Pi Brain

Darren Aronofsky, Brooklyn hip-hop kid with a Harvard degree, talks about his intense new film Pi.

by Sam Adams

Sean Gullette, who plays Max, the obsessed mathmetician.

At a climactic point in Pi, Darren Aronofsky's Kafkaesque tale of divine psychosis, the central character comes across his own brain lying in the middle of a deserted subway platform. Watching Pi for the first time may give you a similar shock. Drawing on elements as diverse as chaos theory and orthodox Judaism, the creepy, starkly black-and-white feature is science fiction of a kind not seen in a while, more philosophically and psychologically oriented than the space opera that's come to dominate the genre. As Aronofsky puts it, "It's not about outer space. It's about inner space."

With its intensely subjective style and jagged editing, Pi isn't an easy movie to summarize, but it's basically the story of Max (Sean Gullette), a brilliant mathematician who becomes obsessed with the idea that higher mathematics can be used to predict the workings of the natural world. Max chooses the New York Stock Exchange as his test case, and his work soon draws the interest of a group of murky corporate types who would exploit his life's work for their own profit. Pursued by them, and by a secret sect of Kabbalah scholars who seem convinced what Max is actually on the verge of discovering is the true name of God, Max becomes steadily more paranoid, plunging deeper into his work even as he can't stop looking over his shoulder. Ignoring the warnings of his elderly mentor, who warns that he must "take a break," Max shuts himself up in his rundown Chinatown apartment. But even behind locked doors, he cannot escape his ever more intense migraine headaches and the hallucinations they bring, and the sense that, as he gets closer and closer to a final solution, the problems he's solving may be changing his own brain, taking him further into truth or madness, or some combination of the two.

Pi, or p, is the mathematical symbol representing the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It doesn't figure that prominently in the movie, but it's a metaphor for Max's pursuit. Although pi is a constant, its exact value has never been found; calculated to billions of digits, it just keeps on going. Like Max's quest for order, pi seems to be a phenomenon whose complete understanding is beyond the reach of science.

At first glance, there's not much to the man behind Pi to suggest any of the film's surreal intensity. With his close-cropped hair and long, narrow face, Aronofsky, 29, seems almost nondescript, the proverbial nice Jewish boy. It's only when he opens his mouth and machine-gun streams of Brooklyn-accented philosophy start streaming out that you begin to see where Max gets his obsessive devotion from. Although it's 10 o'clock Monday morning and we're speaking in a coffee shop, Aronofsky converses without caffeine, as if his own devotion were stimulant enough.

Darren Aronovsky, the director of Pi.

A self-described "Brooklyn hip-hop kid" (albeit a Harvard-educated one), Aronofsky is clearly in love with the city where he's spent his whole life. "I grew up writing graffiti on subway cars," he recalls, "and it got me into the whole urban expressionism thing. The whole guerrilla filmmaking attitude of Pi is totally inspired by hip-hop and living in Brooklyn."

Devoted as he is to New York's beautiful squalor, Aronofsky can only deplore the current mayor's attempts to turn the city into a giant mall. "I can't stand New York without graffiti," he laments. "The whole cleansing of the city is not the New York we've known. The best example is the Disney store in Times Square. The best thing about Times Square was when I was a kid, they'd have all these beat-up porno theaters showing Star Trek I, II and III, and you'd pay $3 and spend a whole summer day in there. Sure, there were blowjobs and people shooting up heroin in the bathroom, but you just ignored that and made sure you went to the bathroom with a friend. Now it's all $9 movies and Godzilla culture. It's a nightmare."

Central to Pi is a vision of New York as a place where cultures collide, and as in hip-hop, the synthesis of seemingly disparate elements creates a final product that bears little resemblance to its component parts. Aronofsky admits that his knowledge of chaos theory is limited to "the stuff you hear at cocktail parties," and that other than a few days on a kibbutz and a "classically hypocritical high holiday Jew" upbringing, his knowledge of Kabbalah scholarship is similarly limited. But, he adds, Pi isn't really about either of those things, any more than it's about the Chinese board game Go, or the Fibonacci spiral (an equation whose graph perfectly mimics the pattern of seashells), or any of the other pieces of cultural detritus that float through the movie. "The different themes come from a long line of tapestry makers, not entertainers. I'm just sampling different ideas that I think are cool, trying to come up with some really cool beat."

Hip-hop's influence on Pi is evident also in the movie's pulsating electronic score, by Pop Will Eat Itself's Clint Mansell, and using tracks from Orbital and other electronica acts. It could also be seen as an homage to Stanley Kubrick, who first mixed science fiction and electronic music when he engaged Walter Carlos to score A Clockwork Orange. Aronofsky counts Kubrick's cinematic command and futuristic visions among his major influences, as well as Polanski's paranoia and the frenetic visual style and angular editing of Japan's Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo, Tokyo Fist). But the movie's "patron saints" are Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone TV series, and legendary science fiction author Philip K. Dick, whose visionary, lucid, idiosyncratic writing has as much to do with most genre-bound sci-fi as Pi does with, say, Lost in Space.

Another influence on Pi is Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which contrary to the antiseptic vision of movies like 2001, envisioned the future as a place filled with industrial clutter and rotting machinery. In particular, Aronofsky says, the look of Max's room-size computer Euclid was "totally learned from Gilliam—that idea of taking old technology and somehow re-wiring and re-working it to make it seem futuristic."

The set of Max's apartment was assembled in characteristically guerrilla fashion. "We recycled about two to three tons of computer equipment," Aronofsky recalls. "We went to every cop station, hospital and college and begged them for their old computers. We'd be walking down the street and jump because we saw a bunch of old modems someone had thrown away. Then we took all that equipment, shelled it and pulled out all the cool chips and made this awesome set. The best part for the DP [director of photography] was that he'd go to dress the wires for his lights, and I'd tell him, 'Just let them hang.' We'd just have all these light cables running through the apartment."

For all its highfalutin references, Aronofsky is eager to dispel the notion that Pi is egghead cinema. "Pi isn't really a math movie," he cautions. "It's a movie about a mathematician. The hardest math problem in the movie is 41+3, and we give you the answer five seconds later. It's the interesting, mystical elements of math. That's the stuff we tried to visualize and make exciting to the audience."