Scene Breakdown: A flock of elements in ‘Black Swan’

In Darren Aronofsky’s psychological thriller “Black Swan,” an increasingly imbalanced ballerina, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), struggles to break free of her inhibitions. Cast as the lead in a production of “Swan Lake,” Nina perfectly embodies the purity and reserve of the white swan but falls well short of finding the aggressive sexuality and passion of its counterpart, the black swan. She is pushed ever harder by the company director to let loose, to go beyond the technical aspects of the dance and find the emotional resonance of the darker character. Yet, through weeks of rehearsals, she never captures it. The night of the show, as Nina’s mental state grows ever shakier, she suddenly breaks free to transform, quite literally, into the stunning and seductive black swan as Tchaikovsky’s score thunders around her.

Here, we break down that scene, with script excerpts, from the viewpoint of all the craftspeople involved.

INT. PRINCIPAL DRESSING ROOM

Nina deliberately applies the Black Swan makeup. Dark eye shadow and rouge, maroon lipstick … she looks fierce.

Makeup designer Judy Chin: “I did look at different productions of ‘Swan Lake,’ mostly from New York City Ballet. They were all beautiful, but I needed something more intense, more dynamic. I just started drawing, and I did a lot of casts. I spent a couple of days working on a model and painting — putting on makeup, photographing them and washing it off. I was hoping to create the feeling of motion with the strokes of the eye makeup and wanted the focus to be on her eyes. [Portman] definitely brought a lot to it.”

INT. STAGE - NIGHT

Nina bursts onto stage as the Black Swan, accompanied by Rothbart. She looks powerful, intense …

Choreographer Benjamin Millepied: “It’s all about how you go from one step to another, and to never go through a movement that may look unprofessional — bending the elbows, leading your fingers — that’s really what the challenge was. She worked on it in a way that became hers, that became completely natural.”

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique: “The camera is almost always with Natalie up to that point. She dances with Rothbart and then she goes backstage, where her transformation actually begins. That’s a combination of two shots: One handheld shot of her with Rothbart and another handheld shot that takes her into the wings, that sort of pans around her arms to see the transformation beginning, the feathers growing on her arms.”

Editor Andrew Weisblum: “We transitioned into a Steadicam shot, and I added handheld movement at the beginning of it.”

BACKSTAGE

Alone, she looks at her arms, sees black points trying to push through again. Some fully emerge as shiny BLACK FEATHERS.

Sound designer Craig Henighan: The use of wing sounds “came from something I tried early on, which was how to evoke subtle touches, subtext, of where she develops. We know with the arc of the story that she turns into a swan at the end. So how do you evoke some of these things at the beginning of the movie? [Fellow sound designer Brian Emrich] did a lot of cool stuff with swan vocals — for lack of a better term, swans bark. I would take them and manipulate them. With the wing flaps, we did a lot of recordings of a lot of different fabrics we could manipulate into wing flaps. We went from feather sounds to tree bark and roots and some other stuff that my foley artists crushed and twisted and manipulated and made everything about her knuckles and toes cracking.

She just watches them, not panicking, but accepting the transformation taking place.

Weisblum: “As she started to transform, I eased off the handheld movement so it gets completely fluid by the time that backstage section is done. When we go back onstage, it’s just floating.”

Her second entrance cue is played … She leaps back on.

Libatique: “This is one of the only times where you start wider and have her move toward you. For the rest of the film, the camera is pretty much always with Natalie at the same distance. So the camera basically counters her as she dances.”

Millepied: “There are a couple of things that are signature moments of “Swan Lake” that are in there. Most of it was re-choreographed to find the right movements for Natalie — a lot of it has to do with more movement for Natalie.”

STAGE

She takes a brief pause, closing her eyes once more, and then completely lets herself go.

Visual effects supervisor Dan Schrecker: “It was one of the handful of scenes where Natalie didn’t do the dance, being one of the most difficult pieces of choreography in the history of human endeavor or whatever. Sarah Lane, Natalie’s dance double — I think it was 17 takes before she nailed it. It was like 30 of these spins and the big bow at the end, so it was 17 takes at least.”

Millepied: “The White Swan has a very fine, vulnerable, fragile quality. The Black Swan is the opposite. She’s trying to seduce the whole court, the Prince, the Queen, everyone around. She’s much more sexual, very strong. It’s hard to find ballerinas who do both very, very well. Even the greatest ballerinas don’t quite have the technique for the third act.”

Schrecker: “Then we brought Natalie out in the same makeup, same lighting, re-created the camera movement and had her walk through the same spins, exactly the same way, and shot her in slow motion. It gave us a face element to put on Sarah’s head.”

Libatique: “It’s the same technology they use for sports video games. The company we brought in to do it, I think, had just finished working on the Beatles: Rock Band game.”

She spins with ferocity. More BLACK FEATHERS burst out from her shoulders and back.

Henighan: “It’s a culmination of all the sounds that Brian and myself had been putting in the movie up until that point — all the little breathing, the little wing sounds, feather sounds. So this is where we get to build all those subtle sounds into a really big sound.”

Schrecker: “Shawn Lipowski, the lead artist on the shot, built the wings and rigging. A lot of research went into how wings are constructed and how feathers are constructed, where human and bird anatomy overlap, so we knew where we wanted her arms and hands to stretch into the wings.”

At last, she truly embodies the Black Swan.

Henighan: If you listen to the score, Clint [Mansell] made pockets for us; the sounds of her wings coming to fruition are right in the pocket of the music. So we went from small, regular wing sounds, then we get into the spin, which turns into feathers and whoosh spin sounds that we would use in a dragon-sized visual effect. The last five or six spins have big whoosh spin-bys of her wings sprouting, then a big low-end surge-rumble that builds up … then the music stops, and she’s in full bloom.”

She finishes the Coda, punctuating her last spin with a sharp step that echoes through the theater. The audience looks on, mesmerized. Too stunned to clap at first.

Schrecker: When we shot it, we had no audience in place. We shot separate elements for the audience later.

… they ERUPT in a standing ovation.

Excerpts from the shooting script by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin (story by Andres Heinz) courtesy of Fox Searchlight.

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