BLACK SWAN directed by Darren Aronofsky, screenplay by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin from a story by Heinz, with Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis and Barbara Hershey. A Fox Searchlight release. 110 minutes. Opens Friday (December 3). For venues, trailers and times, see Movies.
Los Angeles – Natalie Portman still looks a little like a kid playing dress-up.
Wearing a sleek midnight-blue jacket over a lighter blue ruffled shirt, the actor looks much, much younger than her 29 years. It’s what makes her convincing in the role of a deteriorating ballerina in Black Swan, and it’s also what keeps people underestimating her.
“Yeah, I guess I’ve learned the merit of having an image as a good girl,” Portman says. “It just seems easier to surprise people and subvert that. You know, you curse and people are like….” She rears back and gasps like a Southern belle with the vapours.
“Which is funny, because I was never in kid films. My first movie was The Professional, which was R-rated. I was 11 years old.”
Anyone who watches Darren Aronofsky’s intense psychodrama will come away with the image of Portman’s tormented, flailing Nina imprinted on their retinas. She’s so amazingly good, and in so many different ways, that she obliterates almost everything else in the picture.
Portman could very well win an Oscar for her performance, but she’d rather not talk about it. At the Black Swan press conference, she gracefully deflects talk of awards, steering the conversation toward the collective efforts of the cast and crew.
She’s downplaying the effort she put into the movie. She spent a year preparing for the role, doing two hours of ballet training daily with coach Mary Helen Bowers for the first six months, then adding another three hours of formal classes and swimming for additional toning.
And then there was the character stuff. Her Harvard degree in psychology came in handy when building a specific profile of her Black Swan character. Portman diagnosed Nina as suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which comes as a surprise, since the screenwriters had said the character was a classic borderline personality.
“Well, they’re not mutually exclusive,” she tells me about an hour after that press conference, sitting in a quiet alcove at the W Hollywood.
Portman’s talking about the research she did for the movie, which also included watching a few films. I assumed she’d loaded up on thematically related cinema like Repulsion and The Red Shoes, but Portman went another way.
“The Frederick Wiseman documentaries [Ballet, about the American Ballet Theater, and La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet] were my filmic references,” she says. “And then I read all the dancer autobiographies from the New York City Ballet during the Balanchine years. I thought if you situate it in a very particular culture, that’s very helpful. So I read Allegra Kent, Suzanne Farrell, Toni Bentley – and then I just talked to a lot of dancers, too. It was really more from people than from films.”
By the time shooting started, Portman was training eight hours a day. The unrelenting physical regimen – with a diet that consisted of little more than carrots and almonds, according to Aronofsky – certainly helped her connect to her splintering character.
“Every scene was….,” she makes a frenetic gesture, waving her hands around in a panic. “I don’t remember any easy days. We had such a short schedule, and it’s a low-budget film. We were doing 15-, 16-hour days. But it was good, because you really don’t get to do anything else. You just stay in the world of the film.”
It’s a pretty freaky world. Black Swan plays like Michael Powell’s Technicolor fairy tale The Red Shoes as directed by Dario Argento, with the increasingly unhinged Nina coming apart under the demands of her controlling stage mother (Barbara Hershey) and the advances of her predatory choreographer (Vincent Cassel) and a confident dancer (Mila Kunis). Portman’s unrestrained performance and Aronofsky’s feverish mise en scène give the movie the feeling of a runaway train in pointe shoes.
“I think people get excited by it because movies are so tame right now and this one’s crazy,” Portman says, laughing. “It’s not like anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s really bold filmmaking, and I don’t think we see a lot of that right now.”
Portman’s always been drawn to the bolder films, balancing big pictures like Mars Attacks!, the Star Wars prequels, V For Vendetta and next year’s Thor with work by Wayne Wang, Anthony Minghella, Wong Kar-wai, Amos Gitai and Wes Anderson. She was the only person in the world who understood Zach Braff in the Sundance smash Garden State, and she earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress as a lost-soul stripper in Mike Nichols’s Closer.
Portman has an ulterior motive for seeking out challenging projects. She’s been moving toward writing and directing for some time.
“I learn from everyone I work with every day,” she says. “Actors, directors, writers. Yeah, I’m really lucky to be around so many interesting, creative and smart people all the time. I’ve grown up in this world, and though I’m no expert in anything, really, I do feel a kind of familiarity, and have an inherent understanding of structure and all that. And also just this passion and desire to create.”
Recently she’s been testing herself as a filmmaker, directing Lauren Bacall and Ben Gazzara in the delicately observed 2008 short Eve and helming an artful segment of the omnibus film New York, I Love You. (She also appears in a segment of the film directed by Mira Nair.)
Portman’s New York, I Love You sequence is the sort of thing we expect from a young filmmaker – a calm, nicely observed story about a man and a child in Central Park. But Eve is a much more complicated piece, starring actors who are practically living legends.
It’s hard to picture Bacall and Gazzara being directed by someone who looks like she could be their great-granddaughter, but Portman pulled that off, too.
“It was terrifying,” she says, beaming. “Almost anything I’ve done that I am proud of, I was ignorant to have done. There’s some kind of weird bravado that it took to go in there and do that, and I feel so lucky that I did.
“I mean, Ben Gazzara is an absolute legend and such a great actor. Bacall is an absolute icon and an incredible actress and such a great comedian. The fact that they both believed in it and were willing to do the film was such an honour. But also they’re serious actors – they want to work, they want to work hard, they want to be directed.”
So does Portman. She responds to strong filmmakers, and she aspires to be one herself.
“I’ve been writing, and I’ve done the shorts, and I think about doing more.”
She won’t talk about what “more” might be, though. “It just turns into, ‘Why didn’t you ever do that thing that you were talking about?'”
Whatever it is, it’ll be worth seeing. The kid’s got game.
Interview Clips
Natalie Portman on the psychology of ballet dancers:
Darren Aronofsky and Natalie Portman on Black Swan’s ten-year journey to the screen:
Portman on stepping in and out of character during the shoot:
Portman on the training process:
Aronofsky and Portman on the movie’s eco-conscious shoot:
normw@nowtoronto.com
