Chinlund: It was important that we show these people as people with lives and creative output. Marion and her loft and all her dreams of a career in fashion, and Tyrone was a DJ and we had installed DJ equipment in his loft. It was a story about people and how easy it is for them to get derailed. It was the responsibility of the sets to show the optimism, the potential of these characters against the darkness of the path it followed. Watson: We had a lot of actors show up for that role. We were surprised at the response that we got. We had a session where Jared was already onboard, and we had Jennifer come in, because she wanted to do the film. They hadn’t met each other. They did the scene, and she basically threw him around the room in the audition. And we were just like, wow. Aronofksy: All of the younger actors got there a month before or something. We even went to a nightclub — to Twilo or the Tunnel one night. I remember it only because in the middle of the night they turned on the lights. I guess they got raided by the police.

a b Howe, Dessen (November 3, 2000). "A Hopeless 'Dream' ". Washington Post. Archived from the original on May 2, 2018 . Retrieved February 28, 2022. Famous Brooklyn landmarks that are featured in movies we love". Nooklyn . Retrieved March 14, 2020. Harry does in fact have a nice girl – Marion, from a well off, emotionally unengaged family. Together they revel in love and youth, sex and drugs, dreaming of an existence running a chain of arts-themed cafes. With Tyrone they come up with a money-making scheme and it appears they could all make their dreams come true – if only the scheme didn't involve selling heroin. Meanwhile, Mrs Goldfarb's addiction to food and television is transformed into something much more dangerous when she is offered the chance to be a TV quiz show contestant; the prospect of fame has her hitting the diet pills and spiralling mentally out of control.

a b c d Erbland, Kate (February 24, 2012). "32 Things We Learned From the 'Requiem For a Dream' Commentary". Film School Rejects . Retrieved March 14, 2020. Matthew Libatique, director of photography: Marlon would literally be in the heaviest scene, and then cut and tell a joke. Whereas Jared and Jennifer really, it was harder for them. They had to interact with each other and deal with themselves.

Stark, Jeff (October 13, 2000). "It's a punk movie". Salon. Archived from the original on February 5, 2019 . Retrieved July 3, 2019. a b "BBC - Films - interview - Jennifer Connelly". www.bbc.co.uk. Archived from the original on September 24, 2019 . Retrieved March 13, 2020. Christopher McDonald, Tappy Tibbons: I auditioned with Mary Vernieu in a room, and she sent that off to Darren, and Darren said, “He’s our guy.” I went to his little apartment in Midtown, and we went up on the roof and he said, “I’m gonna ask a few questions.” I ad-libbed all this stuff about Tappy Tibbons, just crazy stuff. I was channeling Tony Robbins, walking down the street, talking to people. Some people knew me but didn’t know my name. And I said, “Yeah, I’m Tappy Tibbons, you’ve seen me on TV” — just stopping random people in the streets and making up, like, “30 days, it’ll change your life.” I just riffed on it, and then [Aronofsky] did use a lot of it in the movie. Selby's novel was optioned by Aronofsky and producer Eric Watson. Selby had always intended to adapt the novel into a film, as he had written a script years prior to Aronofsky approaching him. Aronofsky was enthusiastic about the story and developed the script with Selby, despite initial struggles to obtain funding for the film's production. He and the cast speak of the film being about addictions in general, and not just drugs, and how one’s attempts to fulfill their dreams can fuel an addiction with a theme of loneliness and avoidance of reality in different ways. Principal photography took place in Brooklyn, New York, from April to June 1999. During the post-production process, the music was composed by Clint Mansell while Jay Rabinowitz worked for editing. Dellamaria, Miranda (April 4, 2014). "The dA-Zed guide to Darren Aronofsky". Dazed Digital. Archived from the original on February 26, 2016 . Retrieved April 29, 2020.Connelly: My son, Kai, was a baby at that time, and so I had him with me on set. He was with me every day. I was still nursing him. It was a very strange, split world, because the reality of my life was so different from the reality of Marion’s life at that time. I have an amazing photograph somewhere, where I’m getting ready to go out and I have this intense, elaborate makeup on. And I’m looking in the mirror and doing my makeup and you can see the camera in the photograph. And you can see I’m holding Kai as a baby at the bottom of the frame, getting ready to do this scene that’s a really difficult time in this character’s life. The film also highlights the broken relationships between family members, friends and lovers as a result of addiction. It shows how communication breakdowns occur and how people drift away from each other when drugs are involved. a b c d e f g h Denson, Thom (September 14, 2017). "Stories From The Set: Requiem for a Dream". One Room With A View . Retrieved March 14, 2020. Ellen Burstyn: my biggest challenge". Evening Standard. January 17, 2001 . Retrieved February 28, 2022.

Connelly: I took to making a bunch of my own clothing and accessories. I can’t remember if I wore ones that I made in the film or if the wardrobe department humored me and used ideas I had. But I got into trying to inhabit some aspects of that character’s world — painting things that I thought that she would, drawing and sewing and listening to music that I thought she might’ve been listening to. And I spent time meeting people my age who were on the streets and using, talking to them about their experiences. It was a lesson for me, especially right now in my life after losing my mom. I understand that there’s never going to be anything to replace her. The only thing I can seek is a different kind of love, a healthy kind of love. Christopher McDonald and Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream. Photo: Courtesy of Artisan Entertainment Skorin-Kapov, Jadranka (2015) Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope, p.32 Bloomsbury Academic Selby's second nove Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in Brooklyn and went to sea as a merchant marine while still in his teens. Laid low by lung disease, he was, after a decade of hospitalizations, written off as a goner and sent home to die. Deciding instead to live, but having no way to make a living, he came to a realization that would change the course of literature: "I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer." Drawing from the soul of his Brooklyn neighborhood, he began writing something called "The Queen Is Dead," which evolved, after six years, into his first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), a book that Allen Ginsberg predicted would "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."Aronofsky: I was able to blend them a bit, but unfortunately [Selby and I] never really got to work in the same room, which would have been an amazing experience. Aronofsky: I remember during the screening, one of my producers was sitting behind me, and as the film was descending into the hell that it becomes, he started laughing. And he leaned forward and he’s like, “Look what you’re doing to this room.” And I remember looking around and just seeing the faces, and I just put my hands up like blinders on either side of my eyes, and sunk down in my chair. The characters in the film each have their own dreams that they are trying to realize but find themselves unable to do so because of their addictions. The film shows how these dreams eventually become distant memories as they lose themselves in drug-induced fantasies. Requiem for a Dream (2003) - A made-for-TV movie directed by Christopher Reeve based on the novel of the same name by Hubert Selby Jr. This story follows the lives of Sara Goldfarb, her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion Kleinmitz, and his best friend Tyrone C. Love, who are all searching for the key to their dreams in their own ways. In the process, they fall into devastating lives of addiction. Harry and Marion are in love and want to open their own business; their friend Tyrone wants to escape life in the ghetto. To achieve these dreams, they buy a large amount of heroin, planning to get rich by selling it.

Requiem for a Dream (2000)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Archived from the original on December 21, 2014 . Retrieved April 6, 2021. I slept in the same clothes, literally, for ten days,” Marlon Wayans says of his Requiem preparation. “I barely washed. I would talk like the character. My boys would come over to the house — Omar Epps was concerned, like, Are you okay?” Photo: Courtesy of Artisan Entertainment Libatique: There’s a scene we shot, where Harry and Marion fight in Marion’s apartment, with a handheld camera. We shot it twice. Emotionally, Jared was really there between takes one and five, and Jennifer was better later. [Darren] comes to me one day. He’s like, “I want to shoot that again. I’m going to shoot that scene again.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me? We don’t have the time to shoot that again.” And then I realized, he’s right. Because the actors needed a certain amount of time to be prepared for where they had to go. Aronofsky: I was devastated. Then I was watching Seven Samurai, because sometimes I’ll watch my favorite films while working on a movie. There’s this amazing breakdown by Toshiro Mifune in the movie, and it’s actually soft. I was like, “Okay. Good enough for Kurosawa, it’s definitely good enough for me.” TFCA Past Award Winners". Toronto Film Critics Association. May 29, 2014 . Retrieved August 24, 2021.

Broadcasts

From top: Ending with the iconic shot of Jared Leto’s eyeball. Photo: Courtesy of Artisan Entertainment Photo: Courtesy of Artisan Entertainment Connelly: It was a scene that was important to the film. But I don’t remember personally feeling comfortable doing it. Darren’s mother and father were on the set every day,” Ellen Burstyn recalls. “She did have that Brooklyn accent, which was very helpful to me. I came in and talked to her every day so I could take up her intonation. She was my coach.” The novel was grimly forensic in detailing the physical and mental destruction wrought by drug addiction on a quartet of characters: three of them connected in their youth and knowing submission to heroin, and the fourth an elderly Brooklyn widow, drawn obliviously into amphetamine psychosis by solitude, TV fixation and irresponsibly prescribed diet pills. It’s a slender story that makes its essential points early, often and obviously: we’re all vulnerable to some manner of addiction, and legal ones aren’t necessarily safer or less ruinous than their underworld counterparts.