Darren Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky may average only one feature every three years as a writer-director (and also, sometimes, as a producer), but, since his feature debut in 1998 with Pi, his movies have generated intense discussion, controversy, and acclaim for the sheer cinematic provocations embedded in his dramas about extremely flawed and damaged characters.

Aronofsky’s success came early, first with being a finalist in the Student Academy Awards for his short, Supermarket Sweep (1991), made as his thesis film in Harvard’s film program, and then winning the best director award in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Features section for his feature debut about an obsessive mathematician, Pi (1998), with co-writer and lead (and Harvard pal) Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, and Ben Shenkman.

Aronofsky’s psychological interests turned to drug addiction in the nerve-jangling adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s book (with Selby as co-screenwriter), Requiem for a Dream (2000), with Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, and Christopher McDonald, and premiering out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Burstyn earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her remarkable portrayal of addicted Sara.

Besides a submarine thriller project titled Below (2002), starring Bruce Greenwood, for which he served as a producer and screenwriter, Aronofsky spent the next six years pursuing one of his dream projects and his first for a studio (Warner Bros.), the disappointing sci-fi epic, The Fountain (2006), with Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, and Burstyn and grossing a thin $15.9 million worldwide.

Darren Aronofsky made a strong comeback in 2008 with his acclaimed The Wrestler, winning Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion in its world premiere and credited with reviving the floundering career of Mickey Rourke as an aging pro wrestler (and earning him best actor nominations for the Oscars, the Globes, the BAFTAs, and the Indie Spirit Awards, winning the latter three) along with Marisa Tomei (Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actress), and Evan Rachel Wood and Mark Margolis.

Probably the best-reviewed film of Aronofsky’s career, The Wrestler scored a notable 98% on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregate website. A kind of companion film to The Wrestler (Aronofsky’s original script involved a couple, a ballerina and a pro wrestler), Black Swan (2010) was another (far darker) study in self-destruction, starring Natalie Portman in a scene-stealing Oscar-winning performance as a hyper-driven ballerina, co-starring Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, and Winona Ryder.

It marked Aronofsky’s third world premiere at the Venice Film Festival (this time as the opening film). For the first time, Aronofsky was writer-producer-director of a project, this time the Biblical epic, Noah (2014), made for Paramount and starring Russell Crowe as Noah, with Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Emma Watson, and Anthony Hopkins. It proved to be Aronofsky’s most commercially successful movie to date, earning $362 million worldwide, despite bans in several Muslim countries whose governments objected to depictions of revered prophets.

A fervent environmentalist since his teenage years traveling to various parts of the world including Kenya, Europe, and Alaska, Darren Aronofsky returned to directing in 2017 with arguably his strangest and most controversial film to date, Mother!, starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Kristen Wiig. Once again, his film world-premiered in competition in Venice and was distributed by Paramount, earning $44 million globally and sparking intense arguments about the meaning of the drama’s surrealist, allegorical nature—which was revealed as a tale blending (like Noah, only in far more abstract, anti-realist terms) Biblical and ecological themes.

Since 2016, Aronofsky has been quite busy as a producer, backing such disparate fiction and non-fiction projects as Jackie (2016), with Natalie Portman; Aftermath (2017), with Arnold Schwarzenegger; White Boy Rick (2018), with Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Jason Leigh; Lance Oppenheim’s documentary, Some Kind of Heaven (2020); Josef Kubota Wladyka’s thriller, Catch the Fair One (2021), with Kali Reis; Alex Pritz’s Sundance-premiering documentary about Indigenous people battling farmers, poachers and developers destroying the Amazon rainforest, The Territory (2022), and released by National Geographic Films; and the Tobias Lindholm-directed true crime drama, The Good Nurse (2022), about a male, serial-killing nurse, starring Jessica Chastain, Eddie Redmayne, and Noah Emmerich.

Aronofsky’s own 2022 feature as director-producer is The Whale, based on a true story and starring Brendan Fraser (as a 600-pound man named Charlie) Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, and Samantha Morton. Once again, an Aronofsky film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in competition.

The ghost-themed nautical drama, Adrift (date to be announced) is Aronofsky’s next project as writer-director (with Jason Blum as producer), starring Jared Leto and based on Kôji Suzuki’s book. Aronofsky’s slated projects as producer include writer-director Jack Begert’s Little Death (date to be announced); and writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpytsky’s eco-thriller, The Tiger (date to be announced), with Alexander Skarsgård and Dane DeHaan.