Darren Aronofsky funded his debut film Pi with hundred-dollar donations
To pay for his first feature, Darren Aronofsky and producer Eric Watson asked every friend, relative and acquaintance they could think of for $100. The whip-round raised about $60,000, enough to shoot a black-and-white thriller about a mathematician hunting for a hidden order in numbers that won the directing award at Sundance in 1998.
The hero, Max Cohen, is an unemployed number theorist in a cramped Chinatown flat who suffers crushing headaches and believes nature can be decoded through numbers. His homemade computer, Euclid, spits out a 216-digit number and an eerily accurate stock tip before crashing. Soon a Wall Street firm wants his results, and a group of Hasidic Torah scholars believe the number is the hidden name of God. The film draws on real ideas: the golden spiral, chaos theory's patterns in nonlinear systems, and the 216-letter divine name of Jewish mysticism.
Max and his mentor, Sol, play Go throughout, each treating it as a model of the universe. Sol sees a small copy of a chaotic world, while Max insists its complexity settles into findable patterns. The actors spent hours at the Brooklyn Go Club to play convincingly.
Thrift ruled the shoot. Crew earned $200 a day and actors $75, costumes came from the cast's wardrobes and thrift shops, and subway and street scenes were filmed without permits. Max's apartment and Euclid were built in a back room of a warehouse in Bushwick owned by a crew member's father. Aronofsky once paid a cab driver $100 to park in a scene that was later cut rather than rent another car.
High-contrast 16mm reversal stock gave the raw look he wanted, but only one lab, in Arlington, Virginia, could develop it, so footage came back a week late. The crew shot 53,000 feet of film over 28 days, and finishing it cost more than filming, bringing the total to $134,815.
Source: Pi (film)
