Darren Aronofsky On 'Caught Stealing' And Why Austin Butler Was The Perfect Guide

I would be shooting in these buildings and people would be like, get out of my neighborhood! And I'd be like, I'm pretty sure this has been my neighborhood longer than yours. You are so good at creating tension and then sustaining intensity in your movies. I was telling people and I was talking to my coworker about, I like left theater and I was like, I don't remember the last time I was that anxious. Oh, really? Walking, but like in a good way, you know, where you're just like, this is like, you're so in it, you know? That's great. But I'm curious because I edit a lot of video. And so do you ever have any trouble maintaining an objective perspective with, like, the tension and, like, building that? That's the hardest job. Yeah. You've got to sort of be able to, like, step back, try to, like, look at things as if you've never seen them before. Which, of course, is impossible because you've seen a million times. So you kind of, it's a weird kind of muscle that you practice of, like, is this really working or not? So it's hard to know what level of intensity to get up to and when you lose the audience, you know. But I think it's just about when audiences are like kind of feeling and when they're not feeling, they're asking questions. But the questions that they're asking are questions that the character is asking. So I think it's following the truth of the character. And in this case, luckily, we have a tour guide, Austin Butler, playing Hank Thompson in Caught Stealing. and you are with Austin, hopefully the whole time. So for me, I knew I just had to string the pearls of this performance together so that the audience is just following along and kind of in his head. And then if I did that, whatever madness was going on around him, it would make sense. Are you messing with me? Kind of. Did you ever get like numb to it? Or I guess just like, where you have to kind of like pull in somebody else to be like, hey. No, I mean, there'll be times when we'll call in a more like a producer or sometimes we'll just call on an assistant and be like what do you think is this too much is this too little sure i mean you always want a little feedback and then you kind of when they give the answer you see how you feel and then like on this movie i was very open to test screening it because it's kind of inspired by Charlie Chaplin who used to tour with his movies and just to see what was landing what was working and i definitely learned a lot from that in a film like this which is interactive with an audience this is meant to play with a live audience because you do get like a lot of and laughs and things like that and so that's kind of what did you get me into welcome to Narnia everyone gets a cup the Russians the Puerto rican the Hebrews what the **** are you doing i want to talk about just the New York of it all because you grew up here what was it like for you personally just to sort of recreate like late 90s East Village to bring up a ton of nostalgia Definitely. Like, look, it was an incredible time to be alive and be young I didn't really enjoy it because I was fighting and suffering trying to make my first film, Pie. So I was broke and hustling the whole time But it was a great time to be alive because there was just so much optimism about the new millennium what was happening in the world. And revisiting that was really interesting because you kind of forget how much has changed until you start really trying to recreate it. And you're like, oh, yes Is shooting here as crazy as it looks? Because I used to live in Chinatown and so I would, yeah. Like, don't . Yeah. Cut that, please. That's what I'm saying. No, no, no Yikes. I mean, it was madness. It was madness. But I got, to be honest, you know, when we did Chinatown I have a bunch of friends who have Mandarin speaking kids and I got them to help PA and we had, and they nearly lost their minds. Like people really didn't give a ---- But then when we went to Brighton Beach the Russians really don't care. So it was kind of madness. But, but you know, New Yorkers are great. That some, some are great, some are jerks. I mean, I would be shooting in the East Village and people would be like, get out of my neighborhood And I'd be like, I'm pretty sure this has been my neighborhood longer than yours. I can handle it.