Natalie Portman is looking to take the lead role in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, a film that he’s been toying with for a couple years now. Black Swan follows a veteran ballerina in New York City and a competitor whose rivalry escalates as a performance approaches. The twist is that the competitor appears to not be real, either being a ghost or a total hallucination or perhaps something else entirely. When the project was first being mentioned it was only referred to as a psychological thriller in the world of ballet. I’m not sure whether this twist makes me more or less interested. The Hollywood Reporter cites people familiar with the script as calling it similar to The Others, the 2001 film with Nicole Kidman.
John McLaughlin wrote the original script while Mark Heyman, one of Aronofsky’s partners at Protozoa Pictures, did a rewrite.
Black Swan now looks to be Aronofsky’s next project provided a studio picks it up, while the proposed RoboCop reboot that Aronofsky’s been attached to for MGM is now tentatively targeted for 2011 instead of 2010. Let’s go ahead and assume that that entire project, at least with Aronofsky’s involvement, will go the same way as Batman: Year One and Watchmen.
I’m still hoping for news on the television series Aronofsky was developing with McLaughlin for AMC (and before then HBO) called Riverview Towers. That was supposed to be about a family that moved into an apartment complex that had paranormal activities.
