Bryan Cairns meets director Darren Aronofsky as he turns on the waterworks…

Love is eternal. That seems to be the powerful message coursing through Warner Brothers’ sci-fi drama The Fountain, the new movie which finds scientist Tom Creo desperately searching for a cure to his wife Izzi’s cancer.

“The film is a love story,” confirms writer/director Darren Aronofsky. “It’s about a man whose wife is dying. He’s trying to save her life. That’s the engine of the film. That’s what drives the film, him trying to save her. And while saving her he stumbles on the fountain of youth and has to decide how that affects his own life and death.”

On a bitter winter afternoon in Montreal, Hugh Jackman has gone through a startling transformation. Best known for packing on the muscle and popping adamantium claws as the mutant Wolverine in the X-Men trilogy, the Australian actor has shed 15 pounds and shaved off all his brown locks. With the soundstage consisting of a raised platform with a gigantic tree stretching out in the centre, the set represents an organic spaceship which will be surrounded by a transparent CG bubble in post production. Currently, a pensive Jackman is marking his arm with ink while conversing with his ghostly spouse, Izzi. Unlike most romantic stories, The Fountain transpires over various distinct eras and the main character, Tom, Tommy, or Tomas, appears in multiple incarnations.

“The three time periods are the conquistador in the 16th Century, inspired by the Ponce de Leon story of searching for the fountain of youth in Florida, but this is searching for the fountain of youth in Mayan country: somewhere in Guatemala or Mexico,” explains Aronofsky. “In present day, it’s a neuroscientist in a lab searching for the fountain of youth, or eternal life, which is happening all the time. And the third part is the deep future, 500 years later. So it’s 1500, 2000, and 2500. The film takes [place] over a millennium and it’s about an astronaut searching for eternal life at the edge of the universe.”

Future tense

“From my interpretation of it, the film actually takes place in the year 2500,” says the Brooklyn-born director. “The scenes set in the year 2000 are a memory of him from the future. That’s how he was 500 years ago, before he found the fountain of youth. And the 16th Century is a fantasy constructed out of a novel that his wife wrote.”

Thankfully, the Pi and Requiem for a Dream director has demonstrated the same kind of determination and passion for The Fountain script as Tom does for his beloved Izzi. Originally conceived as a big budget epic starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, the $70 million film was put on the back burner when their male lead backed out.

“We hadn’t gone to production,” recalls Aronofsky. “We were seven and a half weeks out from shooting when it fell apart. We were in Australia and had spent many, many millions of dollars. It fell apart and for about a few months after that I tried to put it back together, but I couldn’t because it was just constructed in a certain way. Then after it all fell apart, we searched for other films to possibly do and develop, and I just kept coming back to it. I couldn’t get it out of my system.”

Rather than let his ambitious project drift aimlessly in limbo, Aronofsky retooled the material, keeping the core concept but at a more manageable $35 million cost.

“One night, I couldn’t sleep and there was my bookshelf that had all the books that I had done research with for this project,” he explains. “I started realising that I never really finished that book. I never really dealt with my research and it just started haunting me. I realised that I was an independent filmmaker. Pi was $60,000 and Requiem was $4 million. We know how to do things for a cheap price; we don’t have to do it this way. What is the cheapest version of this film that still captures what it’s about and captures the spectacle of it, but I don’t have to deal with all the nightmares?

“So I literally started writing and two weeks later, this version of The Fountain came out and it was a very different film, but everyone who read it felt it was better. Because I didn’t have to write it for a price, a studio, or for an actor, I was purely writing what I wanted to write, I was able to finally shape it into what it was meant to be.”

Head above water

Nonetheless, Aronofsky discarded some of the more elaborate sequences. “It’s very, very different than what it was,” admits Aronofsky. “The only thing in fact that’s completely the same is the title. But when we got that close we knew what was expensive. We just reshaped it to fit within being able to do it within a studio, meaning enclosed, so we didn’t have to deal with weather.

“I learned a lot through the process of getting that close to the film to understand what costs money. But I wouldn’t call it a concession because that was a completely different movie in a lot of ways. This is something completely different and I don’t think I’ve given up anything that I really needed to tell the story.”

Still, it was Pitt’s involvement which was pivotal in getting The Fountain on the fast track so Aronofsky needed to fill those A-lister shoes quickly. It was while attending the Broadway show The Boy From Oz that he found his replacement.

“Somehow either Hugh’s people got to me and asked me to go or I might have asked to see it, I don’t even remember, but I had tickets that third night,” he recalls. “I was so Broadway-ed out, I didn’t want to go anywhere near it. But I did go, and it was astounding. And even though he plays Paul Allen in that, which is a very different character than what he’s playing here, he has so much talent and I realised no one had really gotten that on film. I mean, you saw some of it as Wolverine, but it was a certain type of character, it wasn’t as well-rounded as this character is. And he was just so tremendous in that show that I sat down with him. Then he read the script and called me a few hours after he read it. And he got it. Not many people get it on the first read but he got it really deeply and understood it in ways that we had been working on a long time. It was really great. It was just a good connection at this right time for both of us in our careers.”

Natural spring

Likewise, co-star Rachel Weisz, who plays the vulnerable Izzi, impressed Aronofsky immediately. “For me, I thought that Rachel hadn’t been defined in American film yet,” says Aronofsky. “She was completely new and fresh for me, yet I knew from her work that she was a very talented and knew how to act extremely well. She responded to the material as well. She was very passionate about getting involved and I think that’s a big part of it. I asked a lot of the actors, as you can see from Hugh’s physical transformation. His emotional transformation is even bigger. I want actors that come to me; chasing actors is always a hard thing to do.”

Yet despite those fantastical sci-fi elements, Aronofsky has employed more practical effects over the ever-growing computer animation method. “I think CG has become a bit overused to a certain extent and people are now depending on it too much. If you look at some of the great CG advances of the last few years and you look back at them a couple years later you start to see through the CG,” he says. “But if you look at 2001 [A Space Odyssey], it’s pretty impeccable. Some of the composites are not that great, but the effects are so amazing. Or even the first Star Wars: very simple effects in today’s world, but they really look great. And I bet you if you look at the Star Wars rehashed version in a couple of years, those digital characters are going to look worse than any of the old effects in the original film, which still look amazing. So I’ve been a revisionist in going back to the original way that things were done and more to an optical, in-camera type of effect. That has been the main thing that I’ve been pushing for.”

Aronofsky previously referred to The Fountain as ‘Science Fiction in a post Matrix vein’. So when asked whether that description still applies to the movie, he concludes: “I think The Matrix defined the first 21st Century sci-fi movie. But I think it’s more like the end of 20th Century sci-fi in a lot of ways, because it took a lot of the great ideas of science fiction, reinvented them and rolled them up into one incredible package, and delivered it hot off the presses – and it was great.

“Now when you read Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson they’re not as fresh as in, say the early 1990s, when they were being rediscovered, or discovered, in William Gibson’s case. So when I started this film, it was very much a response to what type of science fiction can you do now that The Matrix has been made, and all those ideas are out there? We tried to do something new off of that. So now I’m psychedelic science fiction! That is my genre - psychedelic sci-fi.”