Watching a film makes you Exercise empathy, says Darren Aronofsky

American filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has visited India almost half a dozen times –—mostly to get lost in its winding lanes and lose his sense of control. This time it was the 20th edition of the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival that compelled the director to hop on a plane to the island city of Mumbai. At the festival, the 49-year-old director of films such as — Requiem For A Dream, Black Swan and Mother! —conducted a masterclass at the historic Liberty cinema, where he arrived on stage with his signature flat cap and sipped on his cup of chai masala.

In real life, Darren is nothing like his dark, dystopic cinematic oeuvres. He can crack up a room full of audience with the same ease as he portrays the cracking of a baby’s neck on screen. For him, cinema is rooted in empathy, “to watch a film is to exercise your empathy” he says and that’s precisely the very crux of his film making. “When you’re watching a five-year-old girl in Tehran worried about her goldfish in a white balloon, you are that five-year-old girl. If you can actually make the audiences feel what that character is doing, the desperateness, the need, the pleasure — that’s expanding your own humanity.” But mostly, Darren throws in a kink or two, just for kicks. “Breaking the babies neck and eating it had nothing to do with empathy, that was to just f**k with the audiences,” he chuckles.

However, no one can really fathom the depths of Darren’s mind, especially because the filmmaker has rolls of withheld shots that would never make it out of his cutting room. “You never want to do something so extreme that the audiences don’t want to be there. It’s always about how far to push it and there’s definitely stuff you pull back knowing that’s too much!”

Darren Aronofsky

Right from his first film Pi, Darren’s cinematic overtures have pushed the boundaries of pain and its perception by the human mind. For instance, the famous shot in Requiem where Jared Leto is sticking a needle into his open wound — the director knew well that most people in the audience wouldn’t appreciate it, but his intentions were never to terrify them, but to walk them through the dark abyss of drug addiction. “The entire movie is summed up in that shot, but that shot shows you how far people can go to feed their addictions.”

Surprisingly, there is no particular reason for him to chase these intense themes and it’s mostly about going after ideas that have never been done before. “But why I drag it to such extremes? That’s something you can ask my psychologist” he quips.

The film maker’s movies have also been extensively dubbed as a reflection of his own mindset. While theoretically speaking, every filmmaker attaches a part of his personality to his films that eventually goes on to become his/ her style. Quite often, his disposition is thought of as obsessive and manic, but he says that’s not true. “I don’t think I’m an obsessed person. I live a very balanced life, I do get obsessive when I work. Captain America’s obsessed doing good for everyone; the hulk is obsessed with smashing things,” he jokes.

While the tone in all his films can take a dark turn, he is far removed from the violence himself. In hindsight, his films neither glorify violence nor trivialise it. His images are a realistic portrayal of possibilities, which keep challenging the audience “I hate violence, that’s why in my films you’ll see no guns. What they do to the human body or even what they sound like is deafening, but we don’t even capture the sound of shooting a gun realistically. That’s because we’re dramatising it, making it sexy and that’s what normalises it. It becomes a part of our humanity when it’s actually not who we really are.”

A still from Requiem for a dream

Out of all the tools in his box, Darren’s strength lies in his spectacular usage of the camera and his complete dependence on sound to tell his stories. From Natalie Portman's feet cracking to transform into a swan in Black Swan to  Ellen Burstyn’s mounting drug addiction and desperation to slim down and fit into her red dress in Requiem, all these evocations are the handiworks of his impeccable folly sound and background score.

However, in his 2017 film mother! the director took a completely different turn, Mother has no music, it has no score, he says, “I was terrified, but what I realised is music is such a powerful tool for a director, it’s really telling the audience how they’re supposed to be feeling and the whole exercise in Mother! was to never let the audience know how Jennifer Lawrence was feeling. I wanted the audiences to be uncomfortable like the character on screen at all times.”

His other weapon in filmmaking is his affinity for close-up shots. 66 minutes of Mother! is just a close up of Jeniffer Lawrence, “I always say the close-up is one of the most overlooked inventions of the 20th century.” The filmmakers in the 20th century were able to put the camera right next to an actors face. Everything changed for cinema from then.”

It allows you to imagine what the other people are going to do and focus on their eyes, he says, “My favourite actors are the actors with great eyes. Russell Crowe, with the tiniest muscle in his eyelid, can twitch it and every single person in the world understands the same emotion. That’s where great talent comes from,” says the director.

In the offing, Darren is currently producing ‘Discovery’s ‘One Strange Rock’ and is also looking forward to finally work with Hollywood star Brad Pitt, for a film based on a book titled "The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.