![]() It also meant diving back into some of the darkest days of his life. “It was a chance to look at the story again with fresh eyes and to grow as a person as the story grew,” he says. “Sam is so incredibly gifted, I knew he’d find his way,” says Aronofsky.Īs an avid lover of learning, Hunter savored the challenge. ![]() Both agreed that Hunter should adapt his own work-the only problem was that Hunter had never written a screenplay.īut encouraged by Aronofsky and his receipt of a MacArthur Genius grant, Hunter began to teach himself the form from scratch, studying cinematic language and working out how to transform his work from stage to screen. ![]() The instant bond between Aronofsky and Hunter set things into motion. “It took on a question I like to explore in my own work: how do you transport audiences inside of characters they never could imagine being? I didn’t know then if it could be a movie, but I met with Sam and connected with him immediately.” Hunter’s play made my heart ache, it made me laugh, and I felt inspired by the bravery and grace each character finds,” says Aronofsky. He has come through weariness to a palpable optimism that lights up these urgent days.Ĭharlie asks what Aronofsky sees as one of the story’s most profound questions “Do you ever get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring?” In the midst of re-examining trust and its boundaries, Charlie breaks down his own borderlines. But the audience also experience the thrill of it blooming in the course of the story’s construction. In some ways, The Whale is a hunt, a search to grasp the slippery nature of compassion-why we need it and why we push it away, when we can give it and when we can’t. “Through the power of emotion, a story like this can put us into the shoes of a man we might otherwise never even wonder about, and remind us that all the promise of love and redemption is there in every human existence.” It’s a story that asks a simple but essential question: can we save each other? That feels important in the world right now, especially when people seem more than ever to be turning their backs on one another.”įor Aronofsky, this is what cinema is all about. They’ve all made mistakes, but what they share are immense hearts and the desire to love even when others are seemingly unlovable. Says Aronofsky, “What I love about The Whale is that it invites you to see the humanity of characters who are not all good or all bad, who truly live in grey tones the way people do, and who have extremely rich, intricate inner lives. Hunter’s The Whale as a film ever since he first saw the play a decade agoĪronofsky was immediately struck by its intelligence, and the fearless way it interrogates the human condition without offering an easy answer. As he makes a last bold attempt to reconcile with his broken family, Charlie must confront, with his full heart and fierce wit, long-buried traumas and unspoken love that have haunted him for decades.ĭarren Aronofsky has wanted to adapt Sam D. In Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, Brendan Fraser gives a virtuosic performance as Charlie, an English teacher living with severe obesity whose time is running out. Charlie and Ahab were not so unlike, underneath it all both men caught up in the pursuit of a dream, intoxicated with the could-have-been, obsessed with the fantasy of another future. Any concern about the possible insensitivity of the title was quickly dispelled as well, once it was understood that Moby-Dick factored prominently into the show, both literally and thematically. Instead of feeling overly confined, audiences praised it for its expansive, panoramic interrogation of the human spirit, for the authenticity and humor of its characters, and its profoundly moving meditation on grief, compulsion,Īnd redemption. ![]() Even on the compact landscape of a stage, would theater audiences show up to see a show where the protagonist is marooned on the couch the entire runtime? And what about that title?Īs it turned out, all the worrying was for naught. When the original stage version of The Whale premiered in 2012, there was some initial concern. “I connected with the themes and ideas, and the way it found beauty in things our prejudices too often make inhuman,” says Aronofsky. Hunter’s celebrated play The Whale, he knew that he found his next project. When visionary filmmaker Darren Aronofsky saw lauded dramaturge Sam D.
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