The Wrestler is the fourth feature of the Brooklyn-born, Harvard-trained Darren Aronofsky. The movie is rightly talked about for the astounding Mickey Rourke performance as the contemporary gladiator coming to terms with his past and attempting to reinvigorate his professional career. The movie is very much a piece of the unpredictable, eclectic movements grounding all of the 40-year-old director’s work. I first met Aronofsky at Sundance in 1998, where his feature debut, Pi, played in the competition. I wrote about his third feature, The Fountain, here.
The Wrestler captured the Golden Lion at Venice last fall and won an Academy award nomination for Rourke. The movie is now available on standard DVD and Blu-ray. The following is a slightly compressed version of an interview we did last fall.
Light Sensitive: Did you feel more liberated with The Wrestler, coming off your previous film, The Fountain, which was a much larger and more ambitious production.
Darren Aronofsky: The process is very similar on the set. You’re putting in the same hours and you get the same intensity. When I was finishing up The Fountain, it was a very long post period, a year and a half of tech work. My favorite part of the process on a film is always my work with actors. As I was in that [postproduction], I was asking: What do we have that is just with actors. I just want to get back on set and work with actors. The frontrunner was this project.
LS: What was the genesis of The Wrestler.
DA: It was my idea I had when I graduated film school. I put together a list of ideas for films, and there were so many boxing stories, but this was a genre that nobody had ever really done a wrestling film before. I always wondered why and then years later, the producer, Scott Franklin, and I started working on it, coming up with ideas and we found [writer Robert Siegel] and brought him in on it.
LS: How did you conceive the work visually?
DA: I was taught film grammar comes out of the story and what it’s about. I could have shot The Wrestler a lot of ways, but I think it really came out of the actors for the first time. I think Mickey’s style of acting inspired my shooting. I wanted to create as much freedom as possible for him to explore. I didn’t want to limit him to any box or any mark or any light he had to stand under. I wanted him to be free. I hired a cinematographer [Maryse Alberti] who was comfortable shooting 360. I hired a production designer [Timothy Grimes] who was comfortable working on live sets. I wanted to create a sandbox that was infinite. I wanted that visual texture, the look was a homage to seventies’ films, documentary, and also the portability of the super-16 was just very important.
LS: At the start, you photograph Mickey almost constantly from behind. It’s as if we’re wired into his consciousness.
DA: Because the whole attitude came from a documentary feel. You can’t really lead somebody in a documentary because you don’t know where they’re going. That was a natural place to put the camera. As we were shooting, I realized this would be really cool to use this because Mickey’s character is the hero of the film and we’re going to look at him a lot, we might as well start off with a question mark.
LS: The backstage milieu is terrific, the sense of camaraderie and playfulness. I loved the scene of wrestlers their moves in advance.
DA: Because of the budget, I tried to make things as real as possible. I cast real wrestlers and put on real wrestling promotions. The wrestlers all knew that a movie was happening and that there was a camera there, but I asked them to do what they normally do and we just captured it like a documentary. We threw Mickey into the middle of it and watched what happened.
LS: If you’re a certain age, like if you remember the theatrical releases of movies such as Diner or Body Heat, you remember what a great actor Mickey Rourke was.
DA: Absolutely. Angel Heart. Barfly. He was a tremendous actor, and that’s why I cast him. I was such a big fan. What’s interesting is that all the love that has come out towards Mickey since the film has emerged. I just realized how many closet Mickey fans there were out, people that were big fans of his work back then, and they’re excited to see good work from him again.
LS: What was his reaction when you first proposed the part.
DA: I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.
But I was pretty straightforward with him. Just because of his reputation for being difficult, I wanted to be as upfront as possible about what we were doing. I told him: we’re doing a very low-budget film, which means that we’re going to have extremely limited resources. What I remember about him is that he was fully aware of where he was. He was conscious of what had happened to his career and to his life; he didn’t like it and he wanted to be back at work. Because of Mickey’s self-awareness and self-consciousness, I had the confidence that there was a sane person there that you could reason with. That proved to be the point. We had some difficult times, but I could always reach the soul of the man.
LS: The scene on the boardwalk with his estranged daughter, Evan Rachel Wood, where he breaks down, is very powerful.
DA: We all knew the day was coming. It was a very heavy day for Mickey, because it takes a lot for him to get there emotionally. It takes him a couple of days. He gets nervous, or he gets concerned. We got to the day [of the shoot], and we tried to as gently as possible to get to the time of the day when the lighting would be consistent enough. Mickey would go off to another room, sit there for a while, listen to some music, get ready and I’d say, ‘Hey Mick, let’s give it a shot.’ We did a bunch of takes. I really wanted to squeeze the sponge dry because he was ready, so we did about 10, 12 takes of it.
That final line he says, “I just don’t want you to hate me,” and that was improvised. The rest of it was scripted. And the tears happened. That just happened.
LS: The emotional and sexual dynamics of the characters played by Mickey and Marisa Tomei have a familiarity about them, but there’s also a wounded pride, an emotional vulnerability that’s very bracing.
DA: When we were developing the script, [Marisa’s character] is a stripper, and I’m making an independent film about a stripper, you get very nervous because it could very easily become a cliché. I couldn’t get away from it because of the similarities between strippers and wrestlers.
When we started to develop it, we realized both have stage names. They both create a fantasy for the audience, they both work the stage with their body, which is their art and age is the enemy of their art. This whole line between real and fake, how a stripper creates a fantasy, between a wrestler, who plays a superhero inside the ring and Clark Kent outside the ring, those themes were very interesting and fun to play with. It was especially true because the first thing most people think about when they hear about wrestling is: Oh, it’s fake. It was fun to play with what is fake and what is real.
LS: In preparation for our talk, I was thinking of the ways your four films as a director might be linked.
DA: Do they?
LS: You’re confounding in a way. You defeat my auteurist argument.
DA: I see the first three films as far as a filmmaker very much as a trilogy. I joke about them being mind [Pi], body [Requiem of a Dream] and spirit [The Fountain]. More so what I mean is there is a visual premeditation to how to approach those films that kind of ended with The Fountain for me. I think I wanted to do something completely different and new with my work. That definitely started with The Wrestler.
LS: In the first three films, whether your protagonist a man or woman, there’s a sense of people falling, either horizontally or vertically.
DA: In The Fountain, he falls but then he rises up. It’s more circles. It’s hard to put it together. It’s easy to put my authored films together, because Pi and Fountain were both written by me, and there are probably a lot of similarities between them as far as character quests. Requiem, of course, was a different writer [novelist Hubert Selby Jr.], but there’s a visual connection between Pi and Requiem because they’re both very subjective movies.
Comments