Ari Handel, a neurobiologist by training, co-wrote the story for Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, The Fountain. Ari recently agreed to let me record a conversation about this unusually poetic and meditative work of cinema…

First of all, congratulations on the achievement of the film.

Thank you.

How long was it in the works?

We started talking about it in 1999 and started working on it in 2000. It’s been some time.

It must be very gratifying to see it realized on the screen after all this time.

Yeah, it’s great to have it out there.

I thought it was beautifully executed.

Thank you. That’s Darren [Aronofsky], and the whole team.

This is Darren’s third film and he has his cinematographer and score composer, etc. all very talented people that he has worked with before, but this was your first collaboration?

Yes.

And Darren is an old friend of yours.

We went to college together.

What was it like turning the friendship into a working relationship?

It was great, a lot of fun. I think having that backbone of a long-standing friendship probably makes the collaboration process a lot easier, because there’s a lot of mutual respect and caring, so you can argue and you can agree or disagree and you can work your way through the whole creative process which can be hard. Getting a film made is hard and there are stresses and struggles and victories all rolled up one after another, so having that happen within the context of a friendship I think is very helpful. It’s a blessing, really, and a joy to be able to go off to work and spend the day with people who you are friends with. It’s a great thing. And that’s not just me and Darren, that’s the whole team. The whole team is a close group of friends.
Must be much nicer than just being thrown into an office situation with people who perhaps you don’t get along with that well.

Yes. It poses its own challenges at times too. But I think it’s worth it.

Tell us a little about your professional background.

I was trained as a neurobiologist. I got a PhD at NYU from the center of Neuroscience.

How was it making the transition from a fact-oriented scientific work-life to the more nebulous creative sphere?

After eight years of graduate school in neurobiology, it was a welcome change, I have to say, to exercise that part of my mind a little bit more. But during the process I still kept one foot in the fact-oriented side of things. And by the way, I should say that science gets a bad rap, but it is an incredibly creative process when done well. Nonetheless it was nice to expand into other spheres and I enjoyed that a lot. I still got to read a lot of books and go into a lot of laboratories and talk to a lot of academics. And Darren is very rigorous– he likes to be informed, to do things factually and as realistically as possible, and when he deviates from the realistic, to do so knowingly and on purpose. So there was a lot of opportunity to keep that factual side of my brain functioning too.

Is the part of the film that deals with testing on monkeys taken directly from your experience, or perhaps I should say, from your expertise?

Yeah, I mean it’s fictional of course. But it was related and informed by what I know from neurobiology and laboratories certainly. There was also research that we did, all the filmmakers together, to capture the aspects of it that we were interested in.

What was the genesis of the story for the film? How did the concept come about?

Well, it started when Darren and I started talking about the idea of having these three parallel stories of someone looking for the tree of life. And then it became a process of weaving them all together.

Since the film has these three parallel storylines, it seems to suggest through its own non-linear narrative structure, that time itself is non-linear, a concept further supported by the Mayan presence in the film. Did you research Mayan cosmology at all?

Definitely. We looked heavily into Mayan cosmology, though that segment of the film, the Spanish/Mayan segment, isn’t particularly bound by accuracy — there’s room for–

–artistic license?

–artistic license, because it also comes in part from a book that [the Rachel Weisz character] is writing, so there’s room for deviation, but we looked very heavily into Mayan cosmology and actually that started to inform and jive with some of the things that we were thinking for the film. Because of the way that the Mayans looked at time, and sacrifice, it fit with the overall ideas of the film. So that was nice. In terms of the film’s concept of time and things like that, there are lots of ways to look at and interpret the film. That’s one of the nice things about it, that people can bring to it what they will, and see it how they will. I’ve heard a lot of really interesting takes on different aspects of the film that I didn’t even have in mind originally. So I don’t want to comment too strongly on exactly what it’s supposed to mean and risk limiting what people get out of it.

The film almost seems to go to great pains to be able to leave certain things open to interpretation.

Yeah, we didn’t want to spell everything out. It seemed okay to leave some things unclear. But it’s surprising, despite how many things may be left unclear, if you ask someone, “Well, what do you think was happening in that section?” their answers are always good. And certainly on an emotional and spiritual level, they’re right there with what we were thinking with the film. So that stuff seems to come through. It’s just that we don’t go out of our way to make it absolutely crystal clear.

Which I imagine some mainstream American audiences might have a little bit of a problem with, since people are used to Hollywood fare which ties up every conceivable loose end leaving everything all nice and neat. This certainly wasn’t that kind of experience.

No, it’s not that kind of film–

But at the same time it has it’s own internal logic.

Absolutely. And life has it’s own internal logic but doesn’t always wrap up everything in nice neat little packages either.

In this country, science and spirituality are often depicted as being at odds at least in mainstream media. Given your background in science, and the spiritual themes of the film, what are your thoughts on that dichotomy?

I don’t think that they are at odds at all, and I think if you talk to scientists, they tend to be very spiritual people. Because their job is to look into nature and the way the universe works, and that’s a spiritual activity. And most of them, on some level, see it as such. Science tends to come more at odds with Religion–

–as opposed to spirituality–

–as opposed to spirituality. Not that there’s no spirituality in religion, but institutionally, Science sometimes seems to rub up against Religion — I’m thinking of “Intelligent Design” right now as I talk about this. But in terms of the human drive toward spirituality, scientists have that as much as anybody else and tend to be pretty clear about it. You can read “Consilience” by Edward O. Wilson. There are many scientists who think very deeply about spiritual issues. So, I don’t think they are in opposition at all. I think that science is a method for grappling with the nature of existence, just like some of the things that we tend to think of more as spiritual pursuits.

Would you care to speculate on why Religion and Science, institutionally, seem to butt heads?

It’s not my area of expertise, but I would say they butt heads most often where there’s rigidity about dogma. I don’t think it tends to be in the spiritual realm.

One of the themes of the film is the importance of letting go, of accepting death, for the purpose of further growth and renewal. Does that suggest reincarnation?

If you go back to what we were talking about before, about Mayan beliefs, my understanding is that they had an idea that the gods give life essence to us — through various forms, rain, corn, etc. life essence that comes down to the world — and that in turn, we give life essence back to the gods. Just as they feed us, we feed them. And when the Mayans did things like blood sacrifice, they did that as a way of feeding the gods. So in some ways, suffering and the giving up and letting go of things is a creative force that feeds the gods, which in turn feeds us. Those themes are definitely in the film, that the acceptance of loss is a part of a full life. Whether there’s reincarnation, or exactly what that might be, I think is a less important question.

With its central plot device of the search for the tree of life and eternal physical life, the film seems to say that living forever in a physical body is not a true goal, and that what is really important is spiritual life, at least as far as the concept of eternity is concerned. What can you say about eternity as explored in the film? Is that too vague?

Yeah, kinda.

Well, how about this: our culture seems preoccupied with eternal youth– plastic surgery and various media obsessions, young starlets, etc. And as far as I’m concerned, this largely misses the point that we’re not supposed to stay young forever. We’re supposed to grow and evolve and change. But the character of the doctor in the film is obsessed with trying to defeat death and I think a lot of Americans are similarly obsessed. Did you see that character as symbolizing or standing in for a common Western obsession?

There’s two answers to that question. I guess the first answer is that characters are characters, and they’re individuals, so the character doesn’t stand for — the character is just a character and has a life of his own in some way. You can read him to stand for things as you want to, the same way you could read George Bush to stand for something, or any other person in the world, but they weren’t created specifically to be that. On the other hand, I do think that our culture is youth obsessed and “fixing-things-obsessed” — things can be outrun, out-thought, out-technologied, out-anythinged, rather than accepted. I also would say that if we are trying to capture eternal youth or eternal life, that that is inevitably and inherently — value judgment aside — doomed to failure, so you’re not going to get so far that way.

Right. There are people interested in finding ways to download human consciousness into machines to achieve eternal life of a sort, all kinds of efforts to get around the decay of the physical body.

And I’m sure those are possible to some degree. But if you take this to its logical extreme, the universe has a finite lifetime and entropy is always increasing, so there’s only so far you’re gonna go with even that.

Eventually something’s going to happen, and you’re going to end.

Yeah. I mean when you started this question you asked ‘what do you have to say about eternity,’ and eternity doesn’t exist, right? We live in a finite universe.

The physical universe. Even the universe itself is not eternal.

Exactly, so it’s a straw man, that stuff. But in our culture, even more than youth-obsession is this: everyone is a child of a parent, or a sibling or a friend of people who die. That’s a universal shared aspect of our existence as human beings, but it’s something that is hidden away and done in hospitals and not talked about and no one knows really what to say, and we’ve incorporated it into our lives this way. And that’s also true of sickness and disability and even aging. All those things are seen as slightly shameful in our society and are somewhat swept under the rug. And I think that’s probably more harmful than plastic surgery and wanting to look young and beautiful. To me, that’s more harmful because then we leave ourselves disconnected from each other in times of need but also in times that are probably quite ripe for human connection.