Darren Aronofsky’s horror film Mother! about humanity’s unstoppable destruction of the earth was conceived in just five days, the American director said.
Aronofsky, known for Black Swan and The Wrestler, said at the Venice Film Festival that most of his movies take years to create but this was different.
He was inspired by what he saw around him and his inability to do much about it: from the United States pulling out of the Paris climate deal, an iceberg melting in the Arctic to people starving, while others live in opulence.
“I just had a lot of rage and anger, and I just wanted to channel it into one emotion, one feeling,” the Academy Award nominee told reporters. “And in five days I wrote the first version of the script. It just sort of poured out of me.”
The result is an apocalyptic metaphor, rich in religious, environmental and political undertones.
Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence are the lead stars in Mother!. Photo: Paramount
Unexpected guests
Jennifer Lawrence plays mother, a young wife who lives with her poet husband – Javier Bardem – in a secluded country house. While he is trying to overcome a serious bout of writer’s block, she is busy restoring his family home.
Their seemingly idyllic existence starts falling apart when unexpected guests – starting with Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer – arrive at their doorstep.
Lawrence, whose roles usually focus on strong female leads, is thrust into portraying someone living to make her husband happy and asked to give and give until she can give no more.
“It was a completely different character from anything I’ve ever done before, but it was also a completely different side of myself that I wasn’t in touch with, didn’t really know yet,” the 27-year-old Academy Award winner said.
The two-hour film is set in one house, a massive villa surrounded by fields of grass. Aronofsky said he wanted to build on the idea that while we may ignore what’s happening on the other side of the world, we all can identify with the discomfort of someone invading our home and privacy.
Mixed reviews
The movie received mixed reaction in Venice and was booed after its first screening, but Aronofsky remained undeterred.
“It’s a very, very strong cocktail,” he said. “This is a roller coaster ride, only come on it if you’re really prepared to do the loop to loop a few times.”
“The reviews have been just been cracking me up,” Lawrence told reporters at the London roll-out of the movie recently following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
“People either love it or they absolutely hate it and I think that’s so cool. Like there’s not one person that’s walked out of it like ‘Uh,’ and I love that,” she added. – Reuters
