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Holiday Movies 2006

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Fickle stars, wasted millions: Inside ''The Fountain'' | 153838__fountain_bed_l
SPOUSE CALL Aronofsky cast his own leading lady, Weisz, for the featured female role opposite Jackman
The Fountain: Takashi Seida

''The night of Passover dinner Jared Leto and I went to The Matrix,'' says Aronofsky. ''It blew me away. I remember thinking that the Wachowski brothers took every great science-fiction idea of the 20th century, plus a few new ones. 'Here we are on the cusp of the 21st century; what is the next sci-fi?' That was the beginning.''

The idea that evolved was the product of Aronofsky's anxiety over turning 30, his parents' recent bouts with cancer, and a series of visits the director paid to his old Harvard buddy Ari Handel's laboratory at NYU, where the Ph.D. candidate was conducting research on live monkeys. The movie that emerged sounded a little bonkers — a spiritual triptych following a conquistador, a modern research scientist with a dying wife, and a cosmonaut 500 years in the future, all searching for never-ending life and all played by the same actor. There were to be Mayan temples. New Age spaceships. Massive Spanish Inquisition sets and battle scenes on the scale of Braveheart. But at its core, The Fountain was an overgrown art movie — a rumination on life and death dressed up in genre clothes.

It made no real sense as a studio picture. Everyone knew it. But almost no one knew about the secret showing of Requiem for a Dream that had been set up at CAA's Beverly Hills headquarters back in 2000. The screening was for just one person. According to multiple sources, when the movie ended, Brad Pitt stood up and spent the next two hours walking around the block. Then he came back and asked to see the movie again. When it was over, he ordered his agents to get him a meeting with Aronofsky. Their first meeting took place at Pitt's bungalow in the Hollywood Hills. ''We took the script over to his house and said, 'Call us when you're done reading it,''' remembers Eric Watson, Aronofsky's longtime friend and collaborator. ''We were driving back and Darren's phone rings. Brad's 40 pages in and he's crying. He's like, 'I'm in.' We started jumping up and down inside the car, because at that point we knew we were making a movie.''

The duo rang up Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the then president of worldwide production at Warner Bros., who had expressed an interest in the project, and gleefully announced that their art film had a big, fat star. Scouting trips to Central America followed. A shoot in Australia was arranged, and cast and crew were hired. Seemingly endless script meetings to satisfy the story needs of Pitt and the studio were held. Cate Blanchett signed on to play the female lead in a pay-or-play deal worth millions, and Burstyn took a role written just for her. As Watson devised a budget that accounted for every possible expense — some of them wholly fanciful — the potential costs shot past $70 million. ''We called it the Chinese menu theory. We had a menu of everything [that you could spend money on] and I'd eventually get to say, 'Okay, I want that, that, that, and that,''' remembers Aronofsky, whose biggest budget had been Requiem's paltry $5 million. ''It was ridiculous. Money that would never, ever get spent.''

It was an unorthodox way of doing business — and it was also a colossal mistake. When the suits in Burbank got a look at the ''Chinese menu'' budget in June 2002, Aronofsky and Watson were ordered back to L.A., the crew was fired, and the studio held a stone-faced meeting with the filmmakers where it told them that unless a cofinancier could be found, Warner was turning off The Fountain. (According to a studio source, the filmmakers were surprisingly stubborn about cutting items from their ''Chinese menu.'') Worse, Pitt — without whom there never would have been a green light in the first place — was starting to waver, worried that he'd wasted the better part of a year developing a movie that would never get made. ''We finally went to Brad and [said], 'Do you want to do this or not?''' remembers Watson. ''He said, 'I want to do this. I commit to doing this. Let's figure out how to do it.'''

So Watson set to work begging for money from independent production companies. He still had a pass for the Warner Bros. lot and a key to The Fountain's now-vacant visual-effects office. Every day, he'd slink into the office and start dialing for dollars, banking on the Warner Bros. phone prefix to lend his pleas an official air. As Watson's calls became increasingly desperate, Aronofsky spent his days working on the script and reassuring his star. Finally, in March 2004, Regency Enterprises, a company with a reputation for cofinancing projects with high price tags — they did Daredevil and Mr. & Mrs. Smith — announced that they were picking up half the budget. It wasn't long before construction began down in Australia.

Watson was in an Australian petting zoo with his girlfriend when his phone rang. It was August 2002 and The Fountain was set to start shooting in weeks. CAA was on the line: Pitt was out. At the time, no substantial reason was given. He was just...out. (In a statement released to EW, Pitt says, ''Darren and I worked together for a year plus, but as the start date loomed and with the budget at $60 million, it was my belief there still remained many questions that we had not yet answered and we simply were not ready. It was my realization I would have to step in front of the freight train and take the hit, understanding my financial responsibilities to Warner Brothers and the risk of my friendship with Darren, whom by this time I'd grown to love and respect. Thus the end of my time on The Fountain.'')

A scramble ensued. The studio prepared to pull the plug for good, telling Aronofsky that unless he and Watson found a star to replace Pitt, the movie was done. The duo came up with three names: Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe, and George Clooney. ''Only one was available,'' remembers Watson. ''Crowe.''


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