Photo by Michael Beauplet, Styling by Ketevan Gvaramadze
How did the collaborative relationship between you and Darren Aronofsky come about? How do you end up writing a screenplay that he directed? Well, I went to film school for directing, and in my last year at school, Darren Aronofsky came and taught as a guest lecturer. Somehow Darren and I ended up walking out of the room together, just sort of chatting, after his last class teaching there. By the end of that conversation he was saying, you know, stay in touch, you should come work for me. So I was his assistant on post-production for The Fountain. His production company had just gotten a new deal with Universal and he said, “why don’t you stick around to become director of development?” So The Wrestler became the first thing that I developed with him—and I became a producer on that.
While we were shooting The Wrestler I expressed to Darren that I’d really like to write something again and get back into the creative side. That’s when he brought up Black Swan and having me take a shot at that script. Now, writing is definitely the thing I’m pursuing most. When Darren eventually told you to give writing Black Swan a shot, were you nervous at all? Yeah... it was totally overwhelming. Obviously. I should say it sort of happened by degrees. It’s not like Darren said, “Go off and write this thing.” It was more like, “do you want to do some thinking about that project and see if you can come up with an idea of what needs to happen to it and what it should be?” In the beginning, it wasn’t clear to me that I was officially gonna write this movie, for sure. That didn’t happen until I had done a fair amount of