Darren Aronofsky Quotes

I don’t think I make genre films. I think studios try to sell films as genres because they know how to do that. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t know what I make. It’s sort of a pot roast, all my films.

I wasn’t a big fan of social anthropology. And, luckily, that created room for me to work in visual arts because I sort of ignored my requirements. I think I was attracted to social anthropology because I liked to travel and was always interested in far-off places.

I try to live my life where I end up at a point where I have no regrets. So I try to choose the road that I have the most passion on because then you can never really blame yourself for making the wrong choices. You can always say you’re following your passion.

I’m Godless. I’ve had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking

When I go to movies I generally want to be taken to another world.

You can’t look at the Noah story and not see some kind of environmental connection. The Creator wants to start over. He wants creation to be given a shot at survival, and the true enemy is the wickedness of men.

Now there is so much expertise and brainpower it’s hard to be at the cutting edge of what’s cool and not do something that’s totally geeky.

As filmmakers, we can show where a person’s mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it.

I only want to work with actors that really get it and make it work. I didn’t want it to be a star-driven thing anymore.

I’ve always wanted to introduce hip-hop filmmaking to film. There’s hip-hop art, dance, music, but there really isn’t hip-hop film. So I was trying to do that.

I spent about a year and a half doing technical post work on ‘The Fountain’. Although I do like the process, I think my favorite part of filmmaking is the actors.

I grew up in a family with two very strong women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life.

I had some big ups and downs when I was in my 20s and the one thing I learned was, no matter how low it gets, something good will come along – something always comes out of that dark period.

If you ask any person on this crew what they think of Hugh Jackman they’ll admit they’ve never seen anything like it. I’ll give him an emotional note and he’ll hit it every time.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do – every 24 frames of a second.

I don’t make films that are easy to market, unfortunately. I think that ‘Pi’ was the easiest one, because we had that symbol to stick up everywhere, so that was a good gimmick, and created a good mystery, and we didn’t have to do huge scale.

But steady-cams are very different than hand-helds, because hand-held gives you that verite feel.

I think it’s important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you’ve got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances.

I think that there’s an infinite amount of places where you can stick a camera. There’s an infinite amount of choices of what could be going on. There’s an infinite amount of places for so many things, so you have to figure out how to do your job.

I’m Godless. I’ve had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking.

These wrestlers aren’t organized. They have no union, no pension and no insurance. You meet wrestler after wrestler who sold out Madison Square Garden ten years ago, basically running on fumes today. There’s a lot of drama there.

I’m not a comic book guy at all.

At the end of Requiem all I wanted to do was get a DV camera and just do a small film. But then the hunger comes back.

There’s always been a lot of pressure and tension on the line. If ‘Pi’ didn’t work out, I have no idea what my career would be. I don’t think I would have gotten another shot at it. If ‘Requiem for a Dream’ didn’t work out, they would have called me a ‘one-hit wonder with a sophomore slump’.

You hear stories about directors using manipulation to get actors to do certain things, but I think when you’re working with professional actors, it’s all about trust. They can do anything you want, it’s just a matter of them understanding what you’re looking for, and the reason why.

Every film had its own grammar. And it’s your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story.

I was a TV junkie as a kid. I am the Sesame Street generation.

‘Angel Heart’ was one of my favorite films.

Turning 30 was when my parents both got cancer and were fighting it and beat it, but their mortality started to get to me. Everything wasn’t as hunky-dory like it was.

I couldn’t sleep one night and I was sitting in my office and I realized that I was an independent filmmaker.

I think it’s my nature to try and make original content, and that’s what I’ve done, is just try and approach things in an original way, and do things differently.

I think religion is often very different from spirituality. Religion is often about rules and people trying to control our lives who are actually very unspiritual… God can be found anywhere, and in fact, everywhere. And you don

I’ve spent a life loving women and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to.

To me, watching a movie is like going to an amusement park. My worst fear is making a film that people don’t think is a good ride.

I grew up in a family with two very strong women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life. I’ve spent a life loving women, and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to.

Film is a great tool to play with time, going back and forth through time, or speeding time up and slowing it down and do stuff like that. That’s something you can’t experience in real life that you can experience on film, and it takes you to a different place.

Classical scores go up and down; they’re kind of hysterical in a way. And movie scores are much more – they just drive and move forward, and they build and can’t go up and down at that same speed. It’s a big job to turn that into something that pushes the movie along.