, “I noticed that I’d rather be in the edit room than with my girlfriend—that my passion was for a great cut.” His parents were gamely supportive, but Charlotte told me, “Honestly, a movie director? Not on my list.”
In the summers, Aronofsky spent much of his time on Coney Island’s Cyclone, the rackety wooden roller coaster built in 1927. He led me to it, then cried “Bawk, bawk!” when I declined to go aboard. “Everything about myself as a filmmaker is only understandable by going on the Cyclone,” he said. “That minute and fifty seconds is unlike any other ride in the world—eight people have died on it!” (Or three.) “We would go on it sixty or seventy times a day, until we were black and blue and passing out from the hysteria—my friend Ross lost his shoes and didn’t realize it until we were a block away.” Gazing up at the wooden labyrinth, he said, “The lesson is, never bore an audience. The Cyclone gave you at least four types of excitement: the suspenseful build, as the slow, ancient motor ratchets you up that first hill; the Oh-my-fucking-God-I-can’t-believe-I’m-on-this-thing as you descend that first vertical, where the back car can whip off the track; the painful, shattering turns; and the bumpy thrill at the end, where you come in super fast and stop sharp and can’t believe you survived.”
By the fall, Aronofsky had no idea whether he would emerge as the author of “Noah.” Paramount had added a fifth test screening in December, again in suburban Phoenix. “It’s a war of attrition,” he told me. “By mid-January, picture has to lock, and either we win or we lose.” He looked at his watch, and remarked, “I’ve been engaged a year.” He had proposed to his girlfriend, a Canadian film producer named Brandon Milbradt, during Hurricane Sandy. “I’ve gotta do something about that. It’s hard when you’re in post-.”
As he waited anxiously, he trimmed the film to two hours and ten minutes, and the battle to a relatively crisp eight. In mid-November, he spent a long day at the San Francisco offices of Industrial Light & Magic, giving notes on two dozen visual effects. In a conference room, he looked at the cities and mines that I.L.M. had overlaid on a landscape he’d shot in Iceland. “There should be more toxic runoff,” he said. “Major blood trails and cattle effluent. And we need more human grid work in the shot, so it’s clear this is all because of us.” When he saw a flashback shot of the Watchers emerging from the mud after they plunge to Earth, he said, “I’m not asking for an animation change”—Paramount was watching the budget—“but could we get a feature in there, an open, screaming mouth?” He whipped his head back and forth in simulated agony.
He showed the visual-effects team a new opening that he and Andrew Weisblum had devised, with title cards that explained the Watchers and laid out the “Cain people bad / Seth people good” dynamic. For the first time, Aronofsky had shown a rough cut of his work to a number of other artists, and both the director David Fincher and the writer Michael Chabon had urged him to establish the rules of his genre-bending world early—a move that Paramount applauded. Musing aloud, he said, “The problem is, it’s a hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar film. The way I do it is let the audiences be detectives and figure out what’s going on. But here we’re just bluntly saying, ‘These are the good guys, these are the bad guys, this is a fantasy film taking place in a mythical quasi-Biblical world.’ Aesthetically and stylistically, it’s not clean, but”—he balanced scales—“narratively it allows people to relax and understand what they’re going to see.”
Ben Snow, from I.L.M., showed Aronofsky the most kinetic moment in the battle. Four months earlier, at a meeting in New York, the director had told I.L.M., “Samyaza’s three arms in the back are doing nothing—we need a whole other layer of digi-double people flying out like knee-high grass from a lawnmower as he throws and crushes. And I like the idea of a stunt arm that’s a point that could just be squashing people on their heads, like a kid squashing ants.” Now here it was: an entirely composited scene of a Watcher whirling and stamping and clubbing and kicking and smiting about twenty digital humans. “That’s fucking gory!” Aronofsky said. With a measure of chagrin, he added, “So why do I have to go to the set anymore? Next time, can’t I just show up here and see what you’ve done?”
In December, Paramount tested its least Aronofskian version of “Noah”: an eighty-six-minute beatitude that began with a montage of religious imagery, ended with a Christian rock song, and skipped the whole middle, the dramatic part of the drama comprising Tubal-Cain’s bloody machinations and Noah’s turn against his family. Rob Moore explained, “Most people do have a sense that the Noah story is a short, happy journey where Noah rescues mankind and the animals. They’re not thinking, All but eight people die.” So if that cut had tested strongly, Moore said, “who knows what would have happened?”
Yet neither that version, nor any of Paramount’s others, scored higher than Aronofsky’s rough cut had in August. Arnon Milchan, Paramount’s funding partner, said, “Darren was probably afraid that the studio’s version would look like ‘Pretty Woman’ and test like ‘Free Willy.’ But the other tests confirmed that you can’t reinvent the movie that Darren did. Once you lose the texture of his ‘Noah,’ the moral complexity, all you have is a sweet little Hollywood movie that you could make for twenty million dollars.” So Paramount declared victory and surrendered the field. In February, Aronofsky told me, “The process sucked.” But, he added, with a renewed strength born of surmounting an affliction, “I don’t know if you can find another over-a-hundred-million-dollar movie that didn’t have re-shoots. And, at this point, Paramount ninety-eight-per-cent supports everything I want in the movie. So I live and die by this version, and take full responsibility.”
The studio, stuck with a film that had scope and brawn and intensity (and one that, perforce, had a happy ending), began to put its marketing power behind it, advertising “Noah” during the Super Bowl and the Olympics. In response to the test screenings—and to some unrest in the Christian community, gleefully exacerbated by the Hollywood trade papers—it took care to introduce Tubal-Cain in its ads, and put a label on all its marketing materials, warning that “artistic license has been taken” and that “the Biblical story of Noah can be found in the Book of Genesis.” The ads also omitted the Watchers, presented Noah as a beefy Gandalf, and gave no hint of the film’s ineradicably indie soul.
For even as Aronofsky began the film by spoon-feeding the audience the rules of his genre-bending world, he had Clint Mansell unfurl a jarring, nearly hostile D chord—repeated throughout the film—that suggested the yawning gates of Hell. “It’s like Black Sabbath,” Aronofsky told me, as he supervised the recording. Mansell added, “Black Sabbath was from horrible Birmingham, England, and it got its sound because its guitar player, Tony Iommi, cut off his fingertips on a lathe as a boy, so he has to”—he mimed snapping a gnarled fist across a guitar’s neck. “I wanted that atmosphere of foundries and smog and no fingertips.”
In a final bit of character work, Aronofsky flew to Los Angeles to record Nick Nolte as the voice of Samyaza. He’d called Nolte twice to discuss the role, but never heard back, so he wasn’t entirely sure the actor—he of the dishevelled mug shot—would show. Nolte arrived at the studio in Santa Monica only fifteen minutes late. He came in slowly, a heavy man now, at seventy-three, his blue oxford shirt billowing over his pants like a caftan. Aronofsky introduced himself and explained Nolte’s first scene, when the Watchers discuss what to do with Noah and his family in the pit, and an embittered Samyaza declares, “Leave them here to rot.”
“I know that pain,” Nolte said, “because the Watchers have got no purpose—and I understand that.” After rumbling through some vocal exercises, he exploded into character, becoming a roaring bull elephant. Then he tweaked his delivery to add every nuance that Aronofsky proposed: more disgust, a heightened formality, a disenchantment with mankind.
Aronofsky raced into the control room and cried, “How fucking talented is that guy? God damn! He’s giving us character and emotion, which is what was missing. I might have to write a movie for him. Oh, it’s a shame—he’s had more work than Mickey, but he hasn’t done enough. It’s so heartbreaking.”
After a rest, Nolte told an involved story about a small role he had in “Run All Night,” a forthcoming film starring Liam Neeson. “Wow,” Aronofsky said, when the story appeared to be over. “So who’s the director?”
“No idea,” Nolte said.
Aronofsky laughed. “I hope you remember my name tomorrow. It’s Darren, by the way. Darren.” Then he led Nolte through the rest of Samyaza’s lines, pulling out shadings of wonder and fury and anguish. Patches of sweat bloomed on Nolte’s back, and soon he was soaked. “So this is your death in battle,” Aronofsky said. “You have a glorious death—Ray Winstone kills you.” As Nolte watched the scene, the director had him attack his dying line: “My creator, forgive me!” “Try begging,” Aronofsky suggested. “Great, faster.” After Nolte had played a full octave of choices, the director said, “One last one—everything you’ve got left. Beautiful!”
Nolte, gasping, seemed overcome. “Maybe I’ll get forgiven,” he said shakily.
“You O.K.?” Aronofsky said, taking his arm. “It’s just acting.”
“Lying for a living, Marlon called it,” Nolte said, bent double.
Aronofsky had what he needed, but he said, “Let’s do a war cry—but don’t blow it out, don’t destroy yourself. Not yet, not until I’ve got everything.” He smiled conspiratorially at Nolte, who grinned crookedly back. After several war cries, Aronofsky said, “Here we go—you’re speared, here’s your death.” Nolte emitted an astonishing squeal of pain and surprise. Aronofsky applauded and said, “Wow! I’ve never heard a sound like that out of you.”
“Neither have I,” Nolte said. “You make me twenty years younger.”
Aronofsky asked for “ten or fifteen hits of pain, for when you get shot and then stabbed—the pains of sharp impact, and then a deep pain.” Nolte complied, trailing off in a series of bloody gasps. “I’ve lost my lower register,” he said, clearing his throat in a vain effort to regain his Tobacco Road pitch. Then he said, “Hepburn told me artists shouldn’t marry.”
“Each other?” Aronofsky said.
“No. Other people. They love what they do—”
“—but not each other,” Aronofsky said.
“No,” said Nolte, who has been divorced three times. “I’m afraid not. We don’t.”
Aronofsky considered this idea, then shrugged it off. “I have to do one more war cry, just so I can feel that again,” he said. He stood facing Nolte, barely beyond his microphone. When Nolte roared, Aronofsky leaned in to elicit even more aggression. They stared at each other, unblinking, inches apart, as Nolte drew out his growl, on and on and on. Aronofsky gave him a sweaty hug and said, “That I’ll take to my grave.” ♦
