Darren Aronofsky is one of those idiosyncratic directors who often has trouble getting Hollywood to fund his grand plans. Many suggest that while being away from home for a year was the official reason he left The Wolverine, the reality was that Fox didn’t want to give him the control he demanded or to let him take things in the direction he planned. Likewise with 2006’s The Fountain, his ambitious plans had to be hacked back after the budget was slashed, leaving us with more the idea of what Aronofsky wanted, rather than the movie he’d hoped for.
Another massive project that’s been stalled for ages, laregly over funding issues, is Noah, Aronofsky’s grand re-telling of the biblical flood story. It’s an idea that’s been percolating with Aronofsky since he won an award for a poem about Noah in the fourth-grade. He then started seriously developing it as a film idea in 2007, but had trouble finding backing and getting the right elements together.
Now it seems he may be poised to move forward, as Deadline reports the director is shopping a package around, looking for $130 million funding for hi epic. Until recently he’d probably have been laughed out of the room, but execs will be eyeing the fact he took an idea as strange and seemingly niche as Black Swan, and turned it into a film that grossed over $300 million worldwide on a $12 million budget. New Regency is said to be likely to sign up to pay for part of the movie, which is being billed as a big fantasy epic, with Paramount, Fox and Summit possible co-financiers.
At the moment the director still needs people to sign on the dotted line and stump up the cash for his grand plans, but it seems there’s a very good chance he’ll finally get to go ahead with his dream project.