Darren Aronofsky’s new film is a blast from the past; a half-cut retro tour of late-1990s New York. Beetling around the tatty East Village, casually framing the twin towers downtown, it lifts the lid on a time that has been and gone: when the city was a melting pot of miscreants and misfits, when lowly bar staff could still afford Gotham rents,, and when every car came equipped with a cigarette lighter. “Don’t they have those any more?” says Aronofksy, frowning at his untouched cup of herbal tea. “I don’t know, maybe not. It’s been many years since I smoked a cigarette.”
Caught Stealing, he says, could almost be his parallel-universe first movie, given that it’s set in 1998, around the time he was shooting his actual first film, Pi, on the same East Side streets. He was in his late 20s back then, subsisting on pizza and living in a fifth-floor walk-up. He was anxious and ambitious; he had his eyes on the prize. He now thinks he ought to have enjoyed himself more.
He’s nostalgic, but so what? It doesn’t mean he’s not right. “The 90s were such a remarkable time, an exciting time to be alive. It was a lot more loose. There was a sense of innocence. The Soviet Union was gone. Climate change wasn’t on 99% of people’s minds and the big scandal was Bill Clinton having an extramarital affair. People were looking forward to the new millennium. It was going to be The Jetsons. It was going to be sci-fi.” The director grins and shakes his head. “We weren’t all living in a state of existential terror.”
Aronofsky is now 56 and has spent the bulk of his career on the darker end of the street. His films are a rogues’ gallery of brawlers and bawlers, extending from the sweaty contortions of The Wrestler and Black Swan through to the anguished operatics of Requiem for a Dream and Mother. Super-heavy, he says, super-intense. Except that the world turned so black that he wanted to make something light, or at least lighter than his usual brand of Sturm und Drang. He’s like the film-maker hero from Sullivan’s Travels, Preston Sturges’s Depression-era classic, who belatedly learns the value of entertainment and escapism.
“Absolutely,” he says. “Sullivan’s Travels – that’s a huge touchstone for me. But also Hitchcock’s thrillers, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, and a movie like Frantic, with Harrison Ford. I like those films that feature an ordinary hero. The common man who finds himself out of his depth.”
In the case of Caught Stealing, that man is Hank Thompson, a baseball whizz turned slacker bartender, nicely embodied by Austin Butler, star of 2022’s Elvis. Hank has a mysterious key to a safe full of loot and various criminal gangs on his tail. The cops are no help and may even be outright crooked. With its hurried setup complete, Caught Stealing proceeds to run wild alongside Manhattan’s riotous 90s fauna, through a neighbourhood of wholesalers and meat-lockers, back yards and dive bars.
Matt Smith plays an expat London punk who has to open the sun-roof to accommodate his turmeric-coloured mohawk. Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio crop up as orthodox Jewish brothers who lament the shabby state of the city even as they blow holes in it with their shotguns. The film is based on a 2004 novel by Charlie Huston, although Aronofsky says that it was effectively co-written by the city, the locations shaping and changing the action. Fast-paced and punchy, Caught Stealing is a welcome corrective to Aronofsky’s previous picture, The Whale.
I’m worrying, though, that we may be slightly mis-selling its tone. The film is violent and bloody and borderline nihilistic. It only looks light compared to the other movies he’s made. “People are calling it a comedy,” he says. “IMDb is calling it a comedy. And I’m like, ‘Really?’ I mean, there’s definitely some laughs. There are probably more jokes in the first 10 minutes of this than in my entire body of work. But a comedy, I don’t know. It’s more a romp, a hoot, a caper. There’s a lot of the Lower East Side in the mix.”
New York still has soul, he insists. At its heart, it’s the same city that he remembers from his youth. It’s the people who’ve changed; nowadays, everyone’s on their phone. That’s the other key reason why he made Caught Stealing: he wanted to create something that was fun enough to lure people back to the cinema. “That’s the mission these days. We’re in a war with meme culture. With TikTok and Instagram stories. People’s attention is no longer on storytelling. But storytelling is so valuable for humanity.”
He frowns again at his cup of tea. Its presence seems to irk him. “Here’s the litmus test,” he says. “Every person who reads this article will have a memory of a favourite movie where they can remember exactly where they were when they saw it, and exactly how they felt when that two-hour journey was over. But there is no one who has sat through a two-hour chunk of TikTok who will remember anything about it at all. There is no emotional defining moment. They are two completely different experiences. And yet it’s getting harder and harder to get people to see movies.”
He’s hardly alone in his thinking; most big-name directors feel the same. Where he breaks from the script, though, is in his embrace of AI. In May, the director announced the launch of a bespoke new studio, Primordial Soup, in tandem with Google DeepMind. Under the terms of this partnership, Google provides generative AI tools to Aronofsky and his team, while they provide feedback that helps refine and develop the technology. AI more than anything else is viewed as the greatest threat to cinema, so I’m wondering precisely what Aronofksy gets from the deal.
“Well, this is the new front in the war on meme culture,” he says. “These tools are coming. They’re being used at an incredible adoption rate, but they’re mostly being used for slop. So I feel that, as storytellers, we need to harness these tools to help us do our work. There are a lot of artists who are fighting against AI, but I don’t see that as making any sense. If we don’t shape these tools, somebody else will.”
“You keep calling them tools,” I begin. “They are tools,” he shoots back. But we’re not talking about putting a new paintbrush in the hands of an artist. We’re talking about potentially replacing the artist. “No, no, that’s not happening,” he says, properly vexed by the notion. “People are still going to be making films in the traditional way. But the technology is happening, the tools are happening. So it’s like if someone invents fire. You don’t say, ‘Oh, let’s not mess with this because it might burn down our house.’ There’s never been a technology that shows up that people aren’t going to use.”
It was fear of an unchained, omnivorous AI that prompted the 2023 writers and actors’ strike in Hollywood. So I’m assuming Aronofsky’s position makes him a rarity among his peers. “Yeah, publicly I am,” he admits. “But I’ve been in touch with so many people who are deeply curious. And again: it’s already happening. There’s a generation of young people already playing with these tools. So we’re going to see new types of images and a lot of content that’s different – that’s not just mimicking other movies but is really doing something new.”
We’ve been talking over tea for a little under an hour. We started in grungy 1990s New York; we’re ending up in the future, in the brave new sci-fi world. Despite all the dangers, that’s probably the right trajectory. The past can be golden, but it can also be a trap.
“I don’t want to be one of those old men shouting at clouds,” he says. “Or shouting at the TV set, ‘Elvis Presley’s moving his hips and he needs to be banned.’ The world is changing. I’m trying to lean into the excitement. It’s time to shut up, stop complaining and dance.”
