After the success of his 2008 film, The Wrestler, which earned Oscar nominations for stars Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, director Darren Aronofsky thought financing for his next film, The Black Swan, would be easy.
Both were films about “people who use their bodies in extreme ways to entertain” and Black Swan, which he had been planning for years, was a sure seller. (Portman says Aronofsky told her the entire plot, scene by scene, when she was in college in 2002). The backstage psychological thriller also had a high-profile cast: Portman, Winona Ryder, Barbara Hershey and Vincent Cassel (as well as Mila Kunis, who wasn’t on hand yesterday).
Instead, The Black Swan almost fell into the “black hole of film financing” following the 2008 Wall Street crash.
“We were assembling the cast and saying we had the money when we didn’t,” admitted Aronofsky (pictured above). “The truth was the money fell apart many, many times.”
When the cast members started to look each other and laugh, Aronfosky turned to them and said, “Sorry, guys. I lied to you.”
One advantage of the long delay was that Portman spent more time working on her ballet technique while keeping herself in dancer trim. Though she had studied ballet until she was 12 (at which time her film career began with The Professional), Portman didn’t dance again until she was 27, in preparation for the role.
As it worked out, she had a year to prepare.
“Because the money kept never coming through for a really long time, we had to push [postpone shooting] repeatedly,” says Aronofsky. “Each time we told Natalie we had to push another three weeks, she’d say, ‘Another three weeks of eating carrot sticks and almonds? I am going to kill you.'”
