{"id":11177,"date":"2011-03-14T19:37:03","date_gmt":"2011-03-14T19:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=11177"},"modified":"2011-03-14T19:42:04","modified_gmt":"2011-03-14T19:42:04","slug":"darren-aronfskys-pi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2011\/03\/14\/darren-aronfskys-pi\/","title":{"rendered":"Darren Aronfsky’s Pi"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On Pi day<\/a> it is worth recalling Darren Aronofsky<\/a>‘s 1998 debut feature Pi<\/a><\/strong> (or \u03c0)\u00a0which established him as a director and remains a compelling US indie.<\/p>\n

The atmospheric tale of a reclusive maths genius named Max (Sean Gullette<\/a>), it explores his obsession with number patterns and how they can explain life as various people take an interest in his experiments including: a former teacher (Mark Margolis), a shady Wall Street firm (how prophetic that seems now) and a Hasidic<\/a> sect.<\/p>\n

As he delves further into the underlying patterns of numbers that may (or may not) explain things he suffers from crippling headaches and paranoia.<\/p>\n

Filmed in 16mm black-and-white and made for just $60,000, it was a breath of fresh air when it broke out of the Sundance Film Festival<\/a> in 1998.<\/p>\n

Here was a film a world away from the hardening conventions that surrounded the festival in the late 1990s but it managed to create a buzz, winning the drama directing award and later the Independent Spirit Award<\/a> for Best First Screenplay.<\/p>\n

Although he recently admitted cringing when revisiting the film, it still stands up as a bold and original mix of David Lynch’s Eraserhead<\/a> (1976) and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation<\/a> (1974).<\/p>\n