Darren Aronofsky‘s “Black Swan,” his terrific new psychological thriller set in the world of ballet starring Natalie Portman begins its run into theaters this Friday, December 3rd. It’s a dazzling confluence of everything the dynamic filmmaker has created to date — utilizing the raw Super 16mm look he employed in “The Wrestler,” the supernatural elements he displayed in “The Fountain” and the immediate camera movement exerted in “Pi.” Portman seems like a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination (rightfully so) and the picture already seems to be deeply impressing most critics (read our review from the Toronto Int. Film Festival).
We sat down with the filmmaker this afternoon to talk about “Black Swan” (which you’ll read about more this week) and in the course of our discussion we touched upon a few topics including his two-year deal with 20th Century Fox, as well as some future projects including “Machine Man” (which was a bit random because it’s actually set-up at Mandalay which has a first-look deal with Universal, so there’s probably little Fox connection as of right now).
The throughline of course is “Machine Man” is being adapted by Mark Heyman, who worked on the script for “Black Swan.” Based on Australian writer Max Barry’s serialized online story and upcoming book about “a geek who equips himself with high-end parts” and as many sites have noticed, including ourselves, it sounds vaguely like the half-man/half-machine themes that are in “RoboCop,” a film that Aronofsky was looking to reboot, until the project fell apart because of MGM‘s very public financial woes and instability this year that almost did in “The Hobbit.”
With “RoboCop” deep-sixed, we asked if “Machine Man” would allow Aronofsky to get his half-machine/half-human ya-yas out and instead the director suggested there might still be hope for the film vaguely based on Paul Verhoeven‘s 1987 original.
“Well, ‘RoboCop’ may still happen one day, who knows?” he said optimistically. “It’s MGM and hopefully they’ll clear their stuff up and I’m still interested. David Self wrote a great script, but the company went under so…” And that was it, but yes, who knows, maybe a flicker of life does still exist for a “RoboCop” remake one day. Stay tuned for more from our interview with Darren Aronofsky this week. “Black Swan,” which you should go out of your way to see, hits theaters on Friday in limited release.
