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Thursday

Mother! - The 74th Venice International Film Festival

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.”

Mother! is released in the UK on September 15th