Well, Natalie Portman says it took almost a decade, but she finally got him to direct "Black Swan."
"He talked to me about it nine years ago; I was still in college, and he had just made 'Requiem' and I was obviously very eager to work with him," says the actress. "I kept bugging him about it over the years because there was no follow-up - he kept doing other movies. Finally, a year before we started shooting, he called up with the script (by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin)."
Portman had trained in ballet as a child and kept up somewhat, but knew she was very far from where she'd have to be to sell the character of Nina.
"There was no financing, so I just started training on my own. I'd call him and be like, 'I'm in ballet class, come watch.' I was trying to make sure this was actually going to be his next project," she says with an utterly dazzling smile in a room at the W Hotel in Hollywood. "Then they started getting the money together about six months before, and I was like, 'OK, let's get serious.' We were doing two hours a day; we went to five hours a day - I was doing swimming and toning, and three hours of ballet. And then, about two months out, we started doing eight hours because we added in the choreography.
"And then they lost the money.
"It was so grueling. And it's also the one art form where they starve themselves. So I was not eating very much, I was working out like a crazy person, and it just kept getting pushed and pushed. Which ended up being great because it gave me more time to train."
Aronofsky had reservations despite his leading lady's total commitment. Could the Oscar-nominated actress become an artist in another medium?
"About two months out, I was still concerned," he says in a separate interview. "Then about a month out, it kind of clicked. Suddenly, I started to see Natalie's natural grace coming through the moves. 'Oh, she's going to be able to act while dancing,' which was the next level. I always knew I could find a dancer who was better than Natalie, but I could never find a dancer who could act better than Natalie. So my concern became, 'Will she be able to perform, to emote while dancing?' That, to me, is the major accomplishment of her performance."
Told of those remarks, Portman laughs.
"In my own personal life, I am never, ever a depriving person. I like to eat. I like pleasure. I like a few extra pounds on my frame. I'm not that person. So I saved it to the very end: 'When they have their money together, then I'll start the diet!' So that's the thing, when he saw me start looking like a ballerina. I started getting really sinewy. Also, that's when we were really perfecting the choreography because we had worked on it for a couple of months, so toward the end of that, it all started coming together."
Aronofsky says there were easily more injuries among the dancers in "Black Swan" than among the bruisers who populated his previous film, "The Wrestler." He mentions lost toenails and - for his lead actress - a dislocated rib.
Portman winces only slightly now at the thought: "When I got lifted, it went out of place. It sort of goes under another rib. So that was real, (the scene in which a physical therapist) was doing real work on me. Darren was like, 'Film it! Film it! Stay in character, talk in your character's voice!' "
That voice, halting, girly, fragile, was part of Portman's subtler transformation, the finely tuned work she did to create a character simultaneously real and symbolic.
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