Darren Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky studied film and social anthropology at Harvard before training as a director at the AFI Conservatory, where his thesis short reached the final round of the Student Academy Awards. He set up his own production outfit in 1997 and made Pi the following year, in black and white, for almost no money, and it earned him enough credit to make Requiem for a Dream in 2000. That second film is still the one people warn each other about.

Almost everything he has made since is the same story told with different equipment. A person destroys their own body chasing a transcendence that may not be available: the mathematician convinced the universe has a number in it, the addicts of Requiem, the wrestler working a body that has already given out, the ballerina, the man in The Whale. He shoots it close, often with the camera physically attached to the actor, and he has never once been interested in whether an audience finds the result tasteful.

The reception splits along the same line every time. The Wrestler brought him the Golden Lion at Venice and is the warmest, plainest film he has made. Black Swan is the one that broke through to a mainstream audience. Noah is the strangest studio picture of its decade, a biblical epic with rock monsters in it. mother! set out to enrage people and succeeded, and The Whale divided critics all over again. Caught Stealing in 2025 is his first attempt in years at something shaped like a genre thriller.