Mother! Press Conference
Venice Film Festival
"This is my howl to the moon" - Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky - DA
Jennifer Lawrence - JL
Javier Bardem - JB
Michelle Pfeiffer - MP
Darren, you
have said the film poured out of you. There is an urgency to it, and a stream of consciousness quality, as we experience it through
Jennifer's character. Can you describe this urgency?
DA:
“It was a strange experience. Most of my films take many, many years to come to life. Black Swan was 10 years, Noah was
20 years, and this film was five days. It was a strange thing, and I
think it came out of living on this planet and seeing what's
happening around us, and not being able to do anything. I just have a
lot of rage and anger and I wanted to channel it into one
emotion, into one feeling, and in five days I wrote the first version
of the script. It just sort of poured out of me. And after that I
showed it to Jennifer, and Jennifer was really excited by that idea,
and suddenly we were making a movie.”
The soundscape in the film is very powerful. How did
you work with your sound designer? And how did you work on the
colours?
DA:
“It was interesting because we started the process working with
Johann Johannsson, one of the greatest composers working today, and
both of us, as we experimented for months with music, realised that
whenever you put music into a scene, it immediately told the audience how
to feel. And the entire purpose of Mother! is it's a mystery where
you're surprising the audience, you don't know where it's going to
go, and we didn't want the audience to ever feel safe because
Jennifer's character is constantly trying to find out what is
happening to her. Any time you put music in the movie, it leaned
into a certain emotion.
"I've always been interested in sound design
and I worked with Craig Henighan, my sound designer on this one like I
have the last six ones or so, and it was all about bringing the
audience into Mother's point of view. Because I wanted the audience
to experience Mother and her take on this invasion that was happening
to her, because that was the point of the movie.
“And
the design of the film was all about starting in a place and making
it very natural and of the Earth, because we were making this big
allegory, and then slowly as humanity invade they start to bring in
all the different types of colour and materials that are not natural
to the planet.”
Jennifer,
you're used to playing strong women. Why did you sign up to play a
woman playing second fiddle to a man and his needs, and what was it
for you to play that?
JL:
“It was a completely different character from anything I have done
before, but it was also a completely different side of myself that I
wasn't in touch with and didn't really know yet. We did a
really rigorous rehearsal process for three months, and there was a
part of me that Darren really helped me get in touch with. It was
difficult. It was the most I've ever had to pull out of myself.”
Darren,
about the house. Was it Paradise?
DA:
“Look, we all know it, it's an old idea, that something that
happens in Beijing affects us in New York City and it affects us in
Italy, and you can have a beautiful place like Central Park, in New
York, and then you can have Aleppo in Syria, all done by human hand,
and yet most of our immediate fights are with our neighbour over
where the fence is going to go. So I kind of wanted to take the idea
of here we are, on this one home, and to actually reduce it to a
home, and say, 'Here is our home.' Because something everyone can identify with is
somebody comes over to your home and throws a piece of garbage on
your floor, or burns a hole in your carpet with their cigarette, but
they don't understand when they throw a piece of paper out on the
street. It was very inspired by Luis Bunuel's Exterminating Angel; it
took the social structure and stuck them all in one room, and watched
it as it sort of unwinded (sic). So the idea was to take and sort of unfold
human history. I don't want to give you all the metaphors, but you're
well down the path. But the working title we used as a codename,
because we didn't want the name to get out, we wanted to be
secretive, was Day Six. So if you think about Day Six in your bibles,
then you'll kind of figure where the film starts.”
Michelle,
can you talk about your character's relationship with Mother?
MP:
“I think in a review I read today they described my character as a
“gargoyle”, which I rather liked. At first I thought, 'Ooh that's
rather insulting', and actually it's kind of good. I guess she is
somewhat of an invader but I look at it as if she's Jennifer's
guardian angel, and she shows up and awakens her in a way, and
becomes a mirror. She immediately sees that there's trouble in
Paradise. She's a little older and a little wiser. I think she's trying to
help her, in my point of view.”
JL:
“I thought it was interesting because during the entire process I
kept saying, 'I, Jennifer, would love this character. Somebody who
blows into my house.' That's the kind of the personality that I would get
along with. But as my character it was so assaulting. My character is
so private and so kind of meek that it was very assaulting.”
Darren,
when you take on a new project, what do you look for to push yourself
as a filmmaker, and what advice would you give to a 20 year old
aspiring filmmaker?
DA:
“When I was 20, I didn't know what filmmaking was. But the most
important thing for filmmaking is persistence and it's also you
offering a story that you think is important and original, because
that's all you have to offer. If you're trying to create something
for a mass audience you'll never do it. You just create the story
that you want to tell. That only you can tell.
“With
this project, there's never a preconcept of being controversial or
being different, or something like that. It's always about something
I feel, that comes from inside. That I go, 'Oh that's a really
exciting idea.'And I can start to visualise it and I can start to
hear it, and I can start to see the actors that can be in it, and it
sort of all starts to come to life. And it's usually that passion,
that you can't stop thinking about it, that keeps you going. And the
result ends up being something the audiences receive, but that is not
fully conceived when it all starts.”
One
of the metaphors in the film is the vampiric quality of the artist.
Javier, do you share that interpretation?
JB:
“Yes. I think it's extreme, where the story goes, for us to make a
reading out of it. But, as Darren said, there are many readings and
it is up to you to choose the one that has the most meaning for you.
At the same time it is a relationship between a creator and his
creation. Call it a writing piece or a house or the Earth itself. I
think it's multilayed and that's the richness of this story.”
Darren, can you talk about women coming undone by the patriarchy in Mother!?
DA:
“I don't know if it's the patriarchy; I think it's becoming undone by
humanity. I don't blame one gender over the other gender. I think it
is about how people are insatiable. There's this endless consumption.
As far as influences, I talked about Exterminating Angel. There's
also a great children's book called The Giving Tree, which is a huge
influence. Bluebeard, the folk tale, was an influence.
"So
there were a lot of influences. But none of them really influenced it
– it just came out in those five days of fever dream. And then as
we tried to understand it, we ran into other influences. Like Edgar
Allen Poe, of course. But it all happened in a very unconscious,
fever dream type of way. And that, I think, as a result, is why the
film feels like a fever. Another major influence was a book called
Woman and Nature, it was a book of poetry in the 1970s by this
feminist writer named Susan Griffin, who basically, back in the 70s,
was making incredible connections about the environment and about
feminism, which I didn't know there are actually people out there
studying it, thinking about that. ”
What are your interests outside filmmaking and they have any influence on this?
DA:
“I'm a pretty avid environmentalist and
I'm on the board of directors of the Sierra Club, which is the oldest
environmental group in the United States. We went to the Arctic,
which is the last piece of wilderness of the United States, to do an
expedition, and the day before we were going out we met with the
nation whose land it was, the native nation, and it turned out that
the chief's sister was this woman named Princess, who was a friend
that I met through Sundance 20 years earlier, just randomly I bumped
into her, and she told me she was working on a doctorate connecting
how aboriginal women are treated and how that's directly connected to
how the environment's treated. So that was intriguing and she sort of
led me down this path of all these different books about it. So I
think there's absolutely a connection between that and stuff I read."
Are you also talking about life after death in the film and are you an optimist about the future of the planet?
DA: “If you want to know my understanding of life and death, my big Venice
hit The Fountain [said ironically], that's all about life after
death. But am I an optimist? I'm completely an optimist about it and
that's why I work undyingly to hopefully change things. America is
schizophrenic. We go from backing the Paris climate agreement to eight months
later pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. It's tragic but in many ways
we've revealed who the enemy is. And now we can attack it.”
Where did the stuff, the nightmares, in the film come from, and is this entertainment?
DA:”Just
read the newspaper, you know? Really read the newspaper and try to
feel what's going on in the newspaper. Look, there's a lot of ways
to entertain people. I guarantee that if you ask all those people
that were engaged with the film, were they ever bored by the film?
I'm pretty sure what the answer would be. There's always going to be
a level of taste about how far you can go with it. But it's funny
because tonight, at 3am, it's the full moon, which is perfect because
I've been saying this is my howl to the moon. So, you know, I think it's
a very strong cocktail, and of course there are going to be people
that are not going to want that type of an experience, and that's
fine. I've been making it clear that this is a rollercoaster ride and
only come on it if you're prepared to do the loop-the-loop a few
times.”
