From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

My guest, Darren Aronowski, in his past films, Pye, Reck Room for a Dream, and The Fountain, has made movies about, well, emotional freefall and using stylistic gestures to connote that. In his newest film, The Wrestler, it's a kind of a reversal. And I think the melodrama, and it plays as more melodrama than drama, I think, is even more heightened because it's more of a Cassavetti's storytelling style.

First of all, Darren, thanks for being back. Thanks for having me, Elvis. What made you decide, first of all, before we get to the movie's story, about going for such a minimal style this time around? I just wanted to do something very, very different. working for a year and a half on the visual effects on the fountain, which is how long

it took because there was so many effects, I realized that my favorite part of the process was

working with actors, yet I got maybe 35, 40 days to work with actors. So I was really looking

for a project that was all about performance. And one of the things that kind of scared me about

the wrestling film was I didn't really really want to do the action sequences. I just really wanted to work with actors. You did not want to do the action. I wasn't that excited by it. But, you know, the more we looked into it, the more, you know, I realized that it was an opportunity to shoot something in a new way. I mean, boxing films, you've seen boxing shot which way.

No one's ever done a wrestling picture.

So it really gave us an opportunity to explore a lot of stuff.

Well, the thing too, though, and that struck me about the movie, what I was really touched by

is the fact that it's not a subconscious story.

There's no point in the dream.

It's incredibly real.

Yeah. And the real emotion actually has a real puncher because sometimes in the other films, the movies had to wash over you a little bit, so we knew exactly emotionally where we were in the narrative. Right. But here, there's no point where we don't know where we are. Yeah. It's interesting. It was, it caused a lot of challenges. I mean, one thing that was, was strange was working with Clint Mansell, the same composer I work with on every film. It was a really hard score for him because anytime he tried to put any type of emotion into the music, it kind of destroyed what was happening on the screen while the Requiem music and the fountain music is so filled with emotion. They become, you know, theme songs for the NBA and for the Rose Bowl.

Their epic scores, and the way, all those films, they're all in their way kind of epics,

weren't that? Oh, you know, always, always swinging for the fences. Why else go up to bat?

This film was definitely, we were going for a double.

It was way, you know, way beyond our expectations

because we were just really just trying to make a very, very pared down, simple film about acting.

And kind of the big lesson for me was that, you know,

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