The Fountain is a major new science fiction film offering a new twist on a genre so heavily dominated in recent years by The Matrix and its many imitators. Reminiscent of European comic book sci-fi, the film seeks to explore human psychology and spirituality while incorporating and updating deep-rooted collective mythology, echoing Stanley Kubrick’s similarly themed but less human movie milestone, which subsequently reinvented the genre, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The film also marks a reinvention for the independent director himself, as he abandons many of the techniques so familiar from his previous movies, steps up the scale of his projects and for the first time finds himself making a movie for a studio. But surprisingly, Warner Bros’ $35 million investment did not come with strings attached. In fact, after the first press screening of some test footage of the film in Montreal earlier this year, Warner Bros announced that it sees its relationship with Aronofsky very much like the one the studio previously enjoyed with Stanley Kubrick. Not bad for the guy who grew up in South Brooklyn, New York and had no idea he even wanted to make films.
So how did the Coney Island kid become one of America’s most critically respected and hip filmmakers? Well, a chance discovery of Hubert Selby’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn at a public library when Aronofsky was still a freshman at college influenced the young sometime poet and photographer tremendously, and he began to consider the possibility of becoming a storyteller himself. “Growing up in Brooklyn there wasn’t really a sense that you could be a director,” Aronofsky told me. “This is all before the whole Sundance thing really became part of pop consciousness. Then when I was in undergraduate college, my roommate was an animator and I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought I should study the liberal arts, but the problem is he would end the year with a movie and I would end the year with a bunch of papers with B-minuses on them. I felt there was something wrong with that. I was always very interested in the visual landscape, so I tried to get into either the filmmaking class or the sculpture class, and I got into the filmmaking class, and it was the first thing that kept me awake at night.”
With fate seemingly already playing a hand in the young artist’s direction, Aronofsky combined practical filmmaking exercises with classes in drawing, animation and film theory. “I went to Harvard for four years. They had a really good program where they just gave you a camera and let you do what you wanted to do, and there was critique and you all talked about each other’s work, but it was very independent, which served me very well. They just gave you the equipment to do things and didn’t really paint any restrictions on what you were allowed to do. I made a short film there called Supermarket Sweep. It won a bunch of awards, but it was a very different world back then. This was, I guess, 1991 and I remember going to this one organization in New York called maybe AVF or something. It was this place that was a sort of a resource for indie filmmakers and they used to have folders of different festivals you could apply to. I used to go there and look through their information and pull out applications and photocopy them and fill them and send off my film. But it was not like today when you can Google film festivals and commit on line and send DVDs out. It’s really interesting how it’s changed because there was much more legwork involved in getting your film out there. I got to know the people at the post office because I would be always sending out these shipments of my videotape.”
From there the aspiring director, like many people seeking a career in film, made the move to Los Angeles studying at the American Film Institute (AFI) for two years. The youngest student in the director’s program, Aronofsky met Eric Watson and Matthew Libatique, also the youngest in their programs, respectively producing and cinematography. They would go on to collaborate on all three of Aronofsky’s features. After the course, Aronofsky stayed on in Los Angeles, trying to get his first feature script Dreamland off the ground, a low budget story about a fortune-teller. “I wrote this screenplay at the AFI and it was about growing up in Coney Island where I grew up it. It was a magical-real-fantasy coming of age story. I just couldn’t get traction; I couldn’t get it made. Then a friend of mine (Scott Silver), who I had gone to film school with had got his film – Johns (1996) – into the Sundance Film Festival, and he asked me to come and hang out and support him. I went and it was the year that Welcome to the Dollhouse and When We Were Kings were there. I think seeing how Sundance welcomed independent vision kind of gave me the courage to say, ‘Hey man I can try and do something for nothing’, and if I do it well then there’ll be an audience for it. So we started to figure out something we could do for no budget – for the cost of the film and a bunch of favours.”
That film turned out to be the gritty black and white quasi-religious sci-fi we all know and love as Pi. Written with help of actor friend Sean Gullette, who also starred, shot on a budget of just $60,000 raised by collecting small investments of between $100 and $2,000, and with the crew working for deferred fees, the nonetheless ambitious project garnered critical attention at the Sundance Film Festival and was picked up by Artisan and given a theatrical, video and DVD release. The film also demonstrated Aronofsky’s ability as an experimental and innovative director with high artistic standards – despite budget restrictions. “At Harvard undergrad, the first synced film we did was a portrait film on black and white reversal,” explains Aronofsky. “I always loved the way that looked. I remember doing that portrait film at Harvard for no money, they just gave us like two or three rolls of 400 16mm film and we just went out and shot our guy and made a really cool looking film, and so I said, ‘Hey, why can’t I do that for a feature?’ So, okay that means one actor, one character, so what’s the story I can tell? I think those three or four years I struggled in LA were kind of my dark LA days. I was unemployed, single and lonely. LA is a hard place, but all that loneliness sort of made its way into Pi.”
For the film, Aronofsky employed unusual techniques such as the Heat-Cam, where a powerful heat source is placed between the subject and the lens causing heat waves to ripple over the image as if in a desert; the Vibrator-Cam where a securely bolted-down camera is manually shaken vigorously, and the infamous Snorri-Cam, developed by the Icelandic photographers the Snorri Brothers (although they’re not really brothers), whereby an actor is strapped into a camera rig like a reverse Steadicam with the camera pointing directly at them. As they move, the actor remains still in the centre and focus of frame, while the world behind them moves. All these techniques formed part of the ammunition in Aronofky’s quest to produce a completely subjective piece of cinema, in other words using the camera to translate the emotional and psychological experience of the character to the audience (as opposed to the more objective proscenium arch – or as an audience at a theatre would view a performance). “Basically you can use a lot of POV and a lot of ways to help the audience really fall into the character’s head,” explains Aronofsky. “So you don’t have to cut away to the bad guys plotting to take over the world, but show what that means from your character’s point of view. I think the reason I was attracted to Requiem was because, instead of being one subjective point of view, there was suddenly four subjective points of view with four characters’ heads to get into, and also because we had a little bit more money there were a lot of the ideas I wanted to do on Pi that I wasn’t able to explore.”
The £4m budget for independent production Requiem for a Dream came from true believers in artistic vision, Thousand Words, with Artisan handling distribution again. Reusing many of the exciting visual techniques from Pi and many of the same crew and actors, Aronofsky let rip with the full potential of his visual style in full colour, and to accommodate the subjective experience of four characters made use of split screens, Snorri-Cams and just about every trick in the book, making his name synonymous with dazzling camerawork and quickfire editing. Requiem for a Dream also marked the introduction of digital effects into the filmmaker’s palette. The finished film contained about 150 small effects shots, such as pupils dilating and faces subtly shrinking, and all amazingly put together on desktop computers by friends Jeremy Dawson and Dan Schrecker from Amoeba Proteus. “Some of the Vibrator-Cams in Requiem we also actually did digitally,” explains Aronofsky. “There’s a sequence where the camera is shaking and Jared and Marlon are in jail screaming in pain. So I had their audio charted for volume and then I had them digitally shake it in sync with their volume so that it was even more subjective.”
In the six year gap since Requiem for a Dream Aronofsky has delivered a script to Warner Bros for Batman: Year One (but they preferred to go with a different concept that eventually became Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins), wrote and executively produced Below (originally entitled Proteus) and tried very, very hard to make The Fountain. Once again, the determined filmmaker found himself fighting to get his singular vision made. The script spanned a thousand years, incorporating the Conquistadors in Southern America, modern day North America and the star fields of outer (or maybe inner) space in a story about the Tree of Life – a tough package to sell once, but when the $90 million film folded just as it was about to go into production, how do you then convince someone else to invest in it? Heartbreaking for any director, but for one that invests so much time and energy into a project from the story upwards it was devastating. “I guess it’s always hard for me to make my films,” says Aronofsky. “No-one really wanted to make a black and white film about God and maths. It was hard to raise the money, and when we tried to do a movie that everyone was calling a drug movie, it took a long time to make and I think The Fountain was also a very tricky film to make. I think that’s all I know how to do is what lays in my belly and just do it until it gets done.”
The film collapsed when original leading man Brad pitt (remember that period when he had the wild man beard? Well, he was growing that for The Fountain) walked away from the project. After two and a half years of developing the script with Aronofsky, pitt decided to take up the offer of playing Achilles in Wolfgang Petersen’s God-less epic Troy. Despite the collapse of the project, Aronofsky eventually went back to the drawing board and wrote a new version of The Fountain, also maintaining the comic book rights to the original version of the script. What emerged was a tighter, cheaper, better script. Out went the huge battle scenes from the 16th century Mayan world, instead of a battle between hundreds on both sides, Aronofsky reduced it to just one man trying to get through overwhelming masses, at the same time creating a metaphor for the central character’s struggle to find the secret of immortality. “Well I think digital effects was a big place where we had to rethink everything, but I think overall the film is very much the same; it’s just that having all that extra time to rethink and to re-plot and to re-plan helped a lot. But ultimately the film is very similar to what it originally was. It’s just that we really boiled it down to the essence of what the film is about.”
Throughout Aronofsky’s career he has quietly resisted the use of digital effects. Pi contains no digitally manipulated imagery whatsoever, while Requiem for a Dream has only the most limited of small visual enhancements. In fact, there are many shots in both films that could easily have been done in post-production, such as the Heat-Cam, frame rate adjustments or the triple exposure of Sarah Goldfarb losing her mind in Requiem for a Dream. “Yeah, I think that comes from my upbringing, going through film school and learning those techniques and enjoying the technical stuff you can do in-camera,” Aronofsky explains. “I mean, I really enjoy in-camera things. Even with the big digital sequences we did in The Fountain, there was this whole move to make everything organic. There’s no CGI in The Fountain (not 100 per cent true – see the following additional article), yet there are a lot of sequences that would feel like they are CGI. The reason for that is I just feel that CGI has been taken too far and people are just basically turning films that should be live action into something that feels like animation, and so we really fought not to do any of that type of stuff.”
While it may be possible to limit the use of digital effects in the first two acts of the film that are grounded in the ‘real’ worlds of sixteenth century Mayan civilisation and present day America, surely the final psychedelic journey across star fields and black nebulas to witness the death of a star requires just a little bit of CGI? “That’s all organic material,” says Aronofsky. “We hired this guy in the UK by the name of Peter Parks, who basically for the past 25 years has been photographing organic reactions the size of a postage stamp inside of a petri dish and shooting with microscopes. We hired him to shoot the stuff that would help us and then digitally manipulated it through collage. But basically everything in the film was photographed – meaning light hit something, it bounced off it, went through a lens and hit film.”
Cinematography on The Fountain was, as ever, handled by the talented Matthew Libatique, whose other credits include Tigerland, Inside Man and Live Schrieber’s Everything is Illuminated. Previous projects with Aronofsky had always been a challenge. On Pi, Libatique had to shoot on black and white reversal stock, which had to be processed at Bono Labs in Virginia, as the only lab in the US capable of dealing with it. While it gives a great stylized look and divides the world into a fitting binary black and white for the obsessed mathematician, it’s also not the easiest of stocks to work with. If you miss the exposure by just one or two stops, the film can go completely black or completely white. For Requiem for a Dream, the colour palette was limited to exclude the colour red in order to highlight the appearances of Sarah Goldfarb in her red dress and hair, while the light in the film slowly shifted from warm natural light to harsher, bluer artificial light. The Fountain, of course enjoyed the same considered approach both from director and cinematographer, with the additional benefits of control that digital intermediate brings. “The Fountain is a pretty extreme palette as well,” explains Aronofsky. “I mean the whole film is a movement from darkness into light. Hugh’s character represents that movement starting off in darkness and moving towards the light. Rachel Weisz’s character represents the light. She’s always in the light and then separating them we used the colour gold for several reasons, which will hopefully become clear in the film. For us it just became the world of Maya, the world of illusion that separated the darkness from the light.”
With a obsessive central male character that focuses more on his work and his quest than his relationship to others, particularly women, but in doing so discovers a way to God, The Fountain bears more than a passing thematic resemblance to Aronofsky’s first feature Pi. But unlike Pi or Requiem for a Dream, the storytelling has moved away from a purely subjective style. “I think The Fountain is a very different visual language from the other two,” Aronofsky explains. “I think the style is much less evident than it was in Requiem and Pi. In graffiti they have this type of writing called Wildstyle; Matty and I always called those films Wildstyle. We’ve completely moved away from that. I think The Fountain is a much subtler visual language, but it is as controlled and thought-out as the other two. People who may read your magazine may notice it. I think that’s just the nature of the piece, it just wasn’t so much of a style piece. The Fountain is a whole different language. Both me and Matty, my DP decided, ‘Hey, let’s just do something completely different.”
In the same way that a cathedral is constructed to echo the symbol of its religion in its layout, its windows, its archways and its decoration, so The Fountain has visually adopted the crucifix as the structure for the positioning and movement of the camerawork around the central character. Perhaps alluding to the ancient mythological concept of the hanged man divided in four directions as part of the required process to achieve wholeness and rebirth. This subtle visual cruciform structure exists throughout the film, placing the camera at 90deg to the central character either in profile, or directly straight on, or directly behind or directly above or below and sometimes incorporating tracking, but always keeping the main character in the centre. “Well, we were just searching for a new way to shoot something and we tried to find something that worked in our visual language,” says Aronofsky. “I think every story has its own visual language and it’s the filmmaker’s job to figure that out, and you basically look at the thematic truth of what the film is and through that it becomes evident that there is only one place to stick a camera. I think that’s the goal: to try and figure out, boil everything down to a single truth; that’s what I try to do in all my films.”
Despite Aronofsky’s reputation for slick visuals, his films are so much more than that. Always striving for the images on the screen to be born out of and driven by the narrative context, the director deftly avoids the danger of letting style override content, as happens far to frequently in this age of computer edited and animated movies. More surprising though for such a visual director is the immense importance he places on the development of performance. Using improvisation with the actors to write scenes both in pre-production and when necessary during production; little surprise then that his films pack such an emotional punch. “I always love the process of rehearsal and working with actors,” says Aronofsky. “Even though they are very visual films, I think the thing I enjoy the most about the directing process is working with actors, and so I love the rehearsal process. We spend a long time and on The Fountain I think I spent about 14 months with Hugh [Jackman] and three months with Rachel [Weisz] rehearsing the movie. I think that every actor is different, like if I was a painter they would be colours and I think that each actor has their own colour and you have to basically work with that colour to find the best way to tell the story.”
With The Fountain on theatrical release in December and the graphic novel of the original script soon to be released by Vertigo, for the time being, at least, fans of Aronofsky’s particular style of cinema and storytelling will be satisfied. They should also be pleased to know that he is currently developing a script based on the story of Lone Wolf and Cub, but like Sergio Leone before him is planning to shift the action away from the Samurai of feudal Japan and adapt the story for a Western. Aronofsky has also optioned a project called Black Flies, a novel about an emergency medical technician working in Harlem, and is developing a script for Flicker, where an LA film student becomes obsessed with a B-picture director whose work he believes is part of a masterplan to obliterate life. While perhaps not the most prolific of directors, you are at least assured that any film by Darren Aronofsky has been painstakingly developed with real passion and personal input to the utmost of the director’s ability, resources and opportunity at that given time. Perhaps that’s why he finds making them so difficult.
“Well, there’s a lot of sacrifice,” he says. “I mean it’s very difficult to make movies. It’s not an easy pastime and it just takes a lot of patience, lot of time, lot of focus, lot of commitment, and its all very, very tough to remain true and believe in a vision. It’s just a very hard thing to do.”
Additional article
Keeping it real
David Valentine reports on how the visual FX team on The Fountain used a combination of micro photography and Fusion and to create the FX on Aronofsky’s new movie.
Warner Bros’ modestly budgeted spiritual sci-fi epic hits theatres this December with a well-timed antidote to the usual ‘family-orientated’ fantasy extravaganzas. Intelligent science fiction for savvy cinemagoers from writer-director Darren Aronofsky whose previous features Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000) were both critical and cult hits. The $35 million feature explores a subject close to the heart of modern society, the desire to be young and live forever and the fragility of existence. But instead of the fountain of youth, the film focuses on the biblical and mythological Tree of Life. In a story that straddles 1000 years, the audience travels to the 16th Century and the Conquistadors’ assault on the Mayan world, follows a medical researcher trying to find a cure for his dying wife in the 21st century and finally, and most spectacularly, follows a lone space traveller in the 26th century on a voyage through a black nebula to watch a star die. Linking all three acts of the film is the actor Hugh Jackman, better known as Wolverine from the X-men franchise. The film also stars Rachel Weisz (Aronofsky’s fiancée) as the wife, anima guide and influence.
For those familiar with Aronofsky’s work, you’ll already be aware that the dazzling images he normally conjures up for his movies are achieved via a combination of practical mechanical devices and in-camera effects. The digitally reluctant director, however, has had his fair share of compromise on this project, with a visual effects tally of some 450 shots, almost half of which occur in the final act in outer (or maybe inner) space. Much of the effects work on this film has revolved around incredibly complex and multi-layered compositing, but despite the director’s insistence otherwise, there are also a few 3D CGI shots in there too for good measure. As Jeremy Dawson from Amoeba Proteus (the VFX arm of Aronofsky’s company Protozoa) explains: “A lot of stuff was done in computer and there’s a few CGI scenes scattered throughout the film, pretty much all of the stuff that was done in CGI would be faking reality, such as the spears in the Mayan battle sequence. Basically we did everything we could only to use it as a last resort.”
As is pretty much the norm nowadays, the visual effects work on The Fountain was divided between several effects houses, partly due to specialist talents, but also a lot to do with speed. Digital Dimension’s Montreal facility was responsible for 26 shots in all, including creating snowflakes that fall near the Tree of Life, a transition from summer to winter and the flying spears from the Mayan battle sequence. These included replacing ‘green-spears’ that the actors were being hit by and adding extra splashes of CG blood. They also had to provide some scene extensions, most crucially when there was a shot during the Mayan sequence that had to pull up higher than the camera could go. This was achieved by shrinking the image and copying more crowd to the outside perimeter of the shot. Also based in Montreal is Buzz Image, which were responsible for generating the flowers that burst out of Hugh Jackman in the last act of the film, a colourful array of petals sprouting from his eyes and mouth. “We had shot a lot of elements like these bladder rigs of green that burst open,” explains Jeremy Dawson. “Then we put the flowers on top; all the flowers were CG.”
Matte paintings in the Mayan sequence and elsewhere were handled by Mokko Studio, whose recent work includes Silent Hill. The bulk of the effects work in the startlingly alien third act was accomplished by Toronto-based effects house Intelligent Creatures. Its credits include The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl (2005), Mr &Mrs Smith (2005) and new feature from Alejandro González Iñárritu, Babel (2006). Working very closely with Jeremy Dawson and Dan Schrecker from Amoeba Proteus, the main task for the facility was the production of the ‘hero backgrounds’ for Hugh Jackman’s voyage across space, across star fields, into a black nebula, and the images of the dying star Shibalbae. Desiring not to date the effects by using contemporary computer graphics capabilities the team opted to hire Englishman Peter Parks to shoot microscopic chemical reactions in a petri dish to represent the alien realms – from the micro to the macrocosm.
“Traditionally what would have happened is we would have generated a library in CG,” explains visual effects supervisor Raymond Gieringer: “basically, a CG library of elements that we would have used to create the star and the nebula. In this case Peter Parks’ chemical reactions gave us a library of all these literally microscopic chemical reactions that have a certain scale to them. They’re beautiful. We were charged basically to integrate all these elements because ultimately they don’t have any method of control. So we had to then go in, grab these separate elements, place them, warp them, layer them up, kind of like a jigsaw puzzle; all these little elements we had to adapt to and scale to give the look.”
Electing to use the robust Eyeon Fusion to accomplish the many hundreds of layers of compositing required to achieve the desired look for the ‘hero backgrounds’, the team still had to find a way to make sure their creations would knit seamlessly with not only the production design but also with cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera lighting. “I think we were used in a valuable way early on,” says Raymond Gieringer. “During shooting typically what happened is we’d be on the set with Matty Libatique and we’d have a bunch of images – although the work wasn’t finished by any means – where we had already started to establish the look of the star field and the nebula. We had it sitting there looking at it on the screen, and Matty would literally take a photograph, come over to us, and we could quickly put the background in the photograph for him and he could have a quick look at it and say, ‘Oh, that lighting isn’t working at all’ and he’d go back and start relighting stuff. I can’t really say we controlled his lighting, that wasn’t the case, but I think the great part is that we could help the lighting out a little bit, so it was more of a harmonious involvement. Actually, in the end I think it helped us too. Not to say it was perfect all the time, but it was so much better, so much easier. Generally you don’t have the luxury of having that.”
In an echo of the Mayan camera shot that Digital Dimension had to extend in the first section of the film, is an incredible pull back from an extreme close up of Hugh Jackman to encompass the Tree-Ship he is traveling on, and the star field he is journeying through. Because director Aronofsky wanted to avoid CG wherever possible (although the shell of the ship is CG) a CG version of Hugh Jackman was ruled out, which meant that not only was a miniature of the Tree-Ship going to have to be incorporated into the shot, but a real Hugh Jackman! “We did one big shot,” explains Raymond Gieringer. “We had to do a big kind of pull back starting on Hugh’s face while he’s sitting in the lotus position and we do a pull back to accommodate the ship. That was a beautiful shot starting tight on Hugh in full frame, then he does a big flip and lands by the Tree. I mean that one was a big deal. We shot Hugh directly, shot him underwater so he had that ‘floaty’ feel; he had to feel like he was floating in space, but because he’d been in the water a while with his eyes open, we had to replace his face and remove the rig; then composite in the ship. I think we also gave the data from the shot to the motion control guys so they could repeat the shot elsewhere in the film.”
In his pursuit to create a film that has a timeless feel, or rather a film that would stand the test of time, Aronofsky has crafted a movie, once again, of sustained original vision. Effects can date a movie to a time period as much as fashion, style and dialect; just go back and revisit some of the major effects milestones such as T2: Judgement Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993) or even the original Star Wars (1977) movie. One way to avoid that is to create a wholly original visual language for just that one film. In this, The Fountain, and his previous films are a major success. Of course, there will inevitably be comparisons to the similarly themed philosophical sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But like Stanley Kubrick before him, Aronofsky is demonstrating not only strength of personal vision, but an unusual and innovative approach to technology.
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The hip-hop connection
Growing up as a teenager in New York in the 1980s meant that the hip-hop explosion of DJs, graffiti, MCs and B-Boys played a major influential role on Aronofsky. Hanging out in the scene that suddenly had a new audio-visual language not quite like anything that had come before but at the same time was an amalgam of previous be-bop, jazz, funk and electronic styles must have opened his eyes and ears to a new way of creativity. The most obvious example of this is what Aronofsky refers to as the Hip-Hop Montage. Taking Eisenstein’s ideas one step further Aronofsky’s blipvert montages couple extremely sharp sounds with extremely sharp images and turns them into a rhythmic musical piece in the same way hip-hop DJs sample pieces of music and vocals to create completely new beats. The concept was originally conceived for a montage sequence in Aronofsky’s first short film Fortune Cookie, when the director was looking for a way to show a sequence of events over time while avoiding the usual cheesy slow cross-dissolve montage. The technique was then further developed on both Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000). It’s also worth checking Edgar Wright’s humorous use of the technique in Shaun of the Dead (2004).
Continuing the exploration of hip-hop mixing and re-mixing, Aronofsky used the way DJs cut back and forth between two decks when editing Requiem for a Dream; initially editing two story lines, then four. Introducing turntables and vinyl in early scenes between Harry and Tyrone, the director crosses back and forth between Sarah Goldfarb’s story and that of her son Harry, incorporating the hip-hop montage as one of the methods of connecting them. As the intensity of the narrative increases, accompanied by Clint Mansell’s frenetic score, the characters reach a three-minute fever pitch of four-way destructive bleakness that Aronofsky manages like a four-deck turntabilist.
Throughout all three of Aronofsky’s features he has borrowed the way musical repetition can elicit a whole different level of emotional response from an audience. In the same way that Clint Mansell’s digital compositions use repetitive musical breaks, Aronofsky takes repeated visual images or camera movements to connect people, time or emotions sometimes breaking an expected rhythm at a jarring moment to make an audience pay attention. In Pi the hip-hop montage of Max taking his medication is used throughout until at a crucial moment at the beginning of the third act the montage is broken when he stops to wonder what would happen if he didn’t take it? Other examples of these repeated visuals feature in Requiem for a Dream, such as in scenes where Tyrone lies with his girlfriend and Harry lies with Marion and the camera corkscrews upward and away from them. Or at the end when all four main characters individually curl up into the fetal position with the camera directly overhead. In The Fountain, the three versions of the central character in each time period are connected by a single camera move. As each man rides towards his challenge on horseback, driving a car or in a spaceship an overhead camera watches their inverted approach, follows them as they pass under and watches then ride off the right way up.
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David Valentine...David Valentine is a freelance writer and filmmaker currently working with arts organizations and education providers to support community filmmaking projects for young people. He is also a proponent of Free Media. |