GreenCine | article

In the extended poem Stan Brakhage called Metaphors on Vision (Anthology Film Archives, 2nd Ed. 1976), he wrote: "the rhythms of change in the beam of illumination which now goes entirely over the heads of the audience would, in the work of art, contain in itself some quality of a spiritual experience."

To look at Darren Aronofsky's new film The Fountain, one would think he had just this Brakhage quote in mind during his arduous six-year production crusade. However, he cites Kubrick's 2001 as a greater influence than any experimental film he studied during either production or film school. As a result of this influence, The Fountain's visuals and storytelling hearken to older models of special effect: those that play as much with perception as they do with imagery. Aronofsky's hope was "to take [science fiction] from the tradition of outer space to inner space. Get away from the ray gun and go back to sci-fi that's more internal and more psychedelic." The product is a film that's a trip in (and for) many senses.

The Fountain concerns a couple that lives in perpetuity between three different epochs. In the 16th century, Conquistador Tomas is asked by Queen Isabella to search New Spain in pursuit of the Tree of Life which they think will save Spain from the infiltration of the Inquisitor; in the 21st century, Tom and Izzy suffer respectively under the burden of Izzy's brain cancer, Tom the unstoppable medical researcher who toils for a cure to her illness and Izzy the romantic writer, fascinated by the 16th century Conquest for the Tree of Life; and finally in the 26th century, Tom lives in a bubble of a space ship, tormented by Izzy's ghost as he ascends to the Orion Nebula, the place in the stars the Mayans called Xibalba. The film weaves these disparate timelines together with symbolic motifs: in each story, there is a flaming sword; in each story, we are mesmerized by points of "healthy light"; in each story, Adam and Eve recur.

Uniting these epochs with symbols, the film alludes to the concept of time explored by the Mayans. Michael Guill�n described it well during our roundtable with the director: "Time for the Mayans was not about tense, it was about aspect." And the time travel - if we can call it that - presented in the film demonstrates this idea. In The Fountain, neither the past nor the future feel so removed, because their relationship to the present is as close at hand as the motifs that unite them.

Aronofsky approached The Fountain with the understanding he would have to rethink some central sci-fi imagery. "If you think about it, for the last 50 to 60 years we've seen tin cans floating in space and there's no reason they should be made out of steel or in any shape because there's no friction up there. So instead of having trucks in space, we said, 'No more trucks in space ? let's get rid of that and go for something else.' And for several other reasons, we slowly evolved to this bubble ship. What's the best thing to have in space? The answer is: the view." As material as this conclusion may seem, one can't help comparing the bubble - or any other imagery repeated in The Fountain - with religious iconography. Any viewer could comfortably approach the film as a treatise on spiritualism and look on that bubble not as a space ship but as Ananda's "bubble who wishes to be the sea." And watching Hugh Jackman's monk-like astronaut ascend into the Orion Nebula, they'd have ample reason to think such.

"The Fountain is dealing with all these huge issues humans have been dealing with since the beginning of time: Why are we here? What is this life? What is death? What happens when you die? Can you love? What is love? Can you love forever? Those are the big questions and no one can answer them. There are no answers, there are just ideas we think about and talk about and that's what The Fountain is for me: it's like those late night conversations we have with our college roommates where you sat around and talked about 'what is consciousness and existence,' and I think that's what the exercise of the film was about: to explore the big questions. And to explore them, I think everyone has got to come into it and start thinking about how they're going to answer these questions for themselves."

Aronofsky was "really open to going abstract" and, after losing his original cast (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) and a chunk of the money that came with their names, Aronofsky endured a seven-month stall in production. When he came back to the film, his budgetary constraints required him to rethink his visual effects. "We wanted to make something truly real and that's why we took the organic route we did. Everything was photographed - all shot through a microscope so all chemical reactions were all about the size of a postage stamp." And so Aronofsky stumbled onto his own "Power of Ten." One can't help flashing back to Pi's incisive exposition on the game Go.

Similar to his previous efforts in more than a few ways, The Fountain's production seems like it was its own conquest to outlive death. "It's hard to explain why something connects with you or where you get the passion ? it's very hard to explain, but I think for the seven months after the film shut down, before we got back to doing it again - there was this one night when I couldn't sleep, and I realized I had to get it done. I'm not sure if it's purely to prove 'them' all wrong or to get it done because that's what we've always done. You know, Pi? No one wanted to make a black and white movie about God and Math, and then Requiem for a Dream was a drug movie that no one wanted to make. The Fountain was also a hard movie to make - it's just the process I've gone through up to this point." When asked if he identified with his conquistador, Aronofsky promptly replied: "Absolutely."

"The sequence when the conquistador dies and has flowers bursting out of him, I wrote that one night, and it was one of those unconscious moments that you hope for as a writer... That was one of the first scenes I wrote and one we rewrote for four or five years, but it basically stayed the same, and when I began to research the Mayans, there's a whole thing about when great warriors die flowers and butterflies come out of them. And I actually had written butterflies as well - we couldn't do it because that would have meant CGI and I didn't want to do it but it's weird how you can tap into that stuff without being fully aware of it."

Though such ambitious subject matter as eternal life can hardly be poorly timed, I asked Aronofsky about the timing of the release of The Fountain. Though the film's imagery is technically "non-denominational", issues of faith divide today's America, and as a result, the film's mixture of Jewish, Mesoamerican, Buddhist and Hindu iconography could be met with some resistance. "What interests me is the spiritual truth that connects all religion - like a shelf underneath them. If you think about the Genesis story and the Tree of Life in the Genesis story, and then Mayan tradition of the Tree of Life, and the Buddhist tradition that transcendence happens beneath the tree - the ancient Jews and Mayans were probably separated by tens of thousands of years, who knows how long they were apart, yet they still have similar myths. It makes me think there's actually something that connects us and makes us human altogether as opposed to saying my religion is right and my grasp of spirituality is right."

Aronofsky's use and creation of mythology is marked by openness to the myths meanings - he'll be the first to say he doesn't understand them all completely. However, just as he wrote about his avatar the conquistador with ease and little background knowledge, he created many reverberating moments that, like the Mayan first father, create space for consciousness. And like he said before, what we have are ideas, and what we lack are answers. "One of the final images of the film is when the star explodes and it shoots [Tom's] body and rains over him and the stuff comes down and it's right there on the posters. I did not realize this. Look. This little glyph here is from the tombstone of Palenque; the guy lying on his back with the Tree of Life coming out of his stomach. If you look at this image of him lying back, it's the same posture as the one of Hugh and the star. It was completely unconscious but I had been staring at that image for months or maybe even years studying it and trying to figure it out until I realized, when I saw it on the poster, he was in the exact same position as the visual effect I'd been working on for two years. So, the way it all tied together is strange. When you're dealing with myth, I don't think you can stick it all in your head, it just comes out in a very unconscious way and I'm curious if we're programmed from when we first read our little three-paged books that I'm reading now to my son, looking to see how much myth is in there, or if we're actually wired in some way for this stuff to be in there. I don't know which it is, but I know it's definitely real."

ADVERTISE on GreenCine!

New