Darren Aronofsky Quotes

I'm learning more and more to share creativity with the crew and actors. A film crew is more powerful if you listen to them, but it does make my job more tough because I have to listen.

The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director, you're shopping - you're picking this actor, you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.

Imagination decides everything.

My intuition comes up with better stuff than my head, I think.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

I try to think about me, as an audience member, and it [inspiration for movies] comes from there.

Shane Salerno and I adapted my book Savages together, and I learned a lot about adaptation. I think it's an extremely difficult thing to do; adaptation might even be more difficult than writing an original screenplay. It's so much a matter of choices, making choices of what to leave in. It was an education.

I think, in fact, there's a plus and a minus to knowing my prior work, Happiness and so forth. The plus is of course you can see how I play with the characters, the storylines, and the way things play off each other. And the minus is that it makes you a little bit more self-conscious, that you're not able to enter the movie as it exists and lives and breathes, because you're so busy making references, connections that you're not able to release yourself from and take the film on your own terms.

People seem to think that my movies are so carefully coordinated and arranged - and in a lot of ways, they are - but every single time I make a movie, I feel that every director makes these choices. You make choices about your script, you make choices about your actors, and how you're going to stage it, and how you're going to shoot it, and what the costumes are going to be like, and in every single detail, you make that decision. And for me, what ends up happening is, I wind up surprised at the combination of all these ingredients. It never is anything like what I expected.

Directing is such alchemy, it's so easy to fail. And I've seen people who are great at their jobs because everybody has a go. Editors, DPs, actors, craft services guy, everybody wants to try it out but it is such a diffuse but necessary set of skills that you never know which one this person might lack.

I think 99% of the whole thing is to have passion about the idea yourself. I think part of your job as a filmmaker is to tell someone that might not think it's going to work that, actually, it will work.

I think Aaron [Sorkin] did a remarkable job of plucking Andy [Hertzfeld] out of [Steve] Jobs' story, to perhaps reflect back on Steve a sense of maybe some things that were missing in Steve's life. Andy, just by nature, is one of these straight shooters.

We're lucky to be making films. My crew and I have been working together for a long time. I think that that's what emanates.

Writer's block to me is where you stop because you're afraid to go forward because you're not sure of what really should be happening next and you think, my gosh, if I choose this... you've got a hundred millions of avenues you could possibly go down but it's all an assess of characters.

I think one of the good things about writing novels is that you always start from scratch.

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me.

Stand-up comedy had an interesting effect on me in terms of how I started to think about constructing things, because I really loved the interstices, the linkages, or lack thereof.

I think as a filmmaker you try not to have any expectations other than that the film have a fairly substantial beginning, middle and end.

Delay and indecision are first weapons in the armory of moviemakers.

Creativity and lateral thinking have exactly the same basis as humour.

When I write, I never know the endings. What I think works in [my] stories is the fact that when I write, I really want to find out what is going on-I'm writing for myself as a reader. It's like when you dream a dream. I want to know what's behind the door. If I navigate, it's from a place that's totally intuitive.

The directing thing, to do it well, I think you have to have a hell of a lot more discipline than I do, or be a lot more willing to really take charge of whole large group of people than I feel comfortable doing - because a director really has to run everything, and be very confident in their ability to do so.

Life is an endlessly creative experience, and we are shaping ourselves at every moment by every decision we make.

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film.