Requiem for a Dream (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Requiem for a Dream is a 2000 psychological drama film directed by Darren Aronofsky. It follows the lives of four characters as they experience the devastating effects of drug addiction and the pursuit of their dreams. Christopher McDonald, Tappy Tibbons: I auditioned with Mary Vernieu in a room, and she sent that off to Darren, and Darren said, “He’s our guy.” I went to his little apartment in Midtown, and we went up on the roof and he said, “I’m gonna ask a few questions.” I ad-libbed all this stuff about Tappy Tibbons, just crazy stuff. I was channeling Tony Robbins, walking down the street, talking to people. Some people knew me but didn’t know my name. And I said, “Yeah, I’m Tappy Tibbons, you’ve seen me on TV” — just stopping random people in the streets and making up, like, “30 days, it’ll change your life.” I just riffed on it, and then [Aronofsky] did use a lot of it in the movie. Wayans: It’s not that I don’t do drama. I haven’t been on the top of the list, because people don’t know if I can do drama or not. I studied drama for four years every day. It is not long before she learns to compromise: “Well, it really depends on how you measure: loose or tight. All Sara did was push out the air between the pieces of lettuce.” From self-deceit Sara moves to obsession to other states of “altered consciousness” in which her mind is dominated by images of eating as Selby astutely uses dreamlike phenomena as strategies of indirect discourse to move our consciousness along with that of the character: “A couple of nights of dreaming and Sara decided enough already. She got the name of the doctor from her lady friend and made an appointment. I dont know from diet pills, but eggs and grapefruit Ive had up to here thank you.” The diet pills are not, then, the first step in what leads to Sara’s psychotic undoing; the first step is her addiction to the American dream, as she watches it on the screen, as she eats it from the seductive boxes. Watson: Selby had written [a screenplay adaptation] years before. He finally found it in somebody’s attic and sent it to us and we looked at the two drafts and they were really similar.

Aronofksy: All of the younger actors got there a month before or something. We even went to a nightclub — to Twilo or the Tunnel one night. I remember it only because in the middle of the night they turned on the lights. I guess they got raided by the police. Aronofsky: We were with the casting director, and at a certain point [Wayans] leaves, and there’s this explosion, a big pop outside. Marlon was in such a daze — it was one of those lots that has those nails if you go the wrong direction, and he tore out his tires on his car. He came in and we ended up having more time together, because they were waiting for his car to get towed. The fact that he was from New York, from a neighborhood I knew well growing up — I felt that he could really connect to the character. Chinlund: I think people recognize it as being sincere and real and entirely devoid of irony. We meant everything we said, we met everything we did.

Broadcasts

Requiem for a Dream is a 1978 novel by American writer Hubert Selby Jr., that concerns four New Yorkers whose lives spiral out of control as they succumb to their addictions. [1] Plot [ edit ] Watson: We basically shot [the sex show scene] in the very last night. We had a closed set. We had a lot of rules and regulations going into that. It was very stressful for me, because if something went wrong that would’ve been really bad. The guys in the scene weren’t actors, except for Stanley B. Herman. The women in the scene, they were strippers by profession. They were very professional about it.

Leto: I think rehearsal was eight weeks, which is very rare, that a director can wrangle actors for that amount of time. There were lots of read throughs and rehearsals but I think the big, most impactful part was the kind of, just the dive into character. Gleiberman, Owen (October 13, 2000). "Movie Review: 'Requiem for a Dream' Review". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on December 14, 2014 . Retrieved December 13, 2014. Song of the Silent Snow (1986) brought together fifteen stories whose writing spanned more than twenty years. At the advice of her friend Rae, Sara visits a physician who prescribes her amphetamines to control her appetite. She begins losing weight rapidly and is excited by how much energy she has. When Harry recognizes the signs of her drug abuse and implores her to stop taking the amphetamines, Sara insists that the chance to appear on television and the increased admiration from her friends Ada and Rae are her remaining reasons to live. As time passes, Sara becomes frantic waiting for the invitation and increases her dosage, which causes her to develop amphetamine psychosis. Burstyn was playing Mary Tyrone in the Eugene O’Neill revival — another addict, though as Burstyn points out, “hers was a kind of smoothing out the rough edges”

Credits

When I got to film school in Los Angeles, they told me, “You’re going to do a bunch of short films.” Selby wrote a collection of stories called Songs of the Silent Snow, and there was one called “Fortune Cookie,” about a door-to-door salesman who can only make a sale if he has a good fortune. I was like, “Oh, I’ll adapt that.” I called the Writer’s Guild to see if I had to get permission, and the Guild gave me [Selby’s] home phone number. I called him up and he said, “Oh, come on over.” Aronofsky: I remember during the screening, one of my producers was sitting behind me, and as the film was descending into the hell that it becomes, he started laughing. And he leaned forward and he’s like, “Look what you’re doing to this room.” And I remember looking around and just seeing the faces, and I just put my hands up like blinders on either side of my eyes, and sunk down in my chair. Aronofsky: I was able to blend them a bit, but unfortunately [Selby and I] never really got to work in the same room, which would have been an amazing experience. Clint Mansell, music: Darren had wanted a hip-hop score to reflect the music he’d listened to growing up in Brooklyn. I remember him sending me a clip of the scene where Ellen Burstyn first takes the speed pills. He put “She Watch Channel Zero?!” by Public Enemy under it. It was fantastic, just brilliant, but it didn’t do anything but say, “Oh, that’s cool.” There was no subtext to it. We realized at that point we were in trouble. I had written a lot of stuff in advance, but in this hip-hopish vein. When I started seeing the rough edit, we put the music to it, and nothing really latched on. I nearly quit at one point because I didn’t think I could do it.

Requiem for a Dream captures the tragedy of lives consumed by substance abuse in a unique and captivating way. In addition, Requiem for a Dream examines the way society views addiction and those who suffer from it. It looks at how society often views addicts as outcasts or “losers” and how this contributes to feelings of loneliness and isolation. Aronofsky: I was terribly intimidated by Ellen. The first day bringing her out to Coney Island and the boardwalk and Brighton Beach — I remember I had a camera with me and I was scared to take pictures of her, even though I was about to shoot a movie on her.Watson: The trap of a heroin movie is, you see people shooting up, right? That was one of the things we really talked about — how do we deal with that, because that’s not interesting just to show people shooting up anymore. Libatique: He said to me, “You think it’s too much?” I’m like, “You’re going to ask me that? You’re going to ask me that now?” And it feels young. The thrill of Requiem for a Dream comes from it being the work of artists who hadn’t yet been told what they could and couldn’t do, for better and, maybe in one instance, for worse. It took on uncompromisingly dark material with such an exuberant sense of style and boundless energy. Twenty years after Requiem made its debut at Cannes and tangled with the MPAA over an NC-17 rating, it remains an influential cultural milestone that continues to reverberate through different media, and an ending that still has viewers curling up in the fetal position like the characters do right before the credits roll. Aronfosky’s second feature was a formative one for a whole swathe of budding cinephiles who’d sneak a director’s-cut version of the DVD home to watch a transgressive story of addiction destroying four lives, all told in gloriously maximalist fashion, from the mini-montages of drug use to the time-lapse interludes to the famous Kronos Quartet–performed score. This is the story of Requiem for a Dream, two decades on, from the people who made it — including Aronofsky, the film’s stars, and many pivotal members of its crew. Darren Aronofsky's direction creates an unsettling atmosphere that brings out the worst in each character's story arc.

Travers, Peter (December 11, 2000). "Requiem for a Dream". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on December 10, 2014 . Retrieved February 28, 2022. AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) Ballot" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on September 21, 2017 . Retrieved January 29, 2014. a b "DREAMS FULFILLED: A DARREN ARONOFSKY INTERVIEW". Film Threat. November 10, 2000. Archived from the original on August 24, 2019 . Retrieved March 14, 2020. BBC - Films - interview - Darren Aronofsky". www.bbc.co.uk. Archived from the original on April 26, 2019 . Retrieved March 13, 2020. Florida Film Festival 2018 - An Evening with Ellen Burstyn. Orlando LIVE. April 18, 2018. Archived from the original on February 29, 2020 . Retrieved March 13, 2020– via YouTube.

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Aronofsky: There was always this idea that the film would start off wider and looser, and get tighter and tighter. At the beginning of the film, there are a lot of wide, landscape shots, and by the end we wanted it to be the size of a postage stamp. That last sequence, when all the stories intertwine and explode into misery, we really wanted to be somewhat mathematical, where even the shots were getting tighter in focal length — so less and less frames were happening with each shot. Sara, Harry's lonely widowed mother, dreams of being on television. When a phone call from a game show casting company gets her hopes up, she goes to a doctor, who gives her diet pills to lose weight. She spends the next few months on the pills, wanting desperately to look thin on TV and fit into a red dress from her younger days. However, the casting company does not notify her about the details of her show. She becomes addicted to the diet pills and eventually develops amphetamine psychosis after her life continues to go downhill. She eventually ends up in a mental institution, where she undergoes electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Though Requiem for a Dream gave Darren Aronofsky his big break as one of the most promising up-and-coming filmmakers with its 2000 release, he initially couldn’t bring himself to finish Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel when he first attempted to read it a decade earlier. When speaking with Film Threat ahead of the film’s release, the director recalled his experience with the book and why he couldn’t handle it at the time: