YouSaid · the spoken record

Darren Aronofsky

lines on the record: 126
first: 2017-09-09
most recent: 2017-09-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But you're allowed to look as long as they don't look at you. And people come to New York. I said, that's the rule. You can watch and check each other out. But if they realize you're being checked out, stop. So I find it fascinating. And I imagine the subways in Japan must be insane. It's just, once again, well, well, well, we”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As an aside, it's funny it was very upsetting when they got Wi Fi on the New York City subway because now I have to work hard.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my son came home from math class with fat on paper and we played it for a while. And I was like, wow, this is complicated game.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, wow So it's just basically getting five in a row, and you could place them anywhere on the board. Sounds great. Yeah.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, there you go. But the documentary, which I haven't seen yet, he told me there was some documentary about what it meant. This computer finally beating these Go Masters. And he was telling me about a scene where after the first move, the Go Master gets up and walks away because basically I guess the point was that it's such a radical way to change of how the game is played, how this computer is playing it, that it's actually affecting now how humans play each other. Well, that's a line about AI that is interesting, where it actually changes the way we act with each other after thousands of years of playing a game a certain way. Suddenly this idea comes that is a moment of genius that changes the way we look at the board. That was an interesting idea.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But another thing that's fascinating that I've been hearing a lot of people, I think actually Rick was talking to me about it. That's where I heard it was. Well, he's what I suggested.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got into it a lot when I was doing Pi. I needed a game for the two guys to be playing so that they had some reason that they were meeting so that Max and his mentor could meet. And I just thought playing chess was just, we've seen it so much and it's cliche and mathematicians playing chess was just not quite interesting enough. And at that point in 97, GOAT was still very much a fringe game, sort of is still. But I think it was much more fringe then. And we used to go a lot to the New York Go chapter meetings, which were like 18 very intellectual people and very bookline departments. At different houses each week playing go. So it was a great cast of characters just to find, and the best thing about Go characters are the ones that have said that blow off chess as like a fool's game.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell your story. Don't try to figure out what people want. Because the reality is, you know, and I kind of learned this when I was coming out of film school, I went to support my friend Scott Silver, who's a big screenwriter now who had made, directed a film that was at Sundance. And it was the year that welcomed the Dollhouse was there and a bunch of other indie gems. And I remember watching these films go, these are such specific, unique movies, but they're done exquisitely well. And what Sundance allowed me to believe in what independent film has allowed so many dreamers to believe is that if you make a film well No matter how personal it is, if it's truthful, you'll find an audience.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was actually upside down when something good was supposed to happen, something bad was happening. And I was looking at it, and one day I flipped it over and I said, oh Actually, the bad guys, all my characters, the good guy, is addiction. And this is actually a hero's journey of addiction overcoming the human spirit. And that's when I finally understood what the movie was about. And charting it and using.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not doing a document. I always push the writer's journey by Christopher Vogler. It's very good, but it's only for people who are writing screenplays. But he's great. He basically took Joseph Campbell's work and turned it into screenplay language. And he did a really good job at it. And we're totally part of his cult because I believe in that hero's journey, and not to say that's the end all to end all. And there are other ways to approach it, but it's a very, very interesting structure that can really lead to big breakthroughs when you're struggling. You can look at the different archetypes that there are, and often you find yourself falling into it. And, you know, it's funny, like Requiem for a dream, when I was working on it, it was before I read Vogler. But now that I look back, I was doing stuff similar where I was charting out where their emotion was the characters. And what was interesting is that the graph.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huge marathon that only happens once every two, three years. And then you get into editing, and it's basically a ninth five job. You know, there's always things coming up, but it's a much slower pace. And that could be a 40-week process. Then you get to selling the film, which is kind of a two, three-week kind of marathon of travel, but it's kind of fun because that's where a lot of stories come from because you see all these different cultures and you just see a lot of crazy shit. So it's not that bad. And then I get into development. And when I'm in development for the next project, once again, I can really shape that around my son's schedule and I can have time to see my friends and have experiences and travel and stuff like that because when you're developing, it's all virtual in your head, not quite in a computer, but it's all in your imagination for a while. And all you need is a notepad and a pen and you could be anywhere.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not a bad life as a filmmaker because basically, at least the way my schedule is, I do a film every two, three years. So in that two, three years, there'll be like a 50-60 day run, which will be completely selfish and completely committed and dedicated to the film where I'm working 18, 20 hour days over and over again insane amount of time. And, you know, you get one day off on the weekend and then the next day you're probably prepping. Although I'm able now to almost get two days off because I've been doing it enough that I kind of have more skills that I can go in. So I can get a weekend off sometimes. But where I can spend with family and friends, not that I could go out and party and have a beer. I mean, it's got to be very mellow. Most of the time, I'll just want to watch Game of Thrones. But that's a huge...”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In different forms because other forms can be expressed in different ways. So I can't really speak for that, but storytelling, you need stories.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think if it's an assignment where you don't really, you're just showing up as a director and you're there to make all the departments work together and make the actors do it. I think it becomes more of a craft then. Not to say that it's not an art, but I think if you're trying to create your own stories that are coming out of life, you have to actually live life to do it. Otherwise, you're just getting your stories. I don't know where you could get your stories from. I guess you can make things about being an obsessive film, which is kind of like, you know, one of my favorite filmmakers, Fellini, started making films about directors making films. But for a while, that's what he worked on. And so I think you have to balance this art form. It's very different, I think.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, something that's not a personal story by nature. I mean, I think every story is personal or you can find a personal way because anytime you portray a character on screen, you should sort of infuse them with real emotions and stuff. So to do that, you have to feel it yourself. But if you're drawing on your own life and your own stories and you're somehow more autobiographical somehow, even through metaphor, because I think all my films are not about, I'm not a ballerina yet. You know, there's a lot of Natalie in me. I mean, that character, Nina, in me, not Natalie, but Nina, the character. I'm not a wrestler, but Randy the Ram, I'm pretty connected to and I understand why he makes every decision and some of those stories in there I can relate to or are drawn from my own life.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experiences of my life. And the problem is if you keep working nonstop and you're originating your material, I think it's different if you're more of a journeyman who's going along and then just taking your craft and bringing it to life, bringing a great script to life.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it is a balancing act. And, you know, but. I think All the time you put into life, you know, into family and into friends and into activities outside of the work. You know, back to our procrastination, not to say hang out with your family is procrastination, but bringing in those other experiences into your life is what makes you be able to relate to people and to communicate and at least for filmmaking, that's a major part is, you know, going to a diner with friends and seeing an argument between some strangers over there ends up in a movie for me, you know, living life and seeing stuff and doing all different types of experiences through this planet is important to be a storyteller because it's all about the stories. I mean, I think the first three, four films of my career and definitely all my short films before that all came out of very personal.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, there was a test when I was in undergrad, and my roommate did it where he basically was to stay awake and he just became cruel. And I remember him telling me like they were like, he's like, I'm going to go to sleep. They're like, don't go to sleep. So he took a deck of cards and started throwing cards around the room and made everyone run around and pick them up. Otherwise, he would go to sleep. So he started doing really messing with the AIDS and the grad students that were doing the studies on him. Of course the overnighter and those are important, not just, you know, when you're in college and stuff, but I'm glad you are out there exploring it for us.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never did the Romeo. So I probably have some type of insecurity about that because I don't think I could write that. I can write dialogue because I have an ear and I do have some ideas that I can try to sketch out, but I don't really, you know, I guess I'm scared of, I'm scared you're going to give me an essay to write because that's going to be a challenging one.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I mean, I just guess I'm in awe of some friends that really write. And I see the way they can put words together. Look, the reality, I'm being more truthful with Ferris than I've been with probably anyone. The reality is I was a public school kid from Brooklyn, and they never really taught me how to write. And when I got to college, I went into the creative writing class and I almost flunked out of it because I really did not know how to write an essay. To this day, my son, my 11-year-old son, knows more about pronouns and nouns and sentence structure. I just never learned grammar. It was never taught to me. And it was a shame. I just never.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's that unconscious state where you're not feeling body. That's the state to get into where just coming out of you, you know, and by no means as that often, I believe there are writers out there. I was very, I know some real writers and I think they get into that state a lot easier. I'm not a real writer. Sometimes I have ideas that I want to get out and express and so I try to do it.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, there, it's that area. When I feel, when I'm writing and it's like coming out of there, I know it's some type of chi energy from there.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, dancing around for five years, telling studios I was going to that people would be interested in the movie because I really believed it. I wasn't, I'm not interested, you know. I happen to be a filmmaker who wants to talk to audiences. I love it. I love when they respond. Unfortunately, I haven't done a comedy or something that's easy quite yet easier to connect with an audience? Not easier to make by any means. I just mean, you know, when you're going to aiming to please an audience, it's a lot easier to make it than when you're just making something that you feel inside. And for me, it's not a conscious thing. It's purely from my gut. That's the core for me. It comes from my stomach always. It's not the heart. Mostly, or it might be somewhere between, I don't know what's right here.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If it's truthful to who you are and you're concerned about how people are going to react to it, you know, stick up your middle finger and charge straight into that fire. You have to. If you're trying to be provocateur just to be a provocateur, go F yourself. That to me, that's the bad stuff is like when it's not real. So for me, it's never like, oh shit, how do I mess around with that? That's not why I make movies at all. I'm just juiced about these ideas. And they have nothing about being confrontational. But even when I do a film, like, you know, the fountain's been called the love poem to death, I piss people off, even though it's just really gentle, romantic movie about a guy coming to terms with dying. I guess that's just not a very commercial idea in the West. But, you know, I thought it was at the time.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's an easy answer. Keep going. You know, that's what you want. I mean, when I meet, when I teach, both my parents were teachers. And so it's in the blood, and I love teaching. You know, the thing I try to instill in students is like the only thing you have to offer is you. You know, your individual stories, your individual perception, your individual humanity, and figuring out a way to communicate that humanity to humanity at large. I mean, that's the beauty of cinema once again, that you can have a six-year-old Iranian girl or a 90-year-old British gentleman, and you can have an equal emotional experience if the filmmaker does their job right to it. So for me, it would be, you know, a ballerina and a wrestler. Hopefully, can I make you feel their blood and their pain? That's the goal because that's one of the great things cinema does is to bring us into other human experiences. So if you”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saw it, it was like two miles long, you know, half a mile tall. I mean, I just with huge chunks of ice falling and you'd see the chunks fall off and then a minute later you'd hear the sound because of the distance like at a ballpark. And then these huge waves from that start coming at you and you're in a kayak so you're really close to water. And on those waves are icebergs with seals hauled out regulating their temperature on it going up and down. I mean just like.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, a kid from Brooklyn, no idea what was going on. So, I mean, every day it was just, every day literally was something I had never seen before. And then in Alaska, and you know, this is a pre-Google, pre crazy media age, you know, still only 11 channels on the station. A couple of people had cable, but early days of civilization. I remember we were kayaking. It was an amazing trip. It was like five weeks in kayaks out in Prince William Sound, one of the most untouched places on the planet at that point until Exxon showed up. And we were going to this glacier, and I had never seen a glacier. Now everyone's seen a glacier at this point because of the calving ice and what's happening to the glaciers. But the idea of blue ice for a kid from Brooklyn, and like this Chenega Glacier, the first time I...”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything changes your life all the time. But back at that age, when you're 16 and you're Brooklyn kid from New York City who's basically a concrete jungle flea and you suddenly in the savannah of Kenya, of course, it's going to change your life. So it's a little bit of an overstatement, I think. Every day was mind-blowing. As an embarrassing moment, I was 16, so you have to forgive me. I got off the plane and I was riding with the professors to the thing. I was like, oh, when are we going to see tigers? They're like, there aren't any tigers in Africa. They're in Asia.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So basically, what we were there to do is to prove his idea that indigenous animals were better adapted to the environment than domesticated animals, which is completely obvious, but in science, you have to sort of prove it. So we studied them morphologically, which was biologically, and then we also looked at them and their behavior patterns during the day. And I mean, it was fascinating because basically we just use this, you know, I learned the scientific method and we did real serious research and real charting and real, you know, and the next year was Alaska when I went to Prince William Sound. And the beauty of that was the textbook, the only textbook we had was origin of species. And each two days, we had to read another chapter of Origin of Species and discuss it. And over the six, seven weeks I was out in the bush, that was the whole class.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was interesting. We basically were there. We were on this ranch owned by an Afrikana who wanted to, he did this thing called preservation for profit was his idea, where basically he was like, look, during a drought, all the cattle die, but indigenous animals, of course, don't die because they basically forage in the morning when there's dew on the”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All animals that stand on their hoofs. So everything from cattle, you know, domesticated cattle to zebra, gazelle. Yeah, there were no Dira Elk. There might have been some elk in some type of elk there, but yeah, so it's all”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is what I want to do. Dad, you know, and somehow they took a few high school students, and I was like an advanced biology. So I was always good in science. My dad was a science teacher, so I was always pointed in that direction a bit. And so I got them to let me go to Kenya where I did, what did I study? I studied thermoregulation. No, I studied water strategies and ungulates. The next year I went to Alaska with them to Prince William Sound, actually where that big Exxon spill was. But I was there two years before that, which was fascinating because the research we did there actually, they used that research after the spill to see what the impact was. But in Alaska I studied thermoregulation and harbor seals. I just like to say these words because they're fancy sounding.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was after Kenya. I'm also on the board of directors for an organization called the School for Field Studies, which is a great organization out of Salem, Massachusetts, which basically trains mostly college students to go abroad into sensitive environmental areas and do environmental studies. And when I was a, I don't know, a young teenager, I worked at the New York City Aquarium in Coney Island, which was right next to my neighborhood in Brooklyn. And one of the big perks of that job besides being at the aquarium was that if you wore the aquarium t-shirt, you got to go on the cyclone roller coaster over and over again. So we used to go 40, 50 times in a row on the cyclone, you know, and but I picked up a book for the school for field studies there and it was just this little color catalog and I was like, wow, they send kids to Kenya. And I was like, Ma.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That little old shriveled old guy on a cane was transforming himself into this twenty foot beast and I didn't even understand the language. And I was like, that's cool to entertain a crowd with a point of view.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every language, in every culture can relate to. For me, the power storytelling happened. I graduated high school early and backpacked around Europe and the Middle East. And I ended up in the GEMA in Marrakesh. I don't know if you've been there, but it's an amazing square in the middle of the Suk, you know, where they're all the shops and stuff. And at nighttime it's filled with snake charmers and food and all this stuff. And there was one old guy leaning on a cane and a beard telling a story. And he had a huge crowd around him and it was all in Arabic. And I didn't understand the freaking word, but I was mesmerized. And I was like, that's what I want to do. I want to tell stories.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Genetic. I don't know if it's part of the human condition. I don't know if it's something that we're taught very, very young in our first Dr. Seuss books, but it's something that we all around the planet.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be looking away. But in a movie and via the close up, you can be unconscious and fully being Paul Newman's head, even though you don't know exactly what he's thinking. You can sort of study him and steal that thought. And that to me is the greatness of cinema, or one of the great things about cinema. And so, and that's where you get emotion, you know, and what happens is if you start linking different emotions together, hopefully you start to tell a story. What the story does is it expands the emotion, just like a joke, you know, set up, set up, set up, pay off. You know, that's the classic structure of a joke. It's the same thing with drama where you're setting up a character and building a character. You give them a challenge, and then you see them go through that challenge and pay off. And then there's always the pitfall when it all falls apart, and then they rise up. And that hero's journey, you know, is just so, I don't know if it's...”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it starts with the greatest, I think the greatest invention of the 20th century that's overlooked, which is the close-up. And that's the great thing about cinema is the fact that you can stick a camera right in the face of Paul Newman, right on those beautiful blue eyes, and you can go right into his soul. And then when you project it months later to an audience or years later, potentially centuries later, you are anonymous in that audience yet you can feel the empathy because in reality two people talking and hanging out, how much eye contact do you make? There's lots of other things going on in this room that you're taking in, that air conditioner rattling. My guy's mixing in the other room. But the actual connection with another human being where you're really looking into their soul and not thinking about yourself because the thing is when I look at you and you look at me, we're thinking a little bit about, well, now I'm making really uncomfortable us looking at each other and we're going to.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How disposable they are because of how quick, how much stuff we're being bombarded with day after day after day, it's nice to sort of hopefully have something that reflects back on it and thinks about it.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Best life experiences was just randomly. I walked into a coffee shop and it happened to be around the corner from where Pie was playing in LA at the new art. And a dad came in with his 18-year-old daughter and two of her friends. And the four of them were sitting there just talking about this black and white movie that they had just seen. And I just kind of eavesdropped, you know, listening to him, just thrilled that there was a conversation and a debate and what did that mean and what did that mean? You know, for me, that's always been the films I love is, you know, yes, you know, there are movies that you have a great experience in and enjoy. And it's just a great pleasure to watch and a great experience. But I also like the ones that, you know, make you scratch your head and you think about you talking, you debate. Because, you know, you want to kind of have an impact. And I think in today's landscape, a lot of things are disposable and it's really, really quick.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I guess I start off with the first rule of filmmaking is never to bore an audience. That to me is the worst feeling and experience when I'm watching a movie and my mind is wandering and maybe looking at the colors splatter across the screen. I think you always want to engage an audience, not just visually, not just through sound, but emotionally. So I think that's rule one is just to give people an engaging emotional experience for two hours, whatever you're running time is. And then I think on top of that, you can hopefully layer in some ideas so that when people leave the theater, it's not like 15 minutes later, what did we watch? I don't want to be the McDonald's in movies where the rapper, you know, it's just the rapper is all that's left over. I want people to be, you know, thinking about a bit about and talking about it. For me, one of my...”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Machine guns on the biggest movie stars in the world. It's disgusting. The gun companies are getting free ads. And, you know, yet you can't show someone kissing. So there's a whole sort of bend with that. I don't know how I got there, but I got there.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I feel in this country sexuality and violence has flipped, especially in the movies, where you can have as much violence as you want in a PG, PG13 movie, but you can't have an ounce of sexuality in a PG or PG-13 movie. And that, to me, is disgusting. I don't have words to go beyond that. The fact that we're training our kids to fire guns at such a young age with nerf guns and video games. It's disgusting and disturbing while, you know, any form of saying there's a beauty and human connection, physical connection that, no, we can't talk about that. And the fact that the MPAA sort of reinforces that. And that's what, I mean, you know, I mean, here I'll go off, but like guns and ads. I walk down the street when my kid was five, six years old and my kid's pointing out huge, crazy, sexy looking machine.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, well, I mean, a lot, very clear example would be when working with women, if there's things that, or men, there's things that are sexual in nature, you know, what's required, nudity-wise, and all that type of stuff. And you have to talk about that beforehand because, of course, it's very sensitive material and you want everyone to be comfortable and very clear on why you're doing something. You know, anytime you do like a lovemaking scene, what exactly is it going to be and why? And I've never really done a love-making scene to sort of make it sort of an erotic thing for an audience. I always, you know, try to tie it in narratively. So I tell them very clearly where the camera is going to be, what we're going to do, how we're going to run the set, stuff like that. Same thing with violence. Violence, I think, is just as important in the other way of how we're going to be demonstrating violence, how we're going to show it. I mean, for me, that's a huge pet.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, I mean, look, I mean, I've never done a situation where I'm asking someone, hey, we're going to waterboard you for three months. You know, I mean, we're trying to do something that's exciting and hopefully beautiful, striving to make art. So that's the underlining agreement. So, you're walking into that conversation, hey, I dig you, you dig me, let's try to make this work. But just to be clear, these are some of the things that are going to be going on that will probably make you feel uncomfortable.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think they fit in the widget. So we have to convince people why it's going to be a widget. And then we have to raise the money and hopefully make it and get the investors' monies back. And, you know, I'm 5 for six, which isn't bad. But each time it's a real, it's a lot of work. So you want to make the whole process of it for all the artists working with you as easy as possible. That's not really where you want to put your fighting. You want to do the fighting for the world and the money and all that.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, filmmaking is so hard. I think for a lot of people, there's just so many challenges. It's like, you know, literally every single film I've done has been like its own IPO. It's its own corporation. I start off with an idea. I have to attract talent and money to come together. Yes, there's a formula, but I generally are making things that don't quite fit into the widget factory. They're a little weird and stuff.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To keep Because I think he knew deep in his heart that what I was trying to do was make a great film with him. And then he rose to it and he brought it and bring it. But he talks about that meeting the little skinny punk coming to him and pointing his little stubby finger in his face, which I love. It's funny. I wish I was that tough. And that straightforward, I'm sure I was more cordial and polite to him because I was, I know I was in awe of him and excited to meet him. But I just wanted to be clear that, look, you know, if we're going to do this, we're going to do this. Let's roll up our sleeves and go for it. Because it's just.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I try to be very, very straightforward and clear because I want to get all the as many of the problems off the table because when we do get to set, time is really the biggest enemy or foe because it's so short and it happens so quickly that if you start getting to stupid things that weren't pre-discussed, it's a nightmare. And so you have to be as completely prepared and professional as you can when you're spending whatever it is $20,000 a minute or whatever it may be that day you want to Mike Tyson money time is what I'm talking about you want to be on top of your game so I just went in very clearly with Mickie and I think I think what it meant for Mickey for it is like he looked at me like medicine you know he tasted really bad but he knew it was good for him so you know he just closed his eyes and opened his mouth and swallowed to get it done and and really”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I just wanted to be very clear with him because I felt I just knew how challenging the film we were about to do was going to be. And I find that the longer I do this, the more clear you can be up front, the better. Because no matter what happens, it always changes. I think sometimes people don't really hear what you're saying to them.”
2017-09-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT