spinning out
NO DOUBT ABOUT it: Requiem For A Dream is painful. The film is flooded with hurt. It hurts to watch it. It hurt to make it. Which is as it should be — Requiem For A Dream was forged from pain.
Hubert Selby Jr, author of the 1978 novel, knew pain intimately. At 18 he was hospitalised with tuberculosis. He suffered a collapsed lung and got hepatitis. Six months before writing Requiem For A Dream he contracted pneumonia. All of this fed into the book, a compassionate exploration of addiction, and a feverish nightmare if ever there was one. Darren Aronofsky wanted his film to feel the same. He succeeded, turning Selby Jr’s richly painted interior worlds into a soul-scarring assault.
Aronofsky was 30 when he shot Requiem For A Dream in 1999. At a time when new indie voices were lighting up the cinema landscape, Aronofsky, who was offered much after his 1998 breakthrough Pi, instead made this deeply troubling trip to trauma-town, which featured a shaking, roaring fridge monster and a heroin hole in Jared Leto’s arm that had even the hardiest of viewers descending into depression.
Aronofsky welcomed the extreme reactions. “The movies that inspire me are the ones that I’m thinking about for a while,” he tells . “Me and my crew always try to keep pushing ourselves, pushing the envelope. Ultimately, to entertain people, and to move people, to make people feel and think.” did all of that, and then some. But getting it to that point? There was so much pain.
