How Darren Aronofsky Shoots A Film At 3 Budget Levels
INTRODUCTION
The films that Darren Aronofsky makes occupy an interesting space. They straddle the line between experimental and realist, between mainstream and independent, between classical biblical allegories and contemporary tales.
However, what most of his films have in common is a strong emphasis on character and use of perspective to make the audience feel like you’re taking a journey in the shoes of those characters, not just observing their story from afar as an outsider.
As I do in this series of videos, I’ll take a look at 3 different films made by Darren Aronofsky at 3 increasing budget levels: the low budget Pi, the medium budget The Wrestler, and the high budget Noah, to identify commonalities in his filmmaking and how his style has progressed throughout his career.
PI - $60,000
Aronofsky’s introduction to filmmaking came from him studying social anthropology and filmmaking in 1991 at Harvard. His thesis short film for the programme, Supermarket Sweep, starred his friend and actor Sean Gullette. It was well received and won him a spot as a finalist at the 1991 Student Academy Awards. He went on to get his masters in directing from the AFI Conservatory, where he met and began working with his classmate in the cinematography programme Matthew Libatique.
When it came to writing Pi, like with many other low budget films, he decided to focus on a single character. This idea of doing a portrait character study was born out of the verite documentaries he would make in film school which focused on the story of one person.
The experimental, psychological horror film was set in only a few locations, with the primary one being inside a small apartment.
The movie was financed through an early version of what I guess you could call crowdfunding. Aronofsky and his producer Eric Waston went around asking every friend, relative and acquaintance to give them $100 to fund their movie. Eventually they were able to raise $60,000 which, along with a host of other favours, was used to make the film.
Some of those favours included getting the crew to work for deferred pay by granting them shares in the film which would pay out once the film was sold, paying the actors $75 a day and getting a free warehouse which they could use to build their studio set.
Around $24,000 of the budget went towards the cost of buying and developing 16mm film stock and much of the remaining funds were reserved for post production. This left very little money for gear rental, production design or locations on the 28 day shoot.
However, Libatique who would photograph the film, was granted enough to rent a Aaton XTR 16mm camera, three lenses and a free, although small, tungsten lighting package to work with. He chose the XTR for it’s lightness, which helped with the ample handheld work, along with its ability to shoot single frames, which they used for the stop motion board game scene. He got 2 16mm Canon zooms, a 8-64mm and an 11.5-138mm, and one Angénieux 5.9mm wide prime lens.
To support a surrealistic look that Libatique termed ‘low-fi stylisation’ Aronofsky decided to shoot Pi in black and white.
“Darren wanted to shoot Pi in black-and-white for both aesthetic and budgetary reasons. He wanted the most contrasty black-and-white possible, with really white whites and really black blacks.” - Matthew Libatique, Cinematographer
To achieve this look Libatique decided on using reversal film, Eastman Tri-X 200 and Plus-X 50 for daylight scenes, which have high contrast but less dynamic range than negative film. The latitude, the difference between the lightest and darkest part of the image, was so small that he only had about 3 stops before the highlights started blowing.
Which is difficult to comprehend when comparing to modern digital cameras like the Alexa, which can handle more than 14 stops of dynamic range.
Libatique’s lighting and metering of exposure had to be extremely precise as being even half a stop too bright might mean losing all detail. On top of that he used a yellow filter to further increase the contrast and get rich blacks.
Their philosophy behind the look of the film was to create a subjective perspective that put the audience in the shoes of the protagonist. They did this by shooting with a single camera, shooting over the protagonist’s shoulder and moving it in a motivated way. So when the character moved, the camera followed.
To increase this personal perspective they also used a macro lens at times to capture close details in an abstract way that also represented the character’s gaze.
A final example of this subjective perspective can be found in the stylised use of mounting a camera directly onto the actor’s body. Kind of like vlogging, before the concept of vlogging existed. This gave a personal, up close, subjective perspective that mimicked the increasingly manic movement of the character.
They rigged a still photography tripod to a weight belt that was attached to the actor and mounted Aronofsky's own 16mm Bolex camera with a 10mm lens to the tripod. He altered the frame rates, overcranking his close up, and undercranking the camera at 12fps for his POV shots to show his increasing dissociation with the real world.
Aronofsky spent the majority of the low budget on sound in post production, where he was able to find additional funding, as he knew that without a strong sound design and mix the film would fall flat. He was able to get a score from Clint Mansell who, like the crew, worked for a deferred fee.
He was therefore able to pull off Pi on an incredibly low budget by: writing a story with limited locations, characters and no large set pieces, getting crew to work for deferred pay, pulling lots of favours, and using a small gear package to create a vividly experimental, subjective, surrealist look.
THE WRESTLER - $6 Million
After winning the Directing Award at Sundance Film Festival for Pi and selling it to distributor Artisan Entertainment for more than a million dollars, Aronofsky kick started his feature film career.
Following the bigger box office budget flop of The Fountain, Aronofsky picked a lower budget script for his following film, a realistic dramatic portrayal of an aging wrestler, written by Robert D. Siegel. He raised a budget of $6 million to make the movie.
After Nicolas Cage initially expressed interest in the role, it was eventually granted to Mickey Rourke.
Although Rourke admired Aronofsky’s work and wanted to make a film with him, he wasn’t overly happy about the script as he felt that some of the dialogue didn’t accurately portray how his character would realistically talk. Therefore he, along with Aronofsky, re-worked much of the dialogue in the script until they were happy.
Due to the free way that Rourke liked to work, apparently around 40% of the final film was improvised and initially unscripted.
“I tried to approach the film as free as possible. I didn’t go onto set as I usually do with very specific notes and shot lists. I tried to be open every morning to what Mickey was going to bring and then try and figure out after I saw that the best way of capturing it.” - Darren Aronofsky
For example, most of the wrestling scenes were scheduled during real wrestling matches. The crew would wait till about halfway through a match and then bring Rourke into the ring and shoot a bit, using the real energy from the crowd who turned up.
As it was very physically demanding Rourke would then leave the ring, re-gather his energy and come back to shoot a bit more. During these breaks the real wrestlers would keep the crowd entertained while Rourke recovered and the cameras were reloaded with new film stock.
To capture this free way of working, Aronofsky devised a style and approach which both supported how he wanted to tell the story and which was practical.
There’s not much realism in the world of wrestling, which is all about over the top performance, however the life of the main character in The Wrestler is too painfully real. So Aronofsky decided to create a film grounded in cinema verite, which followed his protagonist, literally, with an up close and intimate handheld camera. Again taking on a more subjective perspective, however this time one that was far more centered around realism.
To create this look he hired cinematographer Maryse Alberti who had a track record in both fiction and documentary work.
They shot it on Super 16mm, which suited both the modest budget, as it is cheaper to shoot than 35mm, but the grain from 16mm was also reminiscent of the verite, documentary look that they were going for.
To create the look for this realistic portrait, Alberti shot almost entirely with natural light, mainly using whatever practical lighting was already in the locations. She would sometimes bring in a couple of lights or tweak them slightly in order to achieve exposure but otherwise left the lighting alone whenever possible.
The only exception was the final match, which was a built set. In this she mimicked the lighting setups of many of the other matches which they had already shot - based around using overhead lights and lighting the four corners of the ring.
Since most of the movie was assembled from long shot sequences, photographed from the shoulder on a handheld camera, she chose the Arri 416 for her camera operator Peter Nolan.
She paired the camera with a set of Zeiss Ultra 16 prime lenses and two Angenieux Optimo zooms, a 15-40mm Lightweight and a 28-76mm.
Due to the length of the takes, Peter Nolan came up with some interesting techniques for operating the camera. One involved strapping an applebox to his waist so that when sat down with the camera during a take he could rest his elbows on the apple box and hold the camera steady.
Sometimes these long takes required plenty of choreography and involved grips holding up flags at various points to block out lights from casting shadows of the camera.
So Aronofsky in some ways maintained his perspective of shooting the film in a subjective way, yet moved away from experimentation and more into realism.
The Wrestler’s higher budget allowed Aronofsky to hire a cast of well known actors for this performance heavy drama and pay all the cast and crew fair rates, yet they saved money by shooting on 16mm, in a rough, verite, documentary style which allowed them to work on real locations, without any large production design, grip or electrical setups.
NOAH - $160 Million
The Wrestler proved to be both a critical and financial success.
A few years later he turned to producing a huge scope story which he had been interested in since he was a child: the biblical story of Noah. True to his style, Aronofsky adapted Noah to the screen by straying from the brief source material and including a more surrealistic, allegorical story, which visualised and presented themes through exaggerated characters and images.
Producing such a large scope script, with its epic set pieces, required a hefty estimated budget of around $160 million. Aronofsky turned to his regular DP Matthew Libatique to shoot the film.
“We were handheld on Noah, but it wasn’t like we were floating from character to character in a vérité style. I think we’ve matured as filmmakers and can focus on what’s important, which is subjectivity and storytelling.” - Matthew Libatique, Cinematographer
But, like on The Wrestler, Aronofsky wanted to be able to move the camera in a way that was very fluid and natural, but also in a way that was very controlled. Therefore Libatique mainly used Arricam LT cameras, which were light for handheld work yet also tough enough to handle working outdoors in the elements for extended periods without breaking.
With them he selected Zeiss Ultra Primes, mainly sticking to 3 focal lengths, a wide 24mm, a medium 50mm and a long 85mm.
This time he shot on 35mm, a format with greater clarity and less grain, more suitable for an epic. Libatique shot in the higher resolution 4-perf format for any shots that required post production special effects, and in 3-perf for regular scenes.
Although most of the film was shot handheld with a single camera from a more subjective perspective, certain scenes, such as the large flood scene, was shot with four cameras, two on Chapman Hydrascope cranes and two on the ground, to more quickly cover the many shots needed in this expensive set piece.
The magical exteriors were mainly filmed on location in Iceland.
When it came to lighting characters in those exteriors not much was done except for trying to block scenes so that the actors could be backlit by the sun. Libatique likes to keep things as naturalistic as possible so avoids lighting exteriors whenever he can, only using a muslin bounce occasionally when he needed more fill.
As Libatique says: “Fighting nature to mimic nature is a large undertaking.”
However some interiors and night scenes involved enormous setups. For example, to cover the battle scene at night his team hung 18 daylight balanced helium balloons from condors. Then, two 100-ton cranes each carried 100-foot rain bars, and another 100-ton crane carried an 80-foot rain bar, with two 32K balloons on each rain bar.
Another huge setup was the Arc set, which was constructed in three levels in a studio in New York. Lighting such a big space came at a cost.
For day scenes the rigging grip built a giant white ceiling bounce, made up of smaller UltraBounce surfaces. Bouncing into it were 20 20Ks, which they rigged on each side, underslung on the truss, and also 25 Mole-Richardson 12-lights.
Once production was wrapped, 14 months of post-production work began. During this time Aronofsky tasked Industrial Light & Magic with extensive VFX work including creating 99% of the animals in the film, dropping in background plates, like mountains or trees, and of course creating the mythical elements such as The Watchers.
As with all of Aronofsky’s films dating back to Pi, a score was composed by Clint Mansell.
Noah was therefore produced on a blockbuster budget, which was needed to create massive production design builds, enormous grip and lighting setups, a cast of stars and enormous set pieces which required over a year of innovative visual effects work.
CONCLUSION
Darren Aronofsky’s filmography covers an interesting range all the way from low budget independently financed films up to large studio blockbusters.
Despite this large growth in scale, his preferences for visualising themes and presenting them through characters using a subjective perspective has carried over throughout.
While the maturity of his filmmaking might have grown, it maintains elements of original experimentation and an eye for the surreal that he’s had since his earliest foray into cinema.