"We are the first day of shooting." "We're at Queens." "At Queens Plaza." " Here comes our train." " WOMAN:" "Okay." "MAN:" "Enter the train." "We're going outbound." "So you go down to the platform, go to the end of the platform, on the Jamaica-bound side, and we're in the last two cars." "(INAUDIBLE)" "I was reading Dostoyevsky's The Double, which is about a guy who wakes up and his double's there starting to replace his life, and I was thinking about how to do something with it, and I went to see Swan Lake at the ballet," "and didn't know that one dancer played two roles, the White Swan and the Black Swan, and it was sort of an "Aha!" moment, because I realized that there was this story of a double here," "except it was better in its own way, because the White Swan and the Black Swan were such beautifully drawn characters, and I felt I could really build on that and turn it into something." "We're at the Lincoln Center." "This is day one of 42." "We only have one week of exteriors, though, so on the whole it shouldn't be too bad." "The Wrestlerwas way worse." "(PEOPLE CHATTERING)" "She'll start to look." "When she starts looking, that'll motivate you." "And then..." "MAN:" "She's gonna have to give us a turn." "Then she's gonna give you a turn." "Get right in front of her." "I want to see into her eyes here." "Fundamentally, I go into every film trying to figure out what the balance of dark and light is, and I go into every film trying to use lighting to create an atmosphere for that film." "In Black Swan, it was just, literally, trying to figure out how to make the film look as naturalistic as possible." "Well, we shot a total of 43 days." "You know, starting that way was tough." "It was tough on the crew, it was tough on morale, to just start a shoot and go into winter nights in New York City." "They're not gonna tell." "Still against flattened architecture." "It's still beautiful." "Is that us?" "Yeah, it's us." "We have a limit of how many people can be over there." "You have to be three feet away from the statue." "So, camera comes here." "Over here, maybe." "Start to come up." "MAN:" "Excellent." "One of Darren's big interests in filmmaking, I think, is subjectivity, and making sure that you're always telling the story from the point of view of your main character." "The film is a fable, and in a lot of ways, it's a ballet, but the way that influenced us is that we took a lot of elements from Swan Lake that aren't necessarily explicit and sprinkled them throughout." "(ARONOFSKY LAUGHING)" "And cut." "That's great." " As you may have heard..." " As suddenly..." "Shit, I'm there again." "Different show." "She'll be giving her last farewell performance as Melpomene, in the role she originated in my first ballet." "My little princess." "We'll miss you, but you'll never be forgotten." "This is Dr. Brinson and her husband Freddy." " Tonight's sponsors." " Such a beautiful event." "Not as beautiful as you, my dear." "And this is Mr. and Mrs. Stein." "It is a pleasure." " You're so lovely." " Thank you." "A screenplay really is, by design, meant to be a springboard for everyone else who would become involved in the films." "In the case of Black Swan, it was definitely... I felt like I was in very good company, and I felt like, at the end of the day, they were all gonna make me look very, very good." "I think, in the best case scenario, you take something like that and then you see how it actually gets realized, and every step of that realization is, sort of, like," ""It's just getting better and better and better."" "That's honestly how I felt in this case." "In the room, the camera will come out and look this way, at the end." "We're gonna be heading in that direction." "Okay?" "So everything is safe around the corner there, everything in the hallway both directions is in, and this room will be sealed, so if you're in there, it's a bad place to be." "I'm nothing." "Nothing." "Nothing!" "Nothing!" "No!" "Nothing!" "Nothing!" "Fucking nothing!" "(GRUNTS)" "ARONOFSKY:" "Cut!" "Good." "Very nice." "Check the gate." "Okay, let's shoot." "MAN:" "Okay, picture's up." "Places." "Do not close 13A, guys." "One of the reasons I love working with Darren Aronofsky is there are directors, and then there are filmmakers." "He's truly a filmmaker." "He approaches this film from such a wide range of ideas, and he's very open to ideas." "I was presented with every version of Swan Lake imaginable." ""Go away, come back." "Let me know your thoughts."" "And action." "Mom?" "Where do you want me to go?" "DePREZ:" "It's a combination of everybody walking into a set that is now dressed." "Then the actors walk into a set that's now dressed." "They take it in for a moment," "Matty and Darren will block out exactly where we're seeing this set." "So then it becomes a scramble of redressing the set to that blocking." "Sometimes the blocking is incredibly organic." "I have to quickly change around to make sure that those backgrounds look as best as possible." "It ended up being the end of the day, and it was probably 3:00 in the morning, and Darren just had the camera on me, and in five minutes just kept it rolling, and then would just be, like, "Start again," and he gave me a very specific direction" "right at the beginning of each time, and had me do it like..." "You know, just a run of it, like, 20 times in a row but giving me all these different things." ""Now do it this..." "Now that, now that."" "And it was so..." "I mean, that's just where he's great, because he's able to really focus at the hardest moment and be really specific, and also try a real range of possibilities." "MAN:" "Sound's good." "ARONOFSKY:" "Action!" "I'm incredibly proud to have worked with a director that knows how to push people, but is such a great collaborator that you want to be pushed." "This one was very challenging, not only for the budget, but the time schedule was so tight." "But I also find that on movies like this, when you have those restrictions, first thought, best thought." "I truly believe in that." "This is such a good example of that." "Max, in the POV, which is this nine-and-a-half lens underwater." " MAX:" "Yeah." " We're gonna drop two drops right by the lens." "Bloop!" "Bloop!" "And then Natalie will go... (GRUNTS)" "We move to the close focus." "It tightens the matrix." "Actually determines whether..." "How close you can focus." "So it has to be completely accurate." "It has to be completely tight." "LIBATIQUE:" "You know, we wanted a POV, a subjective POV, which Darren loves, of Nina in the bathtub." "It was one of the large scare moments in the film, but it was simply an underwater periscope." "MAN 1:" "They were unpainted, so I painted..." "Put all the color on, and now I'm aging it." "MAN 2:" "What are you using that..." "What is that?" "A stain?" "No." "This is tinted wallpaper paste." "It dries dead flat, and it comes off." "If I need to get it off, it'll come off." "DEPREZ:" "So I would do these big breakdowns for each location." "I would pin them up on the wall." "They would have details for each room, where particular elements went." "Where to prioritize each room." "Which is hard, 'cause ideally you want to dress and create everything 360, but when you have a limited budget..." "I really had to ask Matty constantly," ""What are we seeing?" "What are we seeing?" "What are we seeing?" ""Let me use my favorite elements, the most important elements," ""in those particular areas."" "It's all in the detail." "(INDISTINCT CHATTER)" "Erica's bedroom." "MAN:" "Who did all the drawings?" "DEPREZ:" "The art interns." "It's Rothbart." "This wallpaper, we made." "I made these sun prints upstate, and we made wallpaper out of it." "MAN:" "So what happens to everything when it's done?" "Like, when you guys..." "When we're all wrapped, what happens?" "We usually have to store hero locations." "It depends on the studio, it depends on the movie." "Sometimes everybody can buy a piece at the art department sale." "I don't know what they want to save yet on this one." "ARONOFSKY:" "The mirrors were an obvious challenge, you know, and also, they were always gonna be a big part of the film, because first and foremost, mirrors are omnipresent in the ballet world." "Ballet dancers are constantly examining themselves in mirrors, looking at their line, looking at how they move, and so we always knew the mirror would be a big part of it, and reflection was part of it." "The idea of reflections, which..." "Not only did we use reflections in actual mirrors, but any surface where we could get a reflection, we utilized, and there were reflections of both Nina and Lily, but they would intermix, and you weren't quite sure who you were looking at." "Often that was the gist of the use of the mirror in the film." "We knew reflection was gonna be a major visual part of the language, and then it became about how to take that clichéd mirror gag, which you've seen in so many films, it's one of the earliest horror gags," "and try to do something new with it, and try to make it more compelling and more different and more freaky." "That was the challenge, was coming up with shots and effects that could really push the mirror gag." "Mirrors are just so prevalent in ballet that they had to play a part, and we exploited reflections in the same way in her apartment." "Not only did she have a mirror in her living room, because that's where she practiced, she had..." "There was reflective surfaces everywhere." "And what the aim was is to try to have so many of them that some of them we could throw away and some of them we could exploit." "There were practical elements to it and there were digital elements to it that made the whole thing work, but again, I can't say enough about how, you know, through Thérèse, through Darren, everything was set up properly" "in terms of embracing the idea of using mirrors." "You're seeing Brendan in a mirror, but the mirror that we're seeing him in is in another mirror above the bed, which is next to another mirror that they could potentially see him in." "And he's going around this giant stalactite chandelier thing, which is also in the mirror." "It's great." "It's been a cakewalk, really, I could do this in my sleep." "There it is." "Three simple letters." "A-D-R." "You can basically edit, color and mix and score an entire film on a laptop for under $5,000 if you just roll up your sleeves and do the work, so, while it is very hard to get independent films financed today," "I think there are tremendous opportunities for young filmmakers to make films that didn't exist 10, 15 years ago." "Scott and I always felt that what we really needed was to find spaces that really work together, because we were working with such a small budget, and so we had dreamed about finding some type of university or some type of institution that could do a..." "Really play for the New York State Theater or the Met Opera." "You know, getting a stage in New York was close to near impossible, because all the stages in New York are in constant use." "It's a cultural city that's constantly used, so to take it over like you do with a film was very hard, but SUNY, Purchase, which is known for its arts and has incredible professional spaces and stages," "actually happened to be on winter break, so it really worked out very well." "(INDISTINCT CHATTER)" " CASSEL:" "Where?" " Straight into the lens!" "And action!" "Your fouettées are like a spider spinning a web." "Attack it!" "Attack it!" "Attack it!" "ARONOFSKY:" "Cut." "MAN:" "Good call, Kurtz." "ARONOFSKY:" "Spinning it the wrong way, though." "Action!" "Seduce us." "Not just the Prince, but the court, the audience, the entire world." "Your fouettées are like a spider spinning a web." "Come on." "Attack it!" "Attack it now!" "Attack it." "ARONOFSKY:" "Cut!" "Good." "MAN:" "Cut, cut." "(VOCALIZING)" " Let me hear you sing Swan Lake." " Do what?" "Do Swan Lake." "(VOCALIZING)" "MAN:" "Let's get ready, please." "Darren decided to shoot the film in a documentary style, which kind of grounds it in a reality, even though the narrative is bold and extreme and a little baroque." "It was trying to find a balance between these verité elements, and the genre elements, the scarier elements, the horror stuff." "So we took the verité style of the movie and the performances, which were very naturalistic, and did a lot of things in post with sound and music and editing to emphasize things as being a little off and a little bit surreal." " That's a good shot." " Through him." "Through him." "It's a shot we want..." "We're gonna go 30 degrees." " Yes." " Just stay over here." "Yeah, stay in one place, and they'll come in and out." "LIBATIQUE:" "He gives you direction as a cinematographer, he gives you direction as a production designer, and he gives you direction as an editor, so, going in, you know what your parameters are, so it's actually..." "Although he gives you the freedom to work, he gives you the world to work in, so that you're not flying around aimlessly." "I was a little nervous to take on something like Swan Lake, because it's such an epic piece of performance." "I knew I had a lot to learn, but I think that's the excitement of filmmaking, is that you get thrown into these new worlds, and you get a crash course, and you get to surround yourself" "with a lot of experts and people who spend their lives studying this stuff, and so they can fill in a lot of the holes." "(PIANO PLAYING)" "And cut." "Well, with the choreography, I hired a man named Benjamin Millepied, who's a young choreographer, who is also a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet and is very, very respected in the choreography world." "It was an interesting collaboration, because normally when I work with actors, I'll give them..." "I'll talk to them about story and they'll turn it into emotion." "With Benjamin, I would talk to him about story and he would turn it into movement." "That was a fun collaboration, to see how he could express through movement what was going on in the story, and then on top of that, of course," "Natalie would then perform it and put her own emotion into the movie." "(INDISTINCT CHATTER)" "All right." "Come on, guys, get into the works." "Well, six months before shooting started," "I started serious ballet training." "Five hours a day of ballet and sort of cross-training, just try and make sure that I wouldn't get injured going into the stuff too quickly, 'cause it's so harsh on the body." "I'm really lucky to work with such talented people, and then they're gonna have ideas that are gonna be awesome." "That's the same thing with actors." "Like, you can have an idea of what the script's telling you, but it doesn't mean anything till an actor tries it on and sees what comes out of them, and then you have to work with that," "because you can't force what they're doing into a mold, 'cause you'll suck the life out of it." "Actors have to be free, and I think your collaborators have to be free to express ideas and come up with ideas." " Actually, this light's better." " Yeah, I agree with that." "WEISBLUM:" "One of the most important qualities of any director is that they're decisive, and Darren's able to recognize right away what's important to telling the story and what isn't, and when there's a happy accident" "that he didn't necessarily plan on, how to immediately grab on it and make good use of it in the film." "On action, camera's over that shoulder, she's gonna go that way." "You could turn this way to see her go, okay?" "This way to see her go." "And then, you wonder what's going on, and then you're in." "Okay, that's all fine." "Okay?" "(INDISTINCT CHATTER)" "LIBATIQUE:" "I shoot digital stills because I'm obsessed with exposure, and I use it, I set the camera up with the same parameters that I'm setting up on the film stock, and I shoot at the same stop," "so I can get a sense of depth of field." "It's part of the process, it's the light meter, it's my spot meter, it's my digital camera, and that's how I find where I want to put the film." "I need that 14 on a stick, guys." "The question is, how do I get it into this room here?" "I guess, I mean, I could just go to the wide shot." "You know like when you go to the dentist and they drilled into your tooth, and then they blow it out with water, and then you put your tongue in there," "and it's like a big opening and, like, a lot of pain?" "That's not where we are." "Working with actors is all about trust, and getting them to take chances, and getting them to put their emotions out there on film, and to show themselves." "I just work hard with actors, telling them that I'm there to protect them and let them explore, and to really go for something." "In general, that's what actors want to do." "You know, they want to be great, and they want to perform, and they want to emote, and they want to cry, and they want to be scared." "I mean, that's..." "That's what they're doing the job for." "I mean, the real actors." "Some actors are there for the trailers and stuff, I imagine, but I don't work with them too much," "I like to work with actors that like to be on set and to really do the work, and if you cast well and find those types of people, they'll be your best supporters, and they'll be there for you." "Exclamation point?" "Heart?" "(CHUCKLING)" "It's a little, like, normal, right?" "Yeah, I think it needs to be that way and a little bit more of a scrawl." "I'm gonna have you write it crappy." "That's nice." "Good." "That's good." "MAN 1:" "Twenty-six paper, take one." "MAN 2:" "Mark." "ARONOFSKY:" "Okay, get yourself ready." "Laugh it out." "(ARONOFSKY LAUGHING)" "(PORTMAN LAUGHING)" "ARONOFSKY:" "Action." "(PORTMAN CONTINUES LAUGHING)" "Get close!" "Good." "Once again." "Okay, so..." "I think, actually, you gotta just make one move to your mark." "Do you think I'm gonna look to see if someone's leaving?" "Like, "Who the fuck did that?"" "You could do that as you get there, but I think what you would do is you come through and you see it and come right for it, if you can, in one move, and pause there and look, and then grab this and go." "Okay?" "Let's try that, all right?" "Let's shoot one." "Okay, and, cut." "Good." "Great." "You okay?" "Okay, and, cut." "Good." "Great." "You okay?" "Slam." "Start next to here." "So I slam the door." "Guys, let her slam the door and come out." "Let's figure out where you go." "Slamming the door on my life." "What?" "Should I let him in or close him out?" "Camera going in?" "ARONOFSKY:" "You let him out." "Keep him out." " It was amazing." "It was really fun." " MAN:" "Yeah?" "That was my first trashing of a room in film and in real life." "It gave me a second wind and it's, what, 4:00 in the morning?" "I was falling asleep and now I'm..." "it wakes you up." "It was great." "It was a really cool experience." "ARONOFSKY:" "Hey, guys." "Before you go, if you hear me scream "cut," just freeze, okay?" "Okay." "And, action!" "Leave me alone!" "Cut, cut, cut!" "MAN 1:" "Cut!" "Cut!" "PORTMAN:" "I slipped." "ARONOFSKY:" "Are you okay?" "PORTMAN:" "Yeah." "MAN 2:" "That was awesome!" "KUNIS:" "Oh, my God." " MAN 2: (LAUGHS) Reflection solved." " I could have done that." "Shoot." "That's not a problem." "Look how sick this looks." "Bam!" "It's great." "Ready to do it again." "ARONOFSKY:" "Okay, let's just do one..." "This is the last one for the choke, okay?" "This is what we need." "We just gotta get that a little better." "MAN:" "This is poured resin." "So, I put, like, a cookie sheet, and mixed this pourable clear resin, poured it into the bottom, stuck a sheet of Mylar down, and then covered it over in resin again." "And when it dried, it was like these flexible sheets." "So, you get something that you can do this with." "It'll look a little more like that." "This is what it's like working on Black Swan." "I think every little girl wants to put on a pink tutu and run around, and it's so fun." "So, yeah, I think I did." "I never wanted to be a professional ballerina." "I definitely don't want to be a professional ballerina now." "I can honestly tell you I would not have done this movie if Darren wasn't directing it, and this is not to go to Darren's head, okay?" "The character in the film is so complicated, such a complicated story to tell, that I don't know if in the..." "Easily, in the wrong hands, it would be very cheesy and very silly." "I don't know how many directors could pull this off, so, because of Darren is the reason I did it." "I've never had to die." "I've been raped, I've been shot at," "I've blown up in a house, but I've never died onscreen, so I'm really excited." " Okay, let's give it a shot." " Here, this is it?" "Yeah, we'll use the thinner blood." "But just use more force." "Just try more force." "Try it one more time before we clean her up." "(COUGHS)" "No, you got to force harder." "WOMAN:" "That is bullshit." "ARONOFSKY:" "And..." " There you go!" " Good job!" "There I did it." "Okay." "I've been studying ballet years ago, so I kind of knew that world a bit." "Then I've watched..." "Yeah, I've watched more than movies about it." "I watched a few documentaries, of course." "That was very helpful." "But I went to the Opera in Paris." "I've worked a bit with Mikhail Baryshnikov." "I've seen him work with dancers." "I went to see Peter Martins directing his dancers, and I went to see rehearsals of the New York City Ballet, too." "And something appeared very fast is that the key of the character was narcissism." "If you're really passionate about what you do," "I guess it really does excuse a bit of what you are and the way you behave." "That's the way I did it." "THOMAS:" "Not so stiff." "Don't be afraid of him." "Your mission is destruction through seduction." "And now, fly!" "CASSEL:" "I don't know." "I mean, some people work differently, but, you know, I think actors have to find their own way to work." "A set is a very special place, and you need to be able to find your freedom without being a weight for anybody else," "so it's how do you interact with that environment, and it's different all the time." "Adapt and stay yourself." "You need to be relaxed." "I think that's the most important thing." "And to enjoy the moment." " At last I can see the Black Swan." " Cut." "Good." "Let's go again." "Everybody's got his own way to concentrate." "To focus, I guess." "But if you spend more energy pretending you're focusing, then it's really no use." "Actually, I did it too." "I went on sets, like... (CLEARS THROAT)" "(LAUGHING)" "But then I realized it takes too much energy, and I can do it in another way." "MAN:" "Here we go." "Places, please." "I mean, it's so vicious on the body, and yet you never see it." "It's like you see this beautiful image, and underneath it is some really, really grotesque detail." "That's another thing in ballet in general is just seeking this perfection, and there's a real beauty to it because it's all ephemeral." "Everything is in a performance." "It's not captured on film forever." "Most of the time, it's not captured anywhere." "It exists for a moment, as beauty does." "It was just too bad at the end..." "No, that's all right." "I could cut around that." "What's important to me is the arms." "Just help her with the arms a little." "MILLEPIED:" "Look in the direction that you're going." "Don't look back." "PORTMAN:" "And they're all striving for that moment of perfection." "You know, they'll work tirelessly and destroy themselves to find that perfection." "(PEOPLE CHATTERING)" "BALLERINA:" "I don't know." "I didn't know you could be a ballerina as a career until I was about 14." " My grandma was a ballet dancer." " My mother was a ballet dancer." " And my sister." " Sisters." "We're just masochistic people." "We like to torture ourselves, and getting emotional." "Pennsylvania Ballet." "Please come support the arts." "(ALL LAUGH)" " We're poor." " Well done." "Well done." "Yeah, but because I was really close to the dancers when they were doing that really fast dancing." "So, when they were breathing, in a way, they sounded like horses." " MAN:" "Yeah, yeah." " It was actually beautiful." "(DRAMATIC HEAVY BREATHING)" "You know, like this, and when they were passing by us, over there in the corner, you could really..." " MAN:" "Feel the energy." " Yeah, it was like athletes." "Well, ballet is built on five positions of the feet." "You start at the bar, every day, even professionals, you start with pliés and you move on to tendus, so the ballet world is very regular and very repetitive and very predictable." "There's a certain personality type that gravitates to that structure, because you always know what you're in for, for that day, and it's this kind of personal pursuing an ideal, you know." "Making your body achieve something that it's never really gonna achieve." "You're trying to get this beautiful line, and rotate your legs completely 180 degrees, which, really, your body's not meant to do." "You know right away if it's something that you're going to want to really do, 'cause it's so physically demanding and so emotionally demanding, but at the same time, there's not anything that gives you such..." "It's definitely given me a life, and it's gonna be hard to find something that fills the same place when I eventually have to hang it up." "Okay, let's get ready, please." "ARONOFSKY:" "The time we had was very, very short." "We had one day to shoot each of the big performances at the end, and you're basically putting on a huge show, and then at night, they had to do a turnaround and a turnover to the next act of the ballet, and then we'd have to come in" "and be ready to shoot, but of course, it would take a few hours to set up the lighting and all that," "so it was really tough." "MAN:" "Cut." "We'll go again." "ARONOFSKY:" "Real quick." "I'm sorry." " Right away, right away, right away." " MAN:" "Right away." "Ready to go." "We're shooting the final act of Swan Lake." "End of the film, and I'm just thinking about shots I missed." "One-sixteen, take two, mark." "Okay, are you gonna hold the top of her hands like this or..." " MAN:" "No." " There?" "Okay." "Ready, and action, Nina." "Three, two, one." "It's fun to watch, it's fun to go on a roller coaster." "It's kind of fun to watch someone lose their mind, as long as it's not you." "You make sure not to waste any of the resources you have at hand." "You're forced, very early on, to make the decisions that you have to make." "Whether they're right, wrong or indifferent, you become committed to them and you make them work, and I think that, fortunately, we made a lot of the right decisions." "I think we made a better film." "I really do." "But I think the only way to break in is by doing something very, very unique and original and personal, because that's what you have to offer, is a story that only you can tell." "So you gotta tell the story that you think would be cool to you and your friends, basically, from your corner of the Earth, and then it may actually then connect with a lot of people." "It will, if you put humanity into it and what makes it special." "It will connect." "Filmmakers today are starting to embrace that you can add to your story and add to your narrative with these little, sprinkled visual effects across the entire film, and they're not in your face, and they're not Transformers," "and they're not dinosaurs, but they're there and they're prevalent today, not just in this film, but in a lot of films as well." "Darren's one of those directors where he still likes to do makeup effects." "He likes to see something on set, he likes to see something there, which I think is the best of both worlds." "instead of a complete CG world, we have live action and digital working to its best." "LOOK Effects delivered 300 visual effects on this $13 million film." "It was an incredibly challenging thing to do, and the complexity of the edit, of the score, all that stuff was really tight, and the difficulty was the limitation in money." "So, with the swan morph, I can say, there were two issues, technical and creative." "From a technical standpoint, we knew we wanted to use motion capture." "It was really important to keep the actual movement of the dancer for this swan transformation." "We knew there was gonna be CG feathers that we were gonna animate and we were gonna build, but it was really important to have it tracked in there with the actual dance, so we set up a motion-capture rig" "putting tracking markers all over Sarah's body, setting up an array of motion-capture cameras, and when she did her dance, we recorded those movements, which we then were able to translate into the 3D process for the feathers." "It wasn't flawless, and required a lot of hand-tracking on top of it." "We spent a lot of time working out what was the final state of her transformation." "We knew that she was gonna turn into some sort of swan, and it was a lot about, "How far can you take Nina towards a full swan" ""before the idea breaks apart?"" "We knew the wings were the major part of it, but beyond that, we tried a lot of different things with her neck and her face and her head and her body, and we had a lot of iterations," "and ultimately what we found was that the wings of a swan are gorgeous, and Natalie was so beautiful that you didn't really need more than that." "'Cause in Nina's mind, this is a beautiful thing that's happening to her." "A lot of the process was figuring out what a swan wing looks like, what a swan feather looks like, sort of morph it to look more like the dancer's arm." "I went to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service." "I e-mailed them and they sent me scans, high-res scans of swan feathers." "The swan feather images were used as reference to build simple geometry in Maya, and each feather had a rig so that it could bend in various directions and flex." "I took those feathers and placed them on the wing in logical groups." "The lights are positioned based on a track in 3D." "The tracking software picks up various points in the image that hopefully don't move too much." "The chandeliers, the lights." "It uses those points to reconstruct what the camera move was in 3D, and once I have that camera move reconstructed," "I can start placing my lights based upon the camera solve." "There were many versions of the feathers growing in different ways." "You can see the final design we settled on." "They grow along the shoulder here, but not so much on the chest." "They have this graceful curve." "That was something Darren really liked." "But we didn't get there for a while." "We tried all sorts of things." "You know, I think one of the exciting things about visual effects is that it is so much more accessible now than it used to be." "There are kids today, there are probably 10-year-old kids who are learning After Effects and starting to pick this stuff up and are gonna create the shots in the future that are gonna blow us away, because they've been doing it their whole lives." "You can get your hands on these tools and start to learn them, and once you start to learn them, if you've got the ideas and you've got the drive and desire to make great stuff, you can do it," "and then once you prove yourself that you're an artist, you can find work and you can do this stuff." "I think the biggest influence on Black Swan is the ballet Swan Lake." "We really went back to the myth of Swan Lake and looked at all the fairytale elements, and I remember meeting with this dancer," "Julie Kent, at the ABT, asking her," ""What exactly is she?" "What is the queen swan?"" "And she said, "Well, she's kind of half-human, half-swan."" "And that immediately made me realize, "This is a were-swan movie."" "I started to get excited, and that was one of the most exciting things, is the transformation we were gonna take Natalie through, to turn her into a creature." " MAN:" "Literally?" " Literally." "I had a guy in my shop look at the effects list and say," ""There's a lot of effects."" "And then he looked at the date next to each effect and they were all on the same day, so January 30th, there were six different complicated effects scenes that had to be filmed." "So, there wasn't a lot of time to prep everything, so it was a real guerilla-style way of filmmaking." "It was a real RD to figure out how to make all these even, symmetrical rashes without covering Natalie's back in a big appliance, because when you cover someone, no matter how soft the piece is," "it looks, especially in a moving back, especially in a ballerina's moving back, you'll see little crinkles and strange things in it." "I would actually put some glue on Natalie, put the actual mold on her skin, and peel the mold off, so you're getting direct from mold to the skin appliance." "Within five, 10 minutes, the makeup was done." "MAN:" "Guys, where's Rothbart?" "MARINO: it wasn't just a crazy monster or something." "I actually based a lot of the design of Rothbart on..." "There was a drawing that Michelangelo had done of a satyr, where it was this demonic face where his nose was crushed, and his high cheekbones and things, and I used that as some of my reference for Rothbart," "and you can see, he's got very strong, strong features." "The dancer, Sergio, he had a lot of prosthetics on." "He had a fake nose, beak, an upper lip, a chin, lower lip, whole forehead, horns, the whole deal, and he turns into a bird when he's dancing." "You see him every now and then." "Okay, I'll talk about it." "There was a scene where Natalie was supposed to peel off her cheek, and it was supposed to be like an onion." "She kept peeling one cheek after another, and we had done a little test and it was pretty successful, and we were gonna tweak some things here and there." "I had to sculpt one big appliance and then a smaller one and a smaller one and it's just kind of peeling, and he didn't want blood." "Didn't want blood in that." "Wanted it to be an onion kind of thing." "MAN:" "Probably more towards the corner." "MARINO:" "We made some fake legs that would bend backwards." "Darren wanted her legs to bend backwards like a bird's leg anatomy." "We made some fiberglass legs that we can manipulate and bend backwards." "They were tweaked digitally, later, to make them look shrunken." "And unsure of yourself, something's weird, and right leg, left and fall." "And cut." "Great." "Check the gate." "There's gonna be sleepless nights and last-minute things." "That's what a good director does, and as demanding a director as he is and as cool as he is, he's a very visual guy, and he knows what he wants, knows what he wants to see," "and you have to keep up with Darren to take part in one of his films." "ARONOFSKY:" "That's a little creepy-looking." "When you put a body next to it, it suddenly becomes so much more real." "Look at that." "Oh, my gosh." "MAN:" "The illusion just changes, doesn't it?" "ARONOFSKY:" "Yeah, totally." "English" " US" " SDH"