Interview with director Darren Aronofsky: Between art house and artificial intelligence

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"It looks like a furniture store here," I say as we are led to the small corner reserved for our conversation. We are on an upper floor of the headquarters of the Locarno Film Festival called PalaCinema. In the evening, Darren Aronofsky will be presented with the Honorary Leopard for his life's work in the Piazza Grande.

Now, faced with the countless sofas in the huge room, he giggles, albeit in his typical baritone. You immediately feel that someone here is polite, friendly, but at the same time wide awake, a little withdrawn and mindful of their own impact every second.

No wonder, the man is one of the most famous directors who walk the fine line between art house and mainstream in Hollywood. “Noah,” starring Russell Crowe as a biblical hero who nevertheless puts humanity over the edge, grossed $360 million in 2014 on a budget of less than half. And “Black Swan” with Natalie Portman was much cheaper and made almost as much in 2010. Aronofsky's continued success cannot be explained by any industry blueprint. “Black Swan” was a horror trip disguised as a dance film, whose protagonist has a bad tit and dies in the end. Very few studio bosses cheer at an elevator pitch like this.

He doesn't have a new film with him in Locarno. As he says, he comes for honor and to celebrate. “Until yesterday,” he says, “I thought it was in Italy.” This morning, however, he was already swimming in one of the nearby paradisiacal river valleys like a smart local. And when he hears that I'm from Berlin, he says: "Ah, I'd love to come and party at Berghain again."

Aronofsky is 57 but looks agelessly semi-youthful. He wears New Balance sneakers, linen pants, and a crocheted-looking short-sleeved shirt. The hair is radically cropped and the fingernails are painted in a delicate violet. Could work with Berghain.

I tell him that Hemingway's "In Another Land" ends in Locarno, with the hero rowing up Lake Maggiore from Italy with his lover. Aronofsky blinks with interest.

Later - we're on the topic of the visionary power of "Terminator" - a press lady will nervously tap an imaginary watch on her wrist. There are follow-up appointments. “Give us a few more minutes,” Aronofsky will say, “I want to finish the conversation.” It is the only one he runs in Locarno with a journalist. “Usually it really sucks,” he says. “But that was fun.”

Aronofsky grew up in Brooklyn as the son of a Jewish immigrant family. His paternal grandmother is from Vilna, Lithuania, formerly Poland, which he remembered a few years ago while looking through old family albums. He has always felt drawn to Europe and felt a kinship, including in the way he makes films. “I realized that this passport was a right I inherited from my grandmother, so I sought it out.” But one should not believe that this has anything to do with a move away from Trump America. “The writer Rebecca Solnit, an old friend of mine, once said something that meant a lot to me when so many were talking about leaving America for politics: No, it is our responsibility to stay and help shape the conversation.”

Aronofsky's films are mostly about blatant outsiders who are exposed to enormous psychological pressure and abuse their bodies to the limit in order to achieve some form of redemption. A strange formula, but it applies to the early junkie film “Requiem for a Dream”, to “Black Swan”, “Noah” or “The Fountain”. In the latter, from 2006, an obsessed Hugh Jackman researches the formula for eternal life while his wife, played by Rachel Weisz, dies of cancer. The main character travels to South America during the conquistador era and to the limits of the universe. The psychedelic trip with petri dish aesthetics was one of the director's few films that never made a profit. In real life, Aronofsky and Weisz, who is now dating Daniel Craig, have a child together.

2008's The Wrestler, starring a pretty broken Mickey Rourke, is the next Aronofsky to fit the formula. The story of the aging wrestling star who, against all reason, forces a comeback that costs him dearly is probably Aronofsky's masterpiece, but that's a matter of opinion. His films divide, and each of them, despite their fundamental similarity, divides people into supporters and opponents. You actually suffer through them physically.

The New Yorker once had an anecdote about the Cannes premiere of the heroin drama “Requiem for a Dream.” While the audience writhed under a fast-cut staccato of needle pricks, flames, gangrene amputations, forced labor columns and strippers, one of the executive producers laughed out loud. To Aronofsky's astonished question about what was so funny, he replied: "Look at what you're doing to these people!" This was followed by 15 minutes of ovation, fueled not least by the relief of never having to see the film again.

“Mother!” from 2017, in which, according to the prevailing interpretation, Jennifer Lawrence symbolizes nature, which is being treated badly by humanity, infuriated at least feminists. They decided that humiliating a woman was not acceptable, even if the message was to the contrary. So Aronofsky sometimes struggles with the spirit of the times, sometimes he fits into it better. He goes his way headstrong to the point of stubbornness. He also had a relationship with Lawrence, albeit a short-lived one.

Recently he has been working a lot on artificial intelligence. He believes it will overturn a lot of the way films are made anyway. That's why you'd do well to be at the forefront. If he were a young filmmaker with no money today, he would throw himself into it the same way. And he, with his influence, he says, “felt a responsibility to get involved in the technology and see if we could make it fruitful for cinematic storytelling.” On the one hand, the technology leads to laziness and the hasty belief that one has “done something great because the results look so finished”. Nevertheless, “artists today start with a head start that no filmmaker before them had.”

For the purpose of AI avant-gardism, he founded the studio Primordial Soup, Ursuppe in German. It has been working with Google DeepMind since May 2025 and is working on its video model Veo. Three short films by young directors have been made so far - the first, Eliza McNitt's birth drama "Ancestra", screened in Tribeca in June. At the end of January this year, the test came in front of a larger audience: “On This Day… 1776”, an animated short series that recreates scenes from the year of American independence on the YouTube channel of “Time” magazine, each episode exactly 250 years later. Within hours, the comment columns were all over Aronofsky. The “Guardian” called the matter obscene and embarrassing, the “Hollywood Reporter” insulted the consequences with the “slop” that is now used for half-baked AI stuff. The audience marveled at the identical soldiers on the battlefields copied to death and the plastic expressions of the founding fathers. The only element that was consistently convincing was the sound. But it didn't come out of the machine either. The voices come from members of the actors union SAG-AFTRA.

The Revolutionary War as a placeholder for today's trench warfare - a nice punchline, and Aronofsky right in the middle of it. And he can claim veteran status: his debut “Pi,” about a mathematician who eventually drills himself in the head, went down in history in 1998 as one of the first films with a completely digitally created opening sequence.

In any case, he doesn't want to know anything about the prophecies of doom that demonize AI. "Remember," he says, "a year ago it was said that the AI ​​would draw six fingers for each figure. That's completely passé today." And it will continue in the same way.

In the evening we meet again at the gala dinner. Festival director Giona Nazzaro welcomes legends such as the Korean Hong Sang-soo and his partner, the actress Kim Min-hee, or Lee Ranaldo, guitarist of Sonic Youth. There is champagne, scampi and cheesecake. Then get out quickly, some, like me, to the back exit to the Piazza Grande, others, like Aronofsky, across the red carpet towards the stage. Accompanied by Guns N’ Roses “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” Aronofsky steps into the spotlight.

He makes a quick joke about Madonna, which the people of Ticino do not respond to with the expected laugh - they are probably thinking of the nearby pilgrimage church of Madonna del Sasso on the slopes of Orselina. Aronofsky makes a pained grimace for fun. If Locarno were ever to program one of his films in the Piazza, he thinks it would definitely be half empty. Even that only goes down half well; the self-deprecating humor fits better in Brooklyn than in southern Switzerland.

Later, after the main film, a tearjerker about late love among French university teachers, Aronofsky stands at the back of the huge screen in the Campari Rotunda. It's almost midnight and still incredibly hot. Everything around him is red from the decorations and the many Negronis. He is deep in conversation with Isabelle Huppert. Then he saunters over. We consider whether social media has replaced film as the defining art of the 21st century. Aronofsky sums it up: “Pablo Picasso is now called MrBeast” – but draws a question mark in the air with his eyebrows. Then he says “Cheers” and strolls off into the humid night in a good mood, because some of the puzzles of the present can be left alone for a while.