Once I got the role, I remember reading with a lot of people for other roles. Darren read with every actor in town for the part that eventually went to Jennifer. Selby's second nove Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in Brooklyn and went to sea as a merchant marine while still in his teens. Laid low by lung disease, he was, after a decade of hospitalizations, written off as a goner and sent home to die. Deciding instead to live, but having no way to make a living, he came to a realization that would change the course of literature: "I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer." Drawing from the soul of his Brooklyn neighborhood, he began writing something called "The Queen Is Dead," which evolved, after six years, into his first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), a book that Allen Ginsberg predicted would "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."

Kirkland, Bruce (February 14, 2014). "The starving artist". Jam! Showbiz. Archived from the original on February 14, 2014 . Retrieved March 14, 2020. 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).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. The film premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, selected as an out-of-competition entry, followed by the United States theatrical release on October 6, 2000, by Artisan Entertainment. It received a positive response from critics despite being a box office disappointment. The film's visual style, direction, screenplay,editing, musical score, cast, emotional depth,and themes were all praised, with Burstyn receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Matthew Libatique, director of photography: Marlon would literally be in the heaviest scene, and then cut and tell a joke. Whereas Jared and Jennifer really, it was harder for them. They had to interact with each other and deal with themselves. 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?”

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. Watson: The scene with Ellen cleaning the apartment, it’s a motion-controlled camera. She basically had to do it in one take — we had to choreograph everything she did. 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. Darren came up to Hartford, where I was doing Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and we met after the play. He was a very young man, but I was impressed with his film. So I felt secure.

Credits

And yet. Certainly, a large part of Requiem’s stylistic mania amounts to auteurist showing-off. It was Aronofsky’s second film, coming two years after his scrappier, more cryptic but equally out-to-dazzle Sundance sensation Pi, and with more money and bigger names at his disposal, he set out to prove himself as the pre-eminent artist-provocateur of his indie class. Still, in choosing to adapt Hubert Selby Jr’s cultish 1978 novel of New York junkie miserablism – and very faithfully, at that – the then 31-year-old film-maker found about the ideal canvas for his ugly showmanship. When I graduated, I concentrated on reading novels by my favorite authors, and I started reading “Requiem for a Dream,’ which I couldn’t finish. It was just so intense and honestly brutal – and so close to the writing I was working on in my personal life – that I didn’t want to read it anymore. Rabinowitz: I’ve been going at this for about 30 years now and Requiem is by far the most quoted film that I’ve worked on. It really did become a reference point for so many people in films, in commercials, in television, across the board. I’ve had the good fortune to work on a lot of wonderful movies, but there’s no question that Requiem has a special place in that. It was a very trying experience. It was brutal at times. There were probably moments where I wasn’t sure I was going to make it — and yet I know how incredible it was. [Darren] was just focused like a laser beam, knew exactly what he wanted, and he just kept pushing until we got it. Marlon Wayans, Tyrone C. Love: I started out with the script and I was like, Oh, hell no. I’m going to kill myself. And I’m a happy person. But when I look at a movie, I don’t just look at the script. If there’s a book, I read the book. If there’s a director attached, I watch the director’s work. And that’s exactly what I did. I read the script, I read the book, and as soon as I saw Pi, I knew what the movie would be. It was a lesson for me, especially right now in my life after losing my mom. I understand that there’s never going to be anything to replace her. The only thing I can seek is a different kind of love, a healthy kind of love.

Sterritt, David (October 6, 2000). "Two versions of American dream: one warm, one grim". Christian Science Monitor. ISSN 0882-7729. Archived from the original on October 5, 2015 . Retrieved December 10, 2020.

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Aronofsky went to Harvard, and then studied directing at AFI, where he met future collaborators Matthew “Matty” Libatique and Eric Watson. Watson: We had a lot of actors show up for that role. We were surprised at the response that we got. We had a session where Jared was already onboard, and we had Jennifer come in, because she wanted to do the film. They hadn’t met each other. They did the scene, and she basically threw him around the room in the audition. And we were just like, wow. Burstyn (left) and Leto (right) received critical acclaim for their performances as Sara and Harry Goldfarb, respectively. [38] [39] Rebello, Stephen (June 1, 2002). "Through The Eyes Of Faye Dunaway". Movieline. Retrieved October 2, 2016. The movie Last Exit to Brooklyn, Directed by Uli Edel, was made in 1989 and his 1978 novel Requiem for a Dream was made into a film that was released in 2000. Selby himself had a small role as a prison guard.