Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by Darren Aronofsky

I couldn't sleep one night and I was sitting in my office and I realized that I was an independent filmmaker.

To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don't think is a good ride.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.

If you ask any person on this crew what they think of Hugh Jackman they'll admit they've never seen anything like it. I'll give him an emotional note and he'll hit it every time.

I've always wanted to introduce hip-hop filmmaking to film. There's hip-hop art, dance, music, but there really isn't hip-hop film. So I was trying to do that.

I think video games and that stuff should be as violent as possible, but age-appropriate. It should be realistic. When it's not realistic you run into kids running around shooting people and not realizing the consequences.

I hope that Requiem is better than Pi. I hope that Pi is better than my student films, and I'm hoping that I'm getting better as I get older.

I know some people that have gone through serious struggles. People that were close to me, and I've seen some terrible things about people who lose it. So I think that type of pain is something that's human and that, actually, can help us look at ourselves a little bit.

Classical scores go up and down; they're kind of hysterical in a way. And movie scores are much more - they just drive and move forward, and they build and can't go up and down at that same speed. It's a big job to turn that into something that pushes the movie along.

I wasn't a big fan of social anthropology. And, luckily, that created room for me to work in visual arts because I sort of ignored my requirements. I think I was attracted to social anthropology because I liked to travel and was always interested in far-off places.

I grew up in a family with two very strong women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life. I've spent a life loving women, and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to.

I try to live my life where I end up at a point where I have no regrets. So I try to choose the road that I have the most passion on because then you can never really blame yourself for making the wrong choices. You can always say you're following your passion.

I had some big ups and downs when I was in my 20s and the one thing I learned was, no matter how low it gets, something good will come along - something always comes out of that dark period.

Casting ethnic characters is a very hard thing to do, but it's important. It's also interesting.

I'm not a comic book guy at all.

Turning 30 was when my parents both got cancer and were fighting it and beat it, but their mortality started to get to me. Everything wasn't as hunky-dory like it was.

It would be nice to make a movie that other people want to make, because every one of these movies, I basically have to find the only company in the world that's willing to make it, and it's always a big challenge. I end up spending a tremendous amount of energy and time trying to get money to make these movies and it's exhausting.

I think it's important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you've got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances.

Right after I did 'The Fountain,' I wanted to go make a documentary or something that was less constructed - more natural. I was searching for a project, and sniffing around, 'The Wrestler' fit right in.

I spent about a year and a half doing technical post work on 'The Fountain'. Although I do like the process, I think my favorite part of filmmaking is the actors.

I only want to work with actors that really get it and make it work. I didn't want it to be a star-driven thing anymore.

As filmmakers, we can show where a person's mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it.

I'd like to do a lot of different stuff. I think it's important as a creative person to keep challenging yourself and keep doing new stuff. If you end up trying to repeat yourself it's death. It just becomes boring and takes the passion out of it. You gotta find stories and characters that you really want to hang out with.

I grew up in a family with two very strong women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life.

Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused.

I've spent a life loving women and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to.

At the end of Requiem all I wanted to do was get a DV camera and just do a small film. But then the hunger comes back.

'Angel Heart' was one of my favorite films.

You hear stories about directors using manipulation to get actors to do certain things, but I think when you're working with professional actors, it's all about trust. They can do anything you want, it's just a matter of them understanding what you're looking for, and the reason why.

I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking.

When I go to movies I generally want to be taken to another world.

There's always been a lot of pressure and tension on the line. If 'Pi' didn't work out, I have no idea what my career would be. I don't think I would have gotten another shot at it. If 'Requiem for a Dream' didn't work out, they would have called me a 'one-hit wonder with a sophomore slump'.

These wrestlers aren't organized. They have no union, no pension and no insurance. You meet wrestler after wrestler who sold out Madison Square Garden ten years ago, basically running on fumes today. There's a lot of drama there.

I was a TV junkie as a kid. I am the Sesame Street generation.

Now there is so much expertise and brainpower it's hard to be at the cutting edge of what's cool and not do something that's totally geeky.

I think it's my nature to try and make original content, and that's what I've done, is just try and approach things in an original way, and do things differently.

I don't make films that are easy to market, unfortunately. I think that 'Pi' was the easiest one, because we had that symbol to stick up everywhere, so that was a good gimmick, and created a good mystery, and we didn't have to do huge scale.

For too long we have been taking, and the Earth has been giving. But that free-for-all, that all-you-can-eat buffet, it's over. The salad bar is closed.

When people think about the ark, they're always thinking about all the thousands of years of religious iconography of a ship with a bow and a deck, where Noah and the giraffes could walk around. In the actual written text it is basically described as a long, rectangular box.

In the story, which is only a few chapters long in Genesis, Noah never even speaks until after the flood - but when you have Russell Crowe, you're going to make him speak.

I've been joking that if Madonna taught us anything, you've got to reinvent yourself. I think it's important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you've got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances. I've tried to take a chance with every film I've done - I've never done it the easy way, and I think that's because that's what excites me, is making as big a mountain as I can in front of me, and just trying to mount it.

I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking

People have been screaming about the end of times forever, it's always the end of times. But there's just so much evidence that the world is changing so radically right now. How much can the world take?

Film is a great tool to play with time, going back and forth through time, or speeding time up and slowing it down and do stuff like that. That's something you can't experience in real life that you can experience on film, and it takes you to a different place.

I was 12 or 13 years old. So I started to write poetry and fiction, even though I was really into biology because my dad was a science teacher. I kept writing all those years.

I think people are people and if their feelings are real and truthful, they can connect.

You can't look at the Noah story and not see some kind of environmental connection. The Creator wants to start over. He wants creation to be given a shot at survival, and the true enemy is the wickedness of men.

I was always writing about the connection between man and nature. I grew up in a neighborhood that was right on the beach, but the beach was not like a beach you would imagine - there was a lot of pollution. And the most magical thing to me as a kid was sea glass, so I wrote about that a lot.

I remember the few times that happened to me in writing, where you basically start writing and you look at the clock and six hours have gone by and you're, like, "Whoa! What the hell just happened?" And that piece ends up in the final product even though the final product is three years away. It doesn't get rewritten. It came out the right way. But that's happened to me so few times in my life.

My god is narrative filmmaking.

Artist and illustrator R. Crumb did a whole illustration of Genesis. And he didn't go away from the text; he was totally truthful. Reading through that, I was like, "Oh, wow, it's a comic-book version of the Bible." There's a lot of heavy-duty stuff that goes on that doesn't make it into Sunday school.

Also expressionistic filmmaking - making the audience feel like they were inside the characters' heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.

I think religion is often very different from spirituality. Religion is often about rules and people trying to control our lives who are actually very unspiritual... God can be found anywhere, and in fact, everywhere. And you don

I don't think I make genre films. I think studios try to sell films as genres because they know how to do that. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't know what I make. It's sort of a pot roast, all my films.

Every film had its own grammar. And it's your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story.

But steady-cams are very different than hand-helds, because hand-held gives you that verite feel.

I think that there's an infinite amount of places where you can stick a camera. There's an infinite amount of choices of what could be going on. There's an infinite amount of places for so many things, so you have to figure out how to do your job.

Noah was this sort of patron saint in my life. When I finished Pi and I started to think about what was next, I was like, "Wow, it's interesting that no one has done a film of one of the greatest stories ever told." Even if you're not a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian, you likely have a flood story in your culture.

Noah is the battle of justice versus mercy. In Genesis it says that Noah was righteous in his times. You think you sort of know what righteous means, you know, if you listen to a lot of Bob Marley. According to all the biblical scholars we talked to, righteousness is the proper balance of justice and mercy. If you think of that, as a parent, you know that if you have too much justice and you're too strict, you destroy a child. If you have too much mercy, as a parent, you destroy a child as well. A big part of this movie is Noah finding mercy for man.

I have a team, the same team of filmmakers I worked with on 'Pi' and 'Requiem'. Which is my cameraman, and my composer, and my producer. We've all worked together for a number of films.