Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by Darren Aronofsky - Page 2

My hope is that I'm going to continue to make more and more challenging work that's going to come out more and more interesting. I don't know if that will always continue to happen, but every one of my films has definitely been a progression as far as complexity of narrative, character, and plot.

Unfortunately, when you're working in film, it's this huge machine, and you've got to get everyone right there, so you get kind of locked into things. I'm not sure where the artistry in film making is. It's usually that moment when you're on set and you're working with the actors. That's the time to play around, the moment of theater. And then you can shape things. But a lot of it is just managing stuff. It's upsetting because you get away from the core.

I think people are people and, if their feelings are truthful, they can connect. It doesn't matter if you're an aging, 50-something wrestler at the end of his career, or an ambitious, 20-something ballet dancer.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

I feel that so many sci-fi films and films in general have just become really dependent on and addicted to CGI, and that some of the big CGI films of the summer, you see these effects that look like crap. You don't know if you're watching a cartoon or something that's real. And I didn't want to fall into that trap. I really thought there was a way to use a lot of these old techniques to do some new and really neat stuff.

It's not that much of a difference. Basically, your job is the same as a film director. It's a triangle between creativity, money, and time. But they don't really change. You're ultimately trying to get the most creativity and time with the money that you have.

I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.

In seventh grade I had a magical teacher, her name was Mrs. Fried. She wore only pink, she drove a pink Mustang, and she was half out of her head. But very inspiring. And one day she said, "Take out a paper and pen and write something about peace." For some reason I wrote a poem on Noah - I don't know why I chose Noah - and it turned out it was for a contest for the UN. I ended up winning and reading the poem in front of the UN. I remember Mrs. Fried telling me, "When you write your first book, dedicate it to me." That was like, "Whoa."

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

The whole visual language of the movie is developed way before we get to set. Especially when you're doing visual effects and you don't have a lot of money to mess around, which we didn't, you have to really preplan everything. Pretty much every shot in the film was figured out months before we got to set.

I think there's something in collaboration - the fact that you can sit there and bounce ideas off of someone. It definitely matters who the person is, because certain people... The act of collaboration, where you can talk to someone, hang out, get ideas going, there is something in that. That's similar between everyone. But I think every individual collaborator is different, because they have different brains and emotions and ways of working, so it changes. Definitely.

The only way I know as a director is to figure out what the film is about. And out of the theme and the sense of what the film is about, all those decisions start to make sense. But to find that truth within it, you have to limit your possibilities and limit your choices. That's where this visual language grows out of.

The '90s were a party, I mean definitely maybe not for the grunge movement, but people were partying harder in the '90s than they were in the '80s. The '90s was Ecstasy, the '80s was yuppies. There was that whole Ecstasy culture. People were having a pretty good time in the '90s.

CGI means, just to be clear, creating any type of image with a computer. Basically, starting off with nothing, or with images and manipulating them. The way we did it, everything was actual photographed images. A lot of that stuff was shot through a microscope of chemical reactions, yeast growing, lots of weird things, by Peter Parks. We put it into a computer and collaged it, manipulated it. Meaning we digitally shaped it to fit with other images. But there was no computer-generated imagery at all.