At Ease in Hollywood Circle

Darren Aronofsky is not afraid of much.

Certainly not the press. Though a scant 29 years old and with only one art-house film to his name, the novice director appears precociously at ease under the intense glare of the media spotlight. From a profile in the premiere issue of the film magazine Indie to stories on CBS’ “48 Hours” and National Public Radio and in the Boston Globe, reporters across the country have been fawning over the independent film wunderkind since the first-time movie-maker took the award for best director at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for his dark, disturbing motion picture “Pi.”

The film, by the way, takes its name from the Greek letter representing the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, an endless number that is basically 3.14 and change.

Since Sundance, Aronofsky has been taking adulation in stride. “Getting a standing ovation from 1,000 people was one of the greatest moments of my life,” he told the Globe after his dark-horse win.

Such public recognition is all the more remarkable for the film’s wonky subject matter. Aronofsky’s edgy black-and-white cyberpunk thriller--about a mathematician and his search for a numerical pattern in the stock market--has already been lauded by Janet Maslin of the New York Times as “Kafkaesque in its torment and claustrophobic tensions.”

Nor is Aronofsky afraid of begging. That’s how he and producer Eric Watson financed the dirt-cheap but lavishly visual $60,000 film, by asking every friend, relative and acquaintance they knew to contribute a hundred dollars each.

“A few hundred people gave us a hundred bucks,” he says with a tone that still retains some astonishment. “Some people gave $5,000, some $300, some $50. I think a lot of people thought it was charity. A lot thought we were gauche to even do it, but we were really polite.”

After selling the film to the distribution company Artisan Entertainment for more than a million dollars earlier this year, Aronofsky says those who said no are wishing they had reconsidered.

In a recent interview, a casually black-clad Aronofsky comes across as intense but assured over a breakfast of French toast and orange juice, as though he has done this routine a dozen times before--which, in the last few months, he may well have.

Aronofsky has been quick to pick up the studio patter, sometimes sounding more like a slick Hollywood agent than the kid from Coney Island who went on from Harvard University to a master’s program at the American Film Institute. “We wanted to position ourselves as smartly as possible,” he says, explaining why his strange new film is being marketed as a sci-fi thriller.

Of his next project, a sci-fi/horror film set on a U.S. submarine during World War II, Aronofsky says, in the shorthand of the movie biz, “It’s ‘Das Boot’ meets ‘The Shining,’ and I guarantee you it’ll be the scariest movie you’ve seen in the last 10 years.”

“ ‘Pi’ could also fall into a lot of different genres,” he admits. “But it’s definitely a thriller. It’s definitely a chase movie.”

In the film, which Aronofsky calls a “digital reinterpretation of the mad-scientist story,” math genius Max Cohen (played by the director’s Harvard classmate Sean Gullette) is pursued not only by ruthless thugs from a Wall Street firm interested in profiting from his research but also by Jewish cabalist toughs. Members of the shadowy sect hope to use his findings--a universal pattern he has accidentally stumbled upon--to decode the name of God and usher in the Messianic age. Throughout it all, Max is tormented by his own increasingly torturous migraine headaches.

Although there’s not a single laser gun or alien or asteroid in it, there is a room-size walk-in computer in Max’s dingy apartment. Called Euclid, the fanciful amalgamation of futuristic and old-fashioned components was cobbled together by production designer Matthew Maraffi from about 2 tons of trashed and recycled computer parts.

“It’s science fiction in the tradition of ‘Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone’ and author Philip K. Dick,” he explains. Many of their stories took place in the present day in a mundane setting that was only “slightly bent, slightly different, slightly strange.”

“Pi’s” cosmic subject matter, however, comes across as a weird blend of naivete and chutzpah--implying that the complexities of the stock market might be reducible to a simple formula or that in them might lie a numerical pattern, a key that could open the door to understanding God and the very meaning of the universe--that sets it apart from the more visceral fare of other “roller-coaster thrill rides” to which the young director insists it be compared.