Last night Darren Aronofsky brought The Fountain to Atlanta. After the film, he did a Q&A moderated by some guy named Nunziata. I missed that, but did interview the director this morning. The full text of our 40-minute talk will be up soon, but here’s a glimpse into what’s next for the director:
Two part question: Will you do another studio film, and is Lone Wolf and Cub really dead?
Well, the big thing we’re writing now is a studio film. Lone Wolf, Paramount never got the rights. And we developed a script, but now the rights don’t exist.
That was so exciting for a moment there.
The new thing is even more exciting, and I’ll give you an exclusive. I’m not going to tell you exactly what it is, but…it’s a biblical epic.
In…Aramaic?
(laughs) In English!
What led you to that?
It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Before Pi. Probably ten years ago, I had an idea. Actually, I wrote a poem about it when I was in 7th grade. I won this award for it — my first writing award. So it’s a story from the Bible that kind of stuck with me. About ten years ago I was at a museum that featured an exhibit that reminded me of it. So we’ve been trying to crack it for a while, and we finally figured out a direction. But…I can’t tell you any more.
There’s always that moment when a filmmaker gets to do the project they’ve wanted to do for a decade and…it rarely works. Are you afraid of that?
That’s…I call that the fingerpaint syndrome. Remember when you were in kindergarten and you were painting, if you kept going too long it started to turn brown? So I’m always asking my crew, ‘are we going brown here?’. And that was the challenge with the Fountain, and with anything you work on, and it’ll be a challenge here too.