3 of 3

We know that there's 16,000 different species that are on the endangered list, and that's all because of human pressure. We're basically destroying our Creator's, uh, Eden. All of us believe that there's something amazing and something beautiful about this creation, yet here we are just totally shredding it and destroying it. It's really, really mixed up and messed up. We've really lost our way.

As far as I can see, we're just continuing down this path. And now, as a new father, I look at my son and I think about my grandchildren, and I know they're gonna look back on my generation and say, "What were you people thinking?" They'll just have incredible disdain for what we did in the twentieth century to the planet and to each other.

So, as a filmmaker and a storyteller, I've got to try and tell stories that reconnect us to each other and to the planet.

So, in view of that human tendency to destroy, what is The Fountain showing us?

Aronofsky: The big message of The Fountain is a message of recycling.

It's called The Fountain because a fountain basically sucks out from below, shoots it up on the air, it goes back into the earth, and goes around in a cycle. Even a tree is very much a fountain that moves extremely slowly: It grows up and up out of the earth, the leaves come out, the leaves die and fall down, they go back into the soil, and the tree comes back alive again.

And, for me, that circle, that rotating circle of energy and matter, is endless. It stretches all the way back to the beginning of time.

The whole "Big Bang," the scientific theory of how we've evolved, and the question of whether or not there is a Creator—it doesn't matter to me. I think The Fountain is open to all of that. All of our energy and all of our matter comes from something before us. It's the old "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," idea that we go back to the earth and then something else comes out of it. I don't think it affects how you look at Heaven or Hell, or reincarnation, or whichever religious belief you come from. I worked really hard in The Fountain not to get in the way of that. I just wanted people to see that we're part of this long, lasting cycle stretching back all the way to the Big Bang.

© Christianity Today International. Click for reprint information.

first page |  3 of 3