REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
EXCITING, FRANTIC, TERRIFYING AND BLEAK, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM WAS AS POWERFUL AS THE DRUGS IT DEPICTED — AND MAKING IT WAS JUST AS TOUGH. DIRECTOR DARREN ARONOFSKY TELLS EMPIRE HOW HE AND HIS CREW WENT THROUGH THE WRINGER
Aka The Discomfort Zone. Twenty years on from the debut of his harrowing drug drama, Darren Aronofsky invites us into his dreamscape.
NO DOUBT ABOUT it: Requiem For A Dream is painful. The film is flooded with hurt. It hurts to watch it. It hurt to make it. Which is as it should be — Requiem For A Dream was forged from pain.
Hubert Selby Jr, author of the 1978 novel, knew pain intimately. At 18 he was hospitalised with tuberculosis. He suffered a collapsed lung and got hepatitis. Six months before writing Requiem For A Dream he contracted pneumonia. All of this fed into the book, a compassionate exploration of addiction, and a feverish nightmare if ever there was one. Darren Aronofsky wanted his film to feel the same. He succeeded, turning Selby Jr’s richly painted interior worlds into a soul-scarring assault.
Aronofsky was 30 when he shot Requiem For A Dream in 1999. At a time when new indie voices were lighting up the cinema landscape, Aronofsky, who was offered much after his 1998 breakthrough Pi, instead made this deeply troubling trip to trauma-town, which featured a shaking, roaring fridge monster and a heroin hole in Jared Leto’s arm that had even the hardiest of viewers descending into depression.
Aronofsky welcomed the extreme reactions. “The movies that inspire me are the ones that I’m thinking about for a while,” he tells Empire. “Me and my crew always try to keep pushing ourselves, pushing the envelope. Ultimately to entertain people, and to move people, to make people feel and think.” Requiem For A Dream did all of that, and then some. But getting it to that point? There was so much pain.
ARONOFSKY WAS RAISED in Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach, his tastes formed, as he grew up, by midnight screenings of the likes of A Clockwork Orange. By the time his debut feature, 1998’s $60,000 claustrophobic maths drama Pi, won him Best Director at Sundance, he had already been planning Requiem For A Dream. The path was set after a revelatory discovery of Selby Jr’s work in the late 1980s.
“It changed my life,” he says now, at home in New York, of picking up Last Exit To Brooklyn from his university’s library. “I really related to it, and just loved the level of emotion he was able to express with the written word.” In 1991, tasked with making a short while at film school in Los Angeles, he wrote an adaptation of Selby Jr’s story ‘Fortune Cookie’, about a salesman who gets addicted to the fortunes in fortune cookies. Aronofsky got hold of Selby Jr’s phone number, then visited him at his home.
“He greeted me in the door wearing just a pair of tighty-whity underwear,” remembers Aronofsky. “He was a very slight guy, with this mouth full of teeth and a devilish laugh. When you read Selby you expect a huge, violent brute. And he handed me a Lao Tzu poem and said, ‘I just translated this.’ I couldn’t understand what was happening. Skinny guy, almost naked,
Lao Tzu — it just didn’t make any sense. And he was like, ‘Yeah, sure, go make your film.’”
During production on Pi, Aronofsky’s producer Eric Watson read Requiem For A Dream and told Aronofsky it should be their next film. Aronofsky read it and agreed, dazzled by Selby Jr giving equal weight to Sara Goldfarb’s downward spiral into diet pills and her son Harry’s narcotics problems. “He showed that the mental state inside Sara’s head was the same mental state inside Harry and [his girlfriend] Marion’s heads,” says Aronofsky. “That to me was an awesome idea. And then underneath this, the addiction to the American Dream. This addiction that things were going to be okay. Addiction to hope.” The film, he thought, could be a monster movie with an invisible monster.
Aronofsky had development deals with New Line and Miramax, but dropped all projects to get Requiem out of his system. He rented a place in Manhattan Beach and started writing, shifting the story’s location from the Bronx to Brooklyn, personalising it by implanting specific places from his life. Bolstering the script with ideas from a Requiem screenplay Selby had written himself years earlier, he would also call the author to provide further scenes to fill in some gaps. In their finished script, realised Aronofsky, addiction was the protagonist, overcoming the human spirit.
It was a brutal screenplay, and Hollywood didn’t bite. “Everyone was really excited after
Pi at Sundance. People were like, ‘What do you wanna do?’ And I would send them a copy of
Requiem For A Dream and they wouldn’t even call me back,” laughs Aronofsky. “No-one wanted to make it.” Unwavering, he and Watson raised finances independently, finding a company who gave them a budget of $5 million, and began casting. Aronofsky was blown away by both Leto, who won the role of Harry, and Jennifer Connelly, whom he cast as Marion. Connelly
“destroyed”, says Aronofsky. “It was one of the best auditions I’ve ever witnessed in my life. She tossed a chair, she just went crazy.” Marlon Wayans auditioned five times to play their friend Tyrone, each time not sleeping for three nights beforehand to give himself an appropriate aura.
As far as Aronofsky saw it, though, Sara Goldfarb was the film’s focus, emphasising the broader themes, elevating it from being a simpler junkie drama. After seeing Ellen Burstyn in a play he was set on her, but she hated the script, finding it a depressing piece of work that, she believed, nobody would want to see. “Ellen says she read Requiem and said, ‘Absolutely not. And for no money?
Absolutely not,’” says Aronofsky. “But then she saw Pi and that gave her the courage to do it.” She was impressed by Aronofsky’s debut and, reading Requiem again, became intensely invested in it, falling in love with Sara Goldfarb — and relating to her. “I have experienced loneliness,” she told The New York Times, explaining her connection. “I have experienced addiction of one kind or another: tobacco, alcohol, food, bad relationships.”
For six weeks before the shoot, Aronofsky worked through the script with the cast, but also underwent some fieldwork. He took Burstyn to the places he grew up in, introducing her to his grandmother and her friends so she could soak up the Brooklyn accent, while he, Leto, Connelly and Wayans hung out in Coney Island and went clubbing. Then, he put them through a rigorous withdrawal programme.
Tappy Tibbons, the motivational speaker who sends Sara over the edge, was Aronofsky’s creation. Tibbons proselytises his ‘Month Of Fury’, a self-help plan borrowed from one of
Aronofsky’s actor friends, who for 30 days before undertaking a job would cut out three things: red meat, refined sugar, and an element not mentioned in the film: orgasms. Aronofsky would practise it himself, and for the film he asked his young cast to do the same. “It demonstrated to them the willpower necessary to quit something, because it’s a very strong lesson you learn from that,” says Aronofsky. “Jared went above and beyond, like in everything he does — he went really, really deep.”
Leto lost 25lbs for the role but also, to gain a more intimate feel for Harry, lived on the streets for some time, befriending some addicts. “There were a couple of nights where we all went out with these junkies who were partaking,” remembers Aronofsky, “and Jared… he didn’t partake, but he got very, very close to the research, to try and understand it.” Leto was shooting up — but water rather than heroin. His new acquaintances would have been uncomfortable, he explained at the time, if they were all using needles and he wasn’t. “I remember him sticking a needle in his arm with water in it, and I’m like, ‘Dude, what the fuck are you doing?!’” recalls Aronofsky. “Anyway. That’s Jared Leto — he takes it very seriously.”
A week before filming, Aronofsky went on a date to a bar, and received a phonecall from his financiers informing him that the budget was being slashed in half. “At some point they talked to too many Hollywood people, and one of them was like, ‘Are you crazy, to invest $5 million in that movie?’ The phone rang and they said to me, ‘You have to make it for two-and-a-half.’ And I broke down and started crying. It was really weird because it was a first date and this woman didn’t know how to deal with me. I was crying, and she was trying to be nice, but she had no connection to me emotionally, or anything. Needless to say, there was no second date.” Watson, though, managed to get the budget up to $3.5 million. And with some reconfiguration, Requiem was ready to roll. It would be a rough, raw month.
IT WAS A 37-DAY shoot, in the summer of 1990, on sets and on location in Brooklyn. Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique doubled down on techniques they’d used for
Pi, strapping cameras to actors to give them focus in the midst of swirling, shaking frenzy, to further fling us inside their breaking mental states. The actors, meanwhile, had their own methods. Leto ate little, later saying that, as rewarding as it was, during filming he was miserable, “in a painful, dark place”.
“He felt that he should be super skinny, and so he went for it,” remembers Aronofsky. “He was often in a bad mood, a grouchy guy on set. It was tough, but he apologised, always. At the end of the day he did his work, and that’s all that matters.” Burstyn, 67 at the time, lost 10lbs herself late in the shoot via, she said, her “famous cabbage soup diet”, but had already suffered hardships by way of a cumbersome, 40lb fat suit, and a prosthetic neck which she often had to wear for 15 hours a day. Her skin would absorb the glue, resulting in her chest being covered in sores and bleeding, let alone the heavy camera often strapped to her. Yet she triumphed, all but becoming Sara Goldfarb.
“I had never seen acting like that,” says Aronofsky. “That type of focus and transformation and commitment and intelligence.” She wasn’t quite Method acting but, in-between takes, didn’t “come back all the way to being Ellen. We would do some crazy, intense, nightmarish sequence and then after cut, I’d have one or two notes and I’d go up to her and say, ‘Ellen?’ And almost through a heavy veil, I could see Ellen inside. I could see her soul in there. I could see her acknowledge it and absorb it and give me a yes with her eyes. It
was like talking to someone in a trance.”
The film’s emotional centrepiece is a tenminute scene in which a broken, quivering Sara lays herself bare to her son. “I’m lonely,” she tells Harry. “I’m old.” For all of the film’s technical tricks, there’s nothing as powerful as Ellen Burstyn pouring her heart out, a 67-yearold woman confessing absolute vulnerability to her son. The scene was one of the main reasons Aronofsky wanted to make the film — he cried when he read it in the book. On set, it had the same effect on others.
Burstyn later explained that she felt confronted by her own ageing process and, lost in the moment, it hit her. It was real. On the set, “big hairy grips” were sobbing, says Aronofsky. Libatique was crying so much his lens got fogged up, resulting in some of the shot being slightly out of focus. “I remember being devastated because it was the greatest performance I was ever honoured to capture,” remembers Aronofsky. He got over it, eventually. “Sometimes you just have to go with the emotion over technical perfection,” he says.
The shoot had taken something out of everyone. “There were a couple of moments towards the end where I had hallucinations,” said Leto, having fasted throughout. Connelly, meanwhile, needed to expunge. “It was really hard to go through, emotionally. It was draining, sad, and uncomfortable,” she later said of filming. “I went on vacation afterwards to Costa Rica. I floated in the ocean for two weeks to cleanse myself.” It had been an intense time for all. But there were more battles to come.
POST-PRODUCTION WENT well — Clint Mansell had created a suitably overwhelming score, with beats sampled from Bruce Lee punches in Enter The Dragon and strings provided by the Kronos Quartet. Aronofsky and his editor, Jay Rabinowitz, wanted to have the edit accelerate as the film hurtled towards its montage of hell, in which Sara undergoes shock treatment, Harry injects more filth into the stagnating abyss on his arm, Marion finds herself in a depraved apocalypse, and Tyrone breaks down in prison. But the threeminute climax, with its rush of intensity and a double-headed dildo, was all too much for the MPAA, America’s ratings board, who awarded it the dreaded NC-17, a commercial kiss of death.
Aronofsky wouldn’t make edits. “I had to say to the studio that the entire reason this movie exists is about how far addiction makes you undermine your humanity,” he remembers. “And if we are to retreat from that and cut back any of those ideas, any of those visuals, any of those sounds — then we’re undermining the entire nature of the project. So I refused to do it.” The distributor, Artisan, instead released the film unrated.
Aronofsky wanted the film to pummel people, and it did. At one screening, a journalist threw up. At 2000’s Toronto Film Festival, someone had heart palpitations, and a paramedic arrived. It made a modest $7.3 million at the box office. “There was some heat on it but it was very controversial, a lot of people were really upset with it, and disturbed by it,” says Aronofsky. “And pissed off by it. If you look at some reviews, you’ll see that.” Those who loved it, though, really loved it. Burstyn, rightly, bagged an Oscar nomination. And before the shoot had even ended, Warner Bros. came calling, hiring Aronofsky to direct a new Batman film.
“I was just like, ‘What? What are they talking about?’” he remembers. “This was before they were putting young directors on superhero films. I wasn’t a comic-book guy but I could see that that was where the studio wanted to go. So I tried.” Collaborating with Frank Miller, he wrote an R-rated, reality-infused screenplay, shocking even Miller with the dark direction he insisted on pushing it in. Warner Bros. baulked, especially at the lead casting. “The studio wanted Freddie Prinze Jr and I wanted Joaquin Phoenix,” says Aronofsky. “I remember thinking, ‘Uh oh, we’re making two different films here.’” Eventually, just as he’d ditched development deals after Pi, Aronofsky instead moved onto the film he really wanted to make: The Fountain. Requiem For A Dream had put him in the position where he was able to do what he wanted.
Today, the film has a whole new currency. In 2020, addiction has expanded and splintered, with mobile phones and social media severely altering our brain chemistry, having us constantly hankering for the next hit, the tiny dopamine rushes, the personal validation. “Everyone is now a junkie with their telephone,” says Aronofsky. “The amount of time that people spend refreshing their Twitter and Instagram feeds is completely something Selby would have written about and I would have made a film about. If I was doing Month Of Fury now, it would be 30 days without social media. See how many people can fuckin’ do that! That’s harder than no orgasms.”
Yet Requiem For A Dream has not dated. It is just as startling, just as scarring. And as feelbad as it is, it is perversely life-affirming. The pain paid off.