Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 26, 2000, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
In early summer 1998, New York City pedestrians started noticing an odd but familiar symbol stenciled onto the sidewalks: the mathematical symbol for pi. There was no clue then what it signified; only later in the season, when the movie titled Pi began its art-house run, did it become clear that distributor Artisan Entertainment was trying to imbue the symbol into the public consciousness. The strategy worked, and word-of-mouth did the rest. Produced for about $60,000, writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s debut grossed $3.2 million without ever even playing 100 theaters at a time.
Pi’s success not only paved the way for Aronofsky’s startling follow-up, Requiem for a Dream (which is about to expand its run), but marked Artisan as an up-and-comer that could use grassroots publicity to effectively market offbeat material—as they proved in spades two years later with The Blair Witch Project. In the beginning, though, there was just Aronofsky, producer Eric Watson and cinematographer Matthew Libatique, who met at LA’s AFI film school and, reversing the usual filmmakers’ journey, traveled to Manhattan to make their first movie.
“It was the quintessential independent film experience,” says Pi star Sean Gullette, who first met Aronofsky when the two were classmates at Harvard. “Darren returned from LA around early 1996, having failed to raise the couple of million dollars he felt he needed for his first feature. And he said, ‘Screw it, I’m going to go back to New York, round up the people I trust and do the film guerrilla-style.’ ”
“LA’s a very difficult place to make a movie,” adds Watson, “because you’re constantly chasing something you may never obtain, unless you win the lottery. You’re always trying to get studio financing, and independent filmmaking is not about chasing the financing, it’s about making the most of what you have. So we came out here [to New York] and said, ‘Even if we only have $10, we’ll just get a video camera and shoot something and make a movie.’ ”
The movie they wound up making is a hallucinatory odyssey through the world of Max Cohen (Gullette), a brilliant but somewhat unbalanced mathematician who has transformed his entire lower Manhattan apartment into a giant computer. As he attempts to use the pi equation to unlock the numerical patterns that rule the universe, he is targeted by two disparate groups—ruthless Wall Streeters looking to make a financial killing and a Hassidic sect seeking the numeric basis of the Torah—who want his secrets.
This decidedly non-traditional story is made gripping and exciting by the visual collaboration of Aronofsky and Libatique, who developed unusual camera rigs and utilized off-kilter angles to draw audiences into Max’s disjointed world. “When I go to see a movie, I’m not really into realism at all,” says Aronofsky. “I respect Cassavetes, and other realistic directors and their work, but I’m not really a viewer of them. I’ve always liked films that delve into fantasy a lot more. Those genres allow you to leave tradition behind and let your imagination run.”
According to Libatique, the choice to use black and white was both a creative and practical one. “Going into it, we all knew what our limitations were, and the goal was to use those limitations to our advantage,” he recalls. “We chose to shoot black-and-white because we knew that whatever crew we would be able to get for free wasn’t going to be able to handle the limits and expectations of dealing with color, and color temperatures and whatnot. We chose black-and-white reversal [film] because we’re big fans of Frank Miller’s Sin City, and we didn’t want a low-contrast stock. The reversal brought us an automatic high-contrast look that required less effort in terms of equipment.”
Filmed over a 28-day schedule, often without permits and with a non-union crew (“Pi was non-everything,” Watson laughs. “It was completely below the radar”), the production was necessarily an intense and sometimes wearying one. Gullette, however, believes that the frazzling pace worked to their advantage. “It was a vigorous shoot,” the actor says, “but in fact the exhaustion and the excessive quality of it all was exactly appropriate. Fortunately, it was not a film about a relaxed, laid-back, mellow person; it was a film about somebody who’s extremely harried, who’s obsessively trying to do something he has dreamed of for years—which is very much like independent filmmaking. It’s always good when the culture infects the set and vice versa.”
While all involved certainly believed in the project, there was some uncertainty about how far its originality would take it in the crowded indie film marketplace. “We looked at the movie and saw that it was pretty weird,” Watson remembers, “so we didn’t know what to make of it. We submitted it to Sundance, and the best we expected was that we would get a midnight screening; we had no idea that it was going to catch on. When we got into competition at Sundance, we were amazed, and then when we went to the festival and got the response we did, we were overwhelmed—I think we spent the next nine months being overwhelmed.” Aronofsky wound up taking the Best Director prize at the fest, where Artisan snapped up the rights for $1 million; on the company’s extras-packed Pi DVD, one of the most moving moments is the filmmaking team toasting their Sundance success.
“We were very pleasantly surprised,” says Aronofsky, who’s now at work on both Batman: Year One and Ronin, about the response to his unusual film. “At the core of it, we wanted to make an entertaining movie, and we were surprised by how many people responded to it.”
