Black Swan. Requiem for a Dream. The Whale. The films of Darren Aronofsky are not exactly known for their laughs.
The director looks up, impishly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Aronofsky’s in the back room of Austin’s legendary Continental Club, sat in cahoots with The Bikeriders star Austin Butler. The night before, the pair had been due west at the Alamo South Lamar for a screening of their new crime comedy, Caught Stealing, before Butler spent the night tending bar at Dirty Bills on Rio Grande. No, don’t worry, A-lister salaries haven’t fallen that much. Butler was just showing off some of the mixing skills he displays in the film as Hank, a one-time baseball next-big-thing now slinging drinks in a pre-9/11 Lower East Side.
It had been a hectic couple of days: the bartending, tacos at Torchy’s, a visit to the UT Stadium where they received personalized Longhorn jerseys, and best of all, a post-screening Q&A with Matthew McConaughey. “It doesn’t get much better than that,” Butler gushed.
“The most charming person, not only in Austin but the world,” added Aronofsky.
“Charming” is McConaughey’s brand, as “dour” is Aronofsky’s, and the sheer volume of laugh-out-loud gags in Caught Stealing may catch audiences off guard. Butler said, “Darren told me he wanted to make a fun movie, and at first I was like, ‘A Darren Aronofsky fun movie?’”
“To be honest,” Aronofsky said, “I kind of underplayed the fun of it a little bit when I first started talking to him about it, and the commerciality of the film that I was going for because I was scared that I was going to scare him away.”
Butler grinned. “It would have!”
“Exactly. So I underplayed it a bit to him.”
“That’s the manipulation!”
“It wasn’t manipulation,” Aronofsky smiled back. “I just left things out.”
The humorous elements increased through the casting process, with the addition of comedy legends like Carol Kane as bubbe to Liev Schrieber and Vincent D’Onofrio (playing two deadpan Hasidic gangsters), and what Aronofsky called “the Matt Smith of it all.” The Doctor Who and House of the Dragon star plays Russ, Hank’s British ex-pat neighbor who drags him into NYC’s grimy underbelly. “I knew the character was funny,” Aronofsky said, “but I didn’t know he’d be pouring funny lines all the time. The way he did stuff, like the broken cigarette and ‘It’s a turn of phrase, Hank.’ It’s not a funny line. It’s purely performance.”
When it came to recreating New York in 1998, Aronofsky said, “We were very strict.” Take the key scene where Hank finds himself among a crowd of Mets fans. “The Mets logos were not period.”
“So you CG changed them?” asked Butler.
“Every single shot, every Met shirt and cap,” Aronofsky said, and it didn’t stop there. “Every walk and don’t walk sign in the movie. When you’re doing a New York City exterior movie, a lot had to be changed … We wanted to do it on set, but New York City wouldn’t let us.” But for Aronofsky, it’s worth the effort. “You wanna really go for it. Part of the fun of it is to make it cohesive.”
“The world’s not that different, but it’s so different.”
Not that he was going to be getting notes on anachronisms from Butler, who was only a kid in 1998. The actor recalled, “I was seven years old, but I have very vivid memories of that time period. I have these big life shifts, and my parents got divorced when I was seven, and there’s this thing where it’s crystalized, the memories of that time period. So it’s interesting that it was set in that exact year – what was on TV, the technology, remembering having to use my parents’ beeper.”
Beepers were one piece of period technology that Aronofsky left out of the film. There are plenty of pay phones around, and baseball games on the radio, but beepers were one piece of history that might leave younger audiences baffled, even though they were not uncommon until the early 2000s. Aronofsky said, “Doctors held on to them for a fairly long time.”
Butler laughed. “Doctors and drug dealers.”
Well, you could get oxy from both. Aronofsky frowned. “I’m not sure oxycodone existed then.”
“Quaaludes were still around?” Butler asked, innocently.
“No.”
“No? Was that the Eighties they were around?”
Aronofsky grinned. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Recreational pharmaceuticals aside, historical accuracy also meant digitally painting out many of what are now familiar landmarks on the New York skyline, as well as reconstructing some lost structures. “Putting the World Trade Center in was really emotional,” Aronofsky said. “We did it with great care and really thought about it. It really reminded you of how often you’d see that building wherever you were in New York City.”
The very specific timing of the film in September 1998 did allow Aronofsky to slip in one non-digital in-joke. “There are Pi. logos all throughout the whole film,” he said. He’d released his debut feature three months before the film was set, “and we were all over the city with Pi graffiti and stickers all over the place. Every single taxi cab, every bathroom on the Lower East Side. I had an entire crew, and that was the extent of our marketing – to hand out stickers to everyone.”
However, it’s not just 1998. It’s 1998 in New York, and Aronofsky wanted to reflect the cosmopolitan nature of the city he loves and knows so well. That’s part of why he insisted that Schreiber and D’Onofrio’s characters, Lipa and Shmully, often break into Yiddish. “The second they do, it’s hilarious. They’re killers talking about ripping out eyeballs in Yiddish. It’s just funny.”
Caught Stealing is in theatres now. Find our review and listings here.
