Around the turn of the century, Darren Aronofsky wanted to make a ballet film, inspired by his sister’s dance lessons. He also became fascinated with the idea of doppelgangers after reading Dostoyevsky’s The Double. They met for coffee in New York in 2000, when he was already thinking that Natalie Portman would be the perfect leading actress. At the time, she had just played Padmé Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I and was a student at Harvard University.
“She said I had the whole movie in my head, which is a complete lie,” Aronofsky told Collider in 2010, but Portman insisted, “No, what he described to me was very close.”
The director continued, “So we talked a little bit and started developing it, and it turned out that it’s very difficult to get into the world of ballet, so it was a very difficult film. Most of the time, when you make a film, you say, ‘I want to make a film about my world.’ , all the doors are open and you can do anything and see anything you want to see. It took us a long time to get the information to put it together because the ballet world really had no interest in us playing.
He worked on Universal’s script “The Understudy,” written by Andres Heinz about a theatrical murder, but Aronofsky hoped the script would be flexible enough to realize his ballet dreams. When several drafts didn’t work out, he took the production independent and eventually got distribution from Fox Searchlight.
And in the meantime, he was watching Swan Lake. “When I saw the story of the Black Swan and the White Swan, I decided to drop everything and tie all the characters and mythology to Swan Lake,” the filmmaker told the Los Angeles Times. “The credits should clearly state “co-written by Tchaikovsky.”
Fortunately, Portman was still on board. Aronofsky told Collider, “Natalie has been saying for years, ‘I’m too old to play dancer anymore. I’d better hurry.'” I was like, “Natalie, you look great.” it’s okay. ‘And about a year after filming, or maybe a little before that, we were finally able to put together the script. That was the beginning. ”
