The Fountain took six years to get made, and Darren Aronofsky isn’t looking to wait that long before he gets to his next film. Universal is fast-tracking Black Swan – a (I swear to God) ballet thriller – to be the director’s next project.
A ballet thriller, huh? The movie is being written by John McLaughlin, based on a concept he and Aronofsky pitches to Universal. The story centers on “the manipulative relationship between a veteran dancer and a rival.” McLaughlin and Aronofsky have worked together before, when developing an adaptation of Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali.
So Aronofsky has gone from paranoid religious/math thriller to hardcore drug romance to mind-bending epic science fiction… to a ballet thriller. This guy keeps you guessing, and I fucking love it. This is what great filmmakers do, jumping from genre to genre, chasing themes and concepts all over the motion picture landscape. I love it when the main thing connecting the entries in a filmography is quality.