Darren Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky (born February 12, 1969) is an American film director, screenwriter and film producer. He is the third American filmmaker to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.



Aronofsky was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Abraham and Charlotte Aronofsky, both school teachers. He grew up in a Conservative Jewish household. His father taught science and was a dean at Bushwick High School. His mother is a retired public school teacher.
He graduated from Edward R. Murrow High School. He was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. He was trained as a research biologist with The School for Field Studies on a ranch in Kenya and Prince William Sound, Alaska.
Upon graduating high school, he backpacked around the Middle East and Europe for six months and, in 1987, entered Harvard University where he studied anthropology, live action film and animation. His senior thesis film, Supermarket Sweep, starred his fellow student and friend Sean Gullette. It was a finalist in the 1991 Student Academy Awards. He graduated in 1991 with honors. He received his M.F.A. degree in directing from AFI Conservatory and was honored with the institute's prestigious Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal.

Past films

Aronofsky's directorial debut was in the late 1990s with Pi (1998), a black-and-white American psychological thriller, for which he won the Directing Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay and the Gotham Open Palm Award. Aronofsky's next film was the drama Requiem for a Dream (2000), which is based on the novel of the same name written by Hubert Selby, Jr., with whom Aronofsky wrote the screenplay. The film depicts characters facing different forms of addiction, which leads to them being imprisoned in a dream world of tormented delusion and reckless desperation.
In the mid-2000s, he directed The Fountain (2006), which comprises three storylines where the male and female leads play different sets of characters: a modern-day scientist and his cancer-stricken wife, a conquistador and his queen, and a space traveler who hallucinates his lost love. The storylines, interwoven with use of match cuts and recurring visual motifs, reflect the themes of love and mortality.
His next film, The Wrestler (2008) is a drama about an aging, impoverished wrestler whose heyday was in the 1980s who continues to do matches, even though his health is failing, because wrestling is all he knows how to do. The script was written by Robert D. Siegel and the film stars Mickey Rourke as the wrestler and Marisa Tomei as the stripper he has fallen in love with.



Planned projects

Aronofsky is planning a Noah’s Ark Project which he started developing before Pi, and was co-written with Ari Handel. Aronofsky is also working on a film based on the February 2006 heist at the Securitas Depot in Tonbridge, England. In 2010, a number of rumors emerged about films that Aronofsky would be directing, including an adaptation of Ron Rash's book Serena starring Angelina Jolie, an adaptation of John Valliant's nonfiction book The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival starring Brad Pitt, and a film about Jackie Kennedy following the assassination of her husband, president John F. Kennedy, starring Rachel Weisz.
Aronofsky was attached as director to a new RoboCop film from 2008-2010. There have been rumors that the reason for the delay, and the reason that the film is not his current project, is because of his refusal to make the film 3D at the insistence of the studio It was reported in late July that MGM scrapped the project, which Aronofsky himself had lost interest in.

Personal life



Aronofsky is engaged to English actress Rachel Weisz. She is known for her role in films such as The Mummy, About a Boy and The Constant Gardener (2005), the latter winning her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, along with other major motion picture awards. They began dating in 2001 and have a son, Henry Chance, born on May 31, 2006, in New York City. The couple reside in Manhattan.