It's about quality, not quantity: Darren Aronofsky's brilliant tragedy Requiem For A Dream is the arthouse sensation that refuses to be ignored.

The film is playing in only a handful of theatres in North America, including in Toronto, so it won't be seen in the Top 10 box-office statistics jostling with the likes of Charlie's Angels. Yet Requiem is selling out, turning Aronofsky into one of Hollywood's hottest and most nakedly ambitious young directors.

"I'm deeply flattered, thank you very much," says the 31-year-old Brooklyn-born filmmaker when confronted with praise.

Yet he is just as ready to self-mock. Mention that Requiem has been unshakeable since its debut screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aronofsky grins and retorts: "It's like a wart, right? A good dermatologist can help you get rid of it."

Keenly intelligent and ready for the big time in Hollywood (he is writing a science fiction fantasy script), Aronofsky knows that Requiem is a dark little drama drenched in acid.

As the chronicle of the tragic lives of three Coney Island smack freaks and a mentally unstable mother (Ellen Burstyn) who loves one of them, Requiem is all anguish.

"We see so few tragedies out of Hollywood and even out of world cinema," Aronofsky tells The Sun. "Most films that come out of Hollywood, if they don't have a happy ending, they certainly have a catharsis. So they release the audience."

Aronofsky doesn't want to do that. Nor did famed Brooklyn novelist Hubert Selby Jr., who wrote Requiem For A Dream, as well as the more celebrated Last Exit To Brooklyn.

'Raw honesty'

Selby, now in his seventies, co-authored the film's screenplay with Aronofsky and appears in a cameo as the laughing prison guard (an ironic twist that means the author is making fun of his own character creations).

Aronofsky says he felt compelled to bring a Selby story to the screen, even though it was not an obvious easy choice and hardly what Artisan Entertainment executives were hoping Aronofsky would do after the success of his debut film pi (the Pi sign) two years ago.

"He is so deeply connected with the human psyche," Aronofsky says of Selby. "When he writes, he takes you so deeply into these characters' heads, it's amazing. I think that's why I'm attracted to his work. It's the raw honesty and raw brutality and raw intensity of his work."

Aronofsky says Requiem is about what happens when three twentysomethings -- played by Jared Leto, Marlon Wayans and Jennifer Connelly -- do after buying into what the filmmaker calls "The Brady Bunch brainwash." By that he means the belief that, "It's all going to work out!"

Reality, however, is cruel. "The reality of life is that it doesn't always work out. What does that do to you when you realize your life is not going to have a happy ending? What does that do to you when you realize your family is not The Brady Bunch?"

In the film, the characters discover that disappointment leaves a hole in their soul and they try to fill it with heroin.

"I think that part of the reason there is tragedy is that you can see how other lives can be so much worse off than yours. It means you can assess your life and change it. I means you can learn from what you saw here and help other people."


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