Requiem for a Dream packs over 2,000 cuts into one film
A typical 100-minute feature has 600 to 700 edits. Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream has more than 2,000, many of them flash-quick montages that mimic a drug hit. The 2000 film cost $4 million, earned $7 million and put Ellen Burstyn in the running for the Best Actress Oscar.
The story comes from Hubert Selby Jr.'s 1978 novel, which Aronofsky had admired since school. Eric Watson, who co-wrote and produced Aronofsky's debut Pi, talked him into adapting it, and the pair paid $1,000 for the rights, a big outlay for them then. Selby had already drafted his own screenplay years earlier, and it turned out to overlap about 80% with Aronofsky's. The two men co-wrote the final script, even as financiers stayed sceptical.
Four lives unravel. Sara Goldfarb, a Brighton Beach widow, starts taking diet amphetamines in hopes of fitting a red dress for a television game show appearance, while her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion and his friend Tyrone chase their own plans through heroin dealing. Aronofsky and the cast insisted the subject was addiction broadly, including the way pursuing a dream can feed a compulsion, with loneliness and flight from reality running underneath.
The actors went to extremes. Jared Leto lived on New York streets and starved himself, dropping 28 pounds; Aronofsky asked him and Marlon Wayans to give up sex and sugar so their cravings would read as real. Jennifer Connelly rented a flat in her character's building and attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings with a recovering friend. Burstyn, who had first turned the part down, wore two fat suits and nine wigs, and called the role harder than The Exorcist.
Shooting lasted 40 days in spring 1999 around Coney Island. The style leans on split screens, extreme close-ups, time-lapse and the Snorricam, a camera strapped to an actor. Scenes shrink from roughly two minutes early on to rapid-fire bursts at the climax. Clint Mansell's score, played with the Kronos Quartet, produced Lux Aeterna, a piece that escaped the film to become a trailer staple.
Source: Requiem for a Dream
