Around the transform of this century, Darren Aronofsky desired to make a ballet motion picture, motivated by his individual sister’s dance experiments. He also became fascinated by the notion of doppelgangers after reading Dostoevsky’s The Double. Already imagining that Natalie Portman would make the great primary lady, they had coffee in New York in 2000, when she was refreshing from her initial change as Padmé Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I and a college student at Harvard.
“She claims that I experienced the full film in my head, which is a complete lie,” Aronofsky explained to Collider in 2010, to which Portman insisted, “No, what he described to me was so shut.”
The director continued, “So, we talked a bit about it and I began to establish it, but it was a really difficult movie simply because obtaining into the ballet globe proved to be particularly demanding. Most of the time, when you do a motion picture and you say, ‘Hey, I want to make a movie about your world,’ all the doors open up, and you can do just about anything and see just about anything you want. The ballet entire world truly wasn’t at all interested in us hanging out, so it took a very long time to get the information and facts to put it alongside one another.”
He obtained involved with a script at Common about a murder that took place in the theater environment, called The Understudy, prepared by Andres Heinz, which Aronofsky hoped could be adaptable adequate to see his ballet goals consider flight. When a several drafts failed to get the job done out, he took the generation unbiased, at some point acquiring distribution from Fox Searchlight.
And in the meantime, he had seen Swan Lake. “When I noticed the story of the black swan and the white swan, I resolved to throw all the things absent and link all the people and myths to Swan Lake,” the filmmaker informed the Los Angeles Times. “The credits ought to definitely say, ‘Co-penned by Tchaikovsky.'”
The good thing is, Portman was still onboard. Aronofsky advised Collider, “Around the many years, Natalie would say, ‘I’m finding too aged to perform a dancer. You better hurry up.’ I was like, ‘Natalie, you appear great. It will be wonderful.’ And then, about a year out from filming, or possibly a minimal bit earlier, I at last acquired a screenplay jointly. That’s how it started out.”
