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That tragedy, to me, became the core emotional story of The Fountain, because I found it so sad and so tragic.

So, The Fountain is a story about learning to accept death as "a spiritual act"?

Aronofsky: I think it has to do with the sanctity of life. The Bible says that the Creator sent Adam and Eve out of the Garden [and they could not] eat from the Tree of Life. The question is, what would have happened if they ate from the Tree of Life? Mortality is part of our humanity; it's what makes us beautiful. And unfortunately we've lost touch with what it means to be mortal.

In many ways it's about science versus art, and religion versus spirituality. You have these [scientific and religious] dogmas that are the languages of a certain type of discovery, but beneath that you have a certain type of acceptance and truth.

Izzy's character is leaning more toward acceptance [of death] … and Tom's character is using the scientific method to fight it. At times, these two methods rub against each other. I think the story is about Tom learning to accept, learning to live in the moment, and learning to accept life and death to the fullest.

But you're not saying it's a bad thing, or a futile pursuit, to employ science for the purpose of prolonging life and fighting disease, are you? Can Tom be both a medical researcher and enlightened?

Aronofsky with Weisz and Jackman on the set

Aronofsky: I think it's about balance. Clearly science and technology have done amazing things. They prolong life, and they prolong the quality of life. We have people in their seventies and eighties living such a full life that it's inspirational. But, I think there comes a certain disconnect at a certain point. Because of the success of science, there's this hubris that we can fix everything. But we can't, because death is a certainty. Without death, we're not really human.

I had a 93-year-old grandmother who had a heart attack, and they tried to resuscitate her three times. I think there's a certain brutality to that. It's like they don't want anybody to die on their watch, or something like that.

All three of your films are about characters striving to escape suffering and reach some higher plane, whether through drugs or mathematics or science. Do you think audiences are ready for something this ambitious?

Aronofsky: It's a very spiritual movie, and I think that there'd be a lot of people in all religious communities that could have reaction to it— especially in the Christian community, because there's a major Judeo-Christian foundation to the film.

What was interesting to me was this: At the core of so many different religions is the spiritual truth which unites us all. It's just amazing when you look at the Judeo-Christian/Islamic foundation in Genesis about the two trees in the Garden of Eden—the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life—and man and woman ate from the Tree of Knowledge and were basically banned from Eden. They could no longer eat from the Tree of Life.

You think about that, and then you go to the Mayan tradition. Think about how separate the Jews were from the Mayans! They were separated by, who knows, thousands of years—and yet, the Mayans tell a story about "a first father," an Adam, who had to make a sacrifice for the Tree of Life.

To me, that's amazing that there's this unity of spiritual sense between many of the faiths. I think that there is something that makes us all human. From all our different faiths and beliefs, there is something that connects us.

The Tree of Life

There seems to be a theme in many films right now, from Code Unknown to Crash to Babel—an increasing focus on the idea that some kind of fundamental connection has been broken.

Aronofsky: I buy it. I think we live in a very critical time. Every plastic bottle of drinking water that we've produced is going to be around for 10,000 years, at the minimum. We've basically poisoned our oceans and ripped down our forests. We've taken a huge chunk out of the planet. And we're still playing the same old game of killing each other, and being the only species on the planet that just basically wipes each other out off the planet.

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