Natalie Portman chats with us about working with Darren Aronofsky and the training she put in for her part in Black Swan in our video interview.
“The physical aspect of it was really challenging. The combination with the emotional side of the role was the most difficult,” Natalie admits about filming Black Swan.
“I trained for a year before the film started. I was doing five to eight hours a day. We’d do ballet and we’d swim a mile a day, tone, and then towards the end we added in choreography with the choreographer Benjamin Millepied.”
“It was really rigorous, while we were shooting I’d work out before and after work, and while we were filming we’d dance the whole day. So it was very extreme.”
“He’s absolutely incredible,” Natalie says of her co-star Vincent Cassel. “I’ve been a fan of his since La Haine and he is really one of the giants of acting right now. It was great working with him, he’s completely modest and professional and fun and easy going, but then is just so on it when it comes time to perform.”
“With me it was really wonderful because it really felt like a collaboration,” she says of working with director Darren Aronofsky. “He would give a lot of ideas but then he would ask me for my input and really welcome anything I wanted to try, so it was really liberating working with someone so free like that.”
And when asked what audiences should expect from Black Swan, Natalie says, “The unexpected. It’s not like anything you’ve seen before,”
Read our review of Black Swan here
Black Swan is out on Blu-ray and DVD on 16 May.
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