What’s next for Darren Aronofsky? He’s finishing up work on The Fountain, his long-gestating epic space/time love story, and after that he’s helming an episode of Lost. Then what?
I have gotten used to two things with Aronofsky – long waits between projects and lots of stops and starts and planned movies falling to the wayside. So while the news that Aronofsky is looking to direct an adaptation of the upcoming novel Black Flies fills me with joy that he’s looking for his next thing right away, I also remain cautious. Black Flies may very well one day be the answer to a very difficult Aronofsky trivia question, like Lone Wolf and Cub and Flickers.
Black Flies is by Shannon Burke, and while it’s been optioned as a movie, it hasn’t even found a publisher yet. Bet she gets one now. The book is about an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) in Harlem who is getting ready to go to medical school. He has many adventures, and the whole thing sounds a little bit like Bringing Out the Dead, an underrated Scorsese film (but truthfully a much better book). Still, I don’t think we have enough films about EMTs, even though the job itself is so inherently dramatic.