It has been 25 years since Darren Aronofsky caught the film world’s attention with his first, super-low-budget movie Pi (or π, if you want to be Greek about it).
The film—about a mathematician whose search for patterns in the chaos of the universe catches the attention of Wall Street brokers and Hasidic Jews—tapped into then-hot concepts like “Bible codes”, and it turned out to be the first in a long line of Aronofsky movies filled with biblical themes and protagonists who are obsessive to the point of self-destruction: movies like Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler, Black Swan (which won an Oscar for Natalie Portman), The Whale (which won Oscars for Brendan Fraser and its makeup crew just last Sunday), and, of course, Noah, the biggest Bible movie of the past half-century that wasn’t directed by Mel Gibson.
Now, to celebrate his first film’s 25th anniversary, Aronofsky has restored Pi and blown it up for IMAX screens, where it will be getting a special one-day-only screening on Tuesday, March 14 (aka “Pi Day”, because the American way to write the date numerically is “3/14” and the first three digits of pi are 3.14). The screening will be preceded by a live Q&A with Aronofsky and his collaborators on the film.
To mark the occasion, I figured I, too, would dig into the archives a bit, and so I have dusted off the phone interview that I did with Aronofsky in the summer of 1998 and am now posting it here. A somewhat abridged transcript of our chat has been out there for some time—paid subscribers can read an expanded version of it here—but this is the first time I’ve ever made the audio available. I think it comes alive in ways I wouldn’t have guessed just from reading the words on the screen. (Among other things, he teases me about the value of Canadian currency back then, and he has a couple of amusing anecdotes about his encounters with “Giuliani’s cops”.)
Incidentally, I got to interview Aronofsky a second time, about a month before Noah came out in 2014, and I learned at that time that Aronofsky had actually started looking into the possibility of making a movie about Noah back when Pi came out… but he set it aside when Hallmark Entertainment announced that they were making a TV miniseries about Noah starring Jon Voight. (It aired in May 1999.)
As it is, Aronofsky ended our first interview by saying that his next film might be Requiem for a Dream… and sure enough, it was.
Related links:
My review of the film for ChristianWeek (August 25, 1998)
‘No, Noah is not Gnostic. (Say that ten times fast!)’ (April 1, 2014) — in which I quote a relevant bit from this interview
‘The thematic and visual links between Noah and Darren Aronofsky’s earlier films: a gallery’ (October 6, 2014)
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