High Art

As weirdness goes, consider the Month of Fury: Wayans and Leto sought to quash every personal urge — from sugar to sex — for 30 days. ''Darren suggested it, because you want to feel that need for something you crave,'' Wayans explains. ''I was cool with no sex, but when they said 'no orgasms,' I was like, 'You can't hump your pillow?''' Wayans eventually succumbed to lasagna — eating it, that is — but Leto took things to a spectral extreme. Seeking junkie emaciation and subsisting on little more than crudites, Leto shed nearly a fifth of his normal weight. ''I was starving all the time,'' Leto says. ''Which put me in a great position as far as my character went, but it wasn't a great position for the rest of the day. I couldn't exaggerate it enough to tell you how brutal the process was.'' (After the film wrapped, Leto shaved his scalp and checked into a monastery in Portugal to get his head straight.) ''I was concerned about him, actually,'' says Burstyn. ''I saw him holding a little paper bowl filled with dry lettuce leaves, mechanically putting them in his mouth, and I said, 'Jared, I think you're going too far.'''

The MPAA said the same thing about the movie, giving it an NC-17 for sexual content. Refusing to snip out footage, Malin opted to release Requiem without a rating. ''To tell you the truth, I want the film to be rated X,'' Aronofsky says. ''I want people to be, like, 'Wow! Here's a film that's not pornography, that's clearly a real movie, that's rated X. That must be f---ed up!''' Lest he get pegged as Indiewood's dark knight, however, Aronofsky takes pains to say that he wants to ultimately make the kind of flicks he loved as an admitted teen pyro — big, mainstream spectacles. He got the Batcall from Warner Bros. after shooting a Requiem scene on a tick-infested prison barge. ''I was surprised,'' Aronofsky says, naming Tim Burton's creepy-crawly Batman Returns as his favorite in the franchise. ''But I was more excited by what I could do with it.'' Which would be? ''The street. Reality. What does it take for a real man to stick on tights and fight crime?'' In other words, not very dreamlike.