“‘Black Swan’ And ‘The Wrestler’ Started Life As One Movie, Darren Aronofsky Says”

Well, this is interesting:

In some strange parallel universe, one in which filmmaker Darren Aronofsky made some of his choices a little bit differently, “The Wrestler” and his upcoming follow-up “Black Swan” exist as a single film, one about the coupling of a wrestler and a ballet dancer. Bizarre? Absolutely. Aronofsky nonetheless looks at the two films — the older of which garnered two Oscar nominations while the newer will kick off the Venice Film Festival in a couple days — as part of a single line of thought.

“I’ve always considered the two films companion pieces,” he said in an exclusive interview with MTV’s Eric Ditzian as part of our ongoing fall preview week. “They are really connected and people will see the connections. It’s funny, because wrestling some consider the lowest art — if they would even call it art — and ballet some people consider the highest art. But what was amazing to me was how similar the performers in both of these worlds are. They both make incredible use of their bodies to express themselves.”

The tie between the two has roots that go back more than 10 years, to a time when Aronofsky had a vision for a film that would put these at-odds art forms into close contact with one another.

“At one point, way before I made ‘The Wrestler,’ I was actually developing a project that was about a love affair between a ballet dancer and a wrestler, and then it kind of split off into two movies,” he said. “So I guess my dream is that some art theater will play the films as a double feature some day.”

More on Darren Aronofsky tomorrow.

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