His bottom line: Being creative

TORONTO -- Darren Aronofsky looks fairly hale for someone who has been through director's hell. It's September, he's at the Toronto International Film Festival with his new movie, "The Fountain," and the buzz is as mixed as it was at Cannes in the spring. But then, nothing about this movie, which opens Friday, has been easy.

Seven years in the making, "The Fountain" is a labor of love that's about love -- and about the power of love to span time and death. The film interweaves three distinct time periods and story lines: the Spanish conquest of the Mayans in the 16th century, a modern-day research doctor racing to cure his wife, and a futuristic yogi soaring through outer space in a bubble with a tree. Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz ( a.k.a. Mrs. Aronofsky) star in all three. Screenings have been rife with head-scratching as well as partisans passionately rising to the defend the film as a modern-day successor to "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Having arrived out of nowhere with the startling 1998 puzzler "Pi" and followed that up with the critically lauded drug drama "Requiem for a Dream" (2000), Aronofsky had hip credentials to burn, and burn them he did. "The Fountain" was going to be a big-budget movie starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and in 2002, Aronofsky was ready to shoot. Then Pitt pulled out to make "Troy" and the film's funding collapsed in the vacuum of his departure.

Undaunted, the director regrouped, rewrote, and recast, and here we are. Sitting for an interview at the festival, Aronofsky doesn't seem like a man who has everything on the line. But maybe that's just relief.

Q Now that the movie's finally done, what are your plans?

A I just want to hang out with my baby. Henry Chance.

Q As in Chance the gardener from "Being There"?

A By coincidence, not by choice, although I was aware of it, because I'm a big fan of [director] Hal Ashby. There was a kid in second grade named Chance, and I always liked the name.

Q How difficult was this movie to make? And why is a movie like this so difficult to make?

A I think the big question is "why," because we know the "how." Any time you make a film that's not quite a widget they can stick into a box and know exactly how to market, it just gets very hard. "The Fountain" has three genres: It has this action-adventure with the conquistador-versus-Mayan battles; it's got a love story, a dramatic story, which could be like an independent film; and then it's got the metaphysical, psychedelic sci-fi stuff. When you mix them all together, people go "What is it?" and when they run their formulas of how much can they make off of it, it becomes an unknown to them.

Q At what stages did you face resistance?

A At every stage. I've always had it. "Pi" we made for $60,000 and it was near impossible to get that money. Everybody would say, "Why are you making a black and white movie about God and math?" And then "Requiem for a Dream" was "Why are you making a drug movie?" It's always been hard and tough, and I'm not sure why. I think it's probably the type of things I decide to tell stories about.

Q How close did you get to filming the first time?

A We were seven weeks out ; $18 million was spent. We had built sets. It was very close for something like that to fall apart -- I didn't think there was anything that could stop it at that point. For about seven months I tried to figure out something else to do, but then one night I couldn't sleep, and I crawled out of bed. I'm sitting in my office, and all the books and research I had done for "The Fountain" were right in front of me on the bookshelf, and I realized it was in my blood. And a light bulb went off over my head: Look, I'm a no-budget filmmaker. I started off making "Pi" for nothing, and "Requiem for a Dream" was made for nearly nothing -- there's got to be a way to make this film for a price at which people are willing to take the risk.

Q What was the budget?

A [It was] $70 million the first time, and we made it now for $30 million.

Q How much of that goes to computer-generated imagery?

A There's no CGI in the entire movie. All the space stuff was photographed. I don't know how much of a sci-fi fan you are, but you've got "2001," where Kubrick basically did realism for the first time. And it holds up; except for some of his matte lines, it's basically impeccable. Then you go into "Star Wars," and you have what I call "hyperspace space" -- basically it's just souped-up trucks and cars. We said, let's not do that.

We found this guy, Peter Parks, who lives in the United Kingdom outside of Oxford and who's been shooting chemical reactions and micro-organisms in petri dishes for the last 25 years. We did use computers to collage it, but it was actually photographs, all that background, even the star fields. And as far as the spaceship, instead of figuring out some weird hologram he uses to control the ship and that'll look good for the next five years, we said let's get rid of it all and go back to minimalism. That's why the ship is a perfect sphere -- a bubble. If you're floating through space, there's no reason it can't be any shape, and there's no reason you wouldn't want to look out on the view.

Q Did the script change from the first iteration to the second?

A Not that much. When I realized that night I was a no-budget filmmaker, I said, 'I'm just going to rewrite this as a cheap version.' So I spent two weeks typing, and after two weeks I gave it to my producer, and he said, 'You've turned it from prose into a love poem to death.' Which I liked. It is a poem more than a normal film, and I think that's kind of cool.

Q What are the spiritual elements of the film?

A I'm kind of a humanist. What interests me is that at the core of all these religions is a spirituality which is deeply related. I could explain it through a Jewish lens, I could explain it through a Christian lens, I could explain it through a Buddhist lens. I think it's all there. When you see the guy in the lotus position you immediately think certain things, but for me that was just a meditative futuristic figure.

Q Your Starchild, in a way.

A That's all it was.

Q After all this work, is it the film you envisioned seven years ago?

A I'm not one of those filmmakers that has the gift of pre-visualizing something deeply -- I'm sure there are people out there like Spike Jonze, maybe Kubrick. For me, I plant the seed, create the script, and then no matter how much work I do in the two dimensions of writing and story boarding, when you get to a three-dimensional space with actors, you have to be open to what they're doing and comfortable with dealing with the three-dimensional space you're in -- how the light is working, the limitations of technology. And then you get to the editing room and try to shape it different ways.

I see it like growing a bonsai tree. You plant the seed and then sprouts come out, and you can slowly shape it and control it, and maybe move the light and branches. But there's a core structure that's going to grow no matter what, and you have to allow that. Otherwise you'll kill it. So you sit back and slowly make it as close as you can and then eventually you say, 'OK, I'm happy with it.' And you give it to the world.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. He blogs at boston.com/ae/movies/blog.