A tempest in Toe-Shoes, more Black Swan Pt II

Natalie Portman and Benjamin Millepied in Black Swan

I’m indebted to ‘the Mysterious J’ for bringing the article below to my attention. And the tempest continues…

Entertainment Weekly
EW.com March 25, 2011
by Adam Markovitz

'Black Swan' double claims Natalie Portman only did '5 percent' of full-body dance shots in the movie

The ballerina who served as a dancing double for Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winning role in Black Swan tells EW she has been the victim of a “cover-up” to mislead the public about how much dancing Portman actually did in the film. “Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie,” says Sarah Lane, 27, an American Ballet Theatre soloist who performed many of the film’s complicated dance sequences, allowing Portman’s face to be digitally grafted onto her body. “All the other shots are me.”

Lane’s claim follows a March 23 L.A. Times article in which Portman’s fiancé and Black Swan choreographer Benjamin Millepied said Lane’s work in the film was far less significant. “There are articles now talking about her dance double [American Ballet Theatre dancer Sarah Lane] that are making it sound like [Lane] did a lot of the work, but really, she just did the footwork, and the fouettés, and one diagonal [phrase] in the studio,” he said. “Honestly, 85 percent of that movie is Natalie.”

Lane disagrees. “The shots that are just her face with arms, those shots are definitely Natalie,” she says. “But that doesn’t show the actual dancing.” Lane admits that she was never promised a particular title for her six weeks of work on the film, though she was disappointed to see that she is credited only as “Hand Model,” “Stunt Double,” and “Lady in the Lane” (a brief walk-on role).

Lane also says that Black Swan producer Ari Handel specifically told her not to talk about her work to the press, even though she claims there was no such stipulation in her contract. “They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” says Lane. “It is demeaning to the profession and not just to me. I’ve been doing this for 22 years…. Can you become a concert pianist in a year and a half, even if you’re a movie star?”

Reps for Portman, Fox Searchlight, and Handel have yet to provide comments on the matter.

Lane is barely seen in promotional materials for the movie, including a VFX reel posted by studio Fox Searchlight that appears to show all the digital alterations made to key dance sequences. An unverified version [now deleted from YouTube] of that reel, leaked to YouTube, seems to shows how digital face replacement was used to put Portman’s head on Lane’s body. (The clip was included in a blog post by Dance Magazine‘s Wendy Perron, who wrote about Lane’s story earlier this month.)

According to Lane, Portman’s dramatic transformation into a ballerina — a narrative firmly at the center of her successful Oscar campaign — wasn’t as impressive as the public was led to believe. “I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff,” says Lane. “I do give her a lot of credit because in a year and a half she lost a lot of weight and she really tried to go method and get into a dancers head and really feel like a ballet dancer.”

In interviews, Portman didn’t hide the fact that she had used a body double for key sequences in the film, though Lane’s name, and the extent of her work, were played down. “I do have a double for the complicated turning stuff,” Portman told EW last November. “It was not anything I ever could have done in a year, nothing I could’ve caught up with. But I think it was just better for all of us if I did as much as possible.”

Lane insists she isn’t speaking out of jealousy over Portman’s acclaim. “[Natalie] is an amazing actress, for sure,” she says. “I know that it’s not a personal thing against me. I know that it’s just a political thing. It’s just unfortunate that I kind of lost credit.”

Personal comment: Readers should note the carefully chosen quotations used:

Sarah Lane: “Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie all the other shots are me.”

Benjamin Millepied: “There are articles now talking about her dance double [American Ballet Theatre dancer Sarah Lane] that are making it sound like [Lane] did a lot of the work, but really, she just did the footwork, and the fouettés, and one diagonal [phrase] in the studio,” he said. “Honestly, 85 percent of that movie is Natalie.”

Sarah Lane: “I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff,”

Sarah Lane: “I know that it’s not a personal thing against me. I know that it’s just a political thing. It’s just unfortunate that I kind of lost credit.”

There is nothing in conflict between: “Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie” and “85 percent of that movie is Natalie.” And Sarah is right when she says, ‘from a professional dancer’s standpoint she doesn’t look like a professional dancer.’ Natalie doesn’t, certainly her legs, but that’s what body doubles/stunt persons are for and the film wasn’t made for the professional dance community. Sarah got as much credit as any other body/stunt double gets in a film. With this tempest I’m not so sure that ‘Any publicity is good publicity’ if the person comes off as a whiner.

As I’ve written before I think the unfortunate part of this whole thing is the naiveté of Wendy Perron the editor of Dance Magazine who added her prestige to the notion that Sarah Lane was ‘thrown under the bus’ by the studio PR machine because she was “exploited” thinking – erroneously – that body doubles get more credit in films than they do and the celebrity chasing media pounced on this as a catfight to generate magazine sales and website hits. And, it worked.

Natalie Portman pregnant by choreographer

An Ortho progestin/estrogen pill dial pack

Natalie Portman to wed `Black Swan' choreographer
Associated Press December 27, 2010

“NEW YORK - Natalie Portman is pregnant with her first child and is engaged to Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer of "Black Swan."

A publicist for Portman confirmed Monday that the couple are engaged and expecting, but declined to give any further details. People magazine first reported the news.

The 29-year-old actress and Millepied, a well-regarded ballet dancer and choreographer, met during the making of "Black Swan," Darren Aronofsky's psychological thriller that stars Portman as a ballet dancer. She's been nominated for best actress by the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild.

Millepied played a small on-screen role in the film as a dancer. Portman also stars in Ivan Reitman's upcoming romantic comedy, "No Strings Attached."”

Personal Comment: There goes her figure! Sigh! Because she isn’t a dancer she doesn’t have to stay in that great shape, but still… I wonder if there was a birth control method failure or if she forgot to take her pill or was taking another medicine that reduced the effectiveness of the hormones? Because of the timing that’s what I think happened. But, perhaps not, since she is almost 30 and nearing the age where her fertility will be decreasing. Maybe they just said “let’s go w/o protection and see what happens”… you think? Apparently this time the plumbing was working just fine.

And speaking of the effectiveness of hormonal birth control, below are the results of a large study testing the effectiveness of a 24/4 dosing regimen.


Real life tests of the effectiveness of oral contraceptives

A typical monthly regimen of oral contraceptives includes 21 days of active pills -- usually containing a combination of the hormones estrogen and progesterone -- and a 7-day break of inactive sugar pills.

Oral contraceptives boast annual unintended pregnancy rates well below 1 percent -- if used correctly and consistently, that is.

But in the not-so-perfect real world, longer lasting ingredients and shorter monthly breaks between active pills could prove useful in bolstering this form of birth control, hints a new study from Germany.

A typical monthly regimen of oral contraceptives includes 21 days of active pills -- usually containing a combination of the hormones estrogen and progesterone -- and a 7-day break of inactive sugar pills. The intent is to prevent pregnancy by obstructing ovulation, or the release of an egg during a woman's monthly cycle.

"Forgetting the first active pills of a treatment cycle has the biggest impact on contraceptive failure as this time interval may allow the process that leads to ovulation to start," Dr. Jurgen Dinger of the Berlin Center for Epidemiology and Health Research told Reuters Health in an e-mail.

To test whether decreasing the pill-free interval and using hormones with a longer duration of action may help counteract this common problem, Dinger and his colleagues studied more than 52,000 U.S. women who took part in the "International Active Surveillance of Women Taking Oral Contraceptive" study.

The participants' average age was 26 years, and each had started on a new contraceptive. More than 80 percent of the women had previously taken another version of the Pill.

The researchers did not interfere with the choice of oral contraceptive, but rather categorized the women into three groups based on their new hormone regimens: 21 days of 3 milligrams of drospirenone (progesterone) plus 30 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol (estrogen); 24 days of 3 milligrams of drospirenone plus 20 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol, or another regimen.

The 21-day drospirenone regimen is currently sold under the brand name Yasmin and the 24-day regimen, with longer-lasting progesterone, is sold as Yaz. Generic versions are also available. Bayer Schering Pharma, maker of Yasmin, supported the study.

Over the course of 3 years following the women, more than 1,600 became pregnant unintentionally. About 1,400 of these contraceptive failures were due to an imperfect use of the Pill.

Unintended pregnancy rates for the 21-day and 24-day drospirenone regimens were 2.8 percent and 2.1 percent at the end of the first year, respectively, and 5.7 and 4.7 percent after the third year.

Women older than age 30 were significantly less likely than younger women to get pregnant unintentionally. Women with a college education and who had never carried a child were also less likely to become pregnant.

Obese women -- who made up nearly a quarter of the U.S. women studied -- had about a 50 percent greater risk of contraception failure after accounting for age, education level and whether or not they had prior children.

According to the researchers, under all the situations studied, the 24-day drospirenone regimen yielded more protection against pregnancy than the 21-day drospirenone regimen, as well as the other oral contraceptives.

However, compared to findings from the same study conducted in Europe, U.S. women showed an overall four-fold higher unintended pregnancy rate.

Dinger suggested that multiple factors could explain this gap in effectiveness, from higher rates of obesity in the U.S. to cultural, behavioural and genetic differences between the regions.

Dinger also noted that most programs that have tried to improve the proper use of the Pill have failed. "Our approach," he emphasized, "did not intend to investigate ways to improve compliance but to look at whether specific oral contraceptive regimens are more 'robust' against incompliance than others."

"This should not mitigate the need for good counseling of female adolescents and women intending to use the Pill," added Dinger. "A highly effective oral contraceptive regimen in conjunction with good counseling is the only way to minimize unintended pregnancies."

SOURCE: Obstetrics and Gynecology, online December 3, 2010. The full text of the article can be found at: http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/2011/01000/Effectiveness_of_Oral_Contraceptive_Pills_in_a.6.aspx

Personal comment: We have known since the introduction of Yaz in the U.S. that the long half-life of drospirenone reduces the chance of breakthrough ovulation during the hormone free interval. Most students on oral contraceptives at St Lucy’s are on Yaz the 24/4 dosing regimen of 3 milligrams of drospirenone plus 20 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol. There are no obese students and roommates buddy to make sure each girl takes her pill at the same time daily. Even so there are times when a student is on meds that decrease the effectiveness of her pills and will ovulate and a few of these instances will result in the need for emergency contraception to avoid an unintended pregnancy. The availability of ella (the five-day EC pill) has increased the effectiveness of EC for St Lucy’s girls.


FDA Approves Gardasil for Prevention of Anal Cancer in Both Sexes

December 23, 2010 — FDA on Wednesday approved Merck's human papillomavirus vaccine, Gardasil, for the prevention of anal cancer in people ages nine through 26, Reuters reports. The vaccine already was approved to prevent cervical, vulvar and vaginal cancers associated with HPV for the same age group.

On Wednesday, FDA cited data showing that Gardasil was effective in a study of men who have sex with men, a group that has a higher incidence of anal cancer than other populations. The agency said the data support the vaccine's efficacy in women because the disease is the same in both sexes.

Although anal cancer is less common than most other types of cancer, with about 5,300 new U.S. cases diagnosed annually, FDA said incidence of the disease is increasing (Krauskopf, Reuters, 12/22). About 90% of anal cancers are linked with HPV, according to Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal (Solsman, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, 12/22).

Karen Midthun, director of FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said, "Treatment for anal cancer is challenging; the use of Gardasil as a method of prevention is important, as it may result in fewer diagnoses and the subsequent surgery, radiation or chemotherapy that individuals need to endure."

As of the end of May, more than 65 million doses of Gardasil had been distributed since its 2006 approval, with sales reaching $1.1 billion as of 2009 (Reuters, 12/22). The vaccine once was expected to be a blockbuster for Merck, but sales have declined as more individuals are immunized and GlaxoSmithKline's HPV vaccine, Cervarix, provides more competition, according to Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, 12/22).

Personal comment: Starting last year our clinic began giving Gardasil injections to male dancers and all escort candidates as an off label use to protect men from anal cancer.

Black Swan - the NYT review

Natalie Portman as Nina Sayers/the Swan Queen

The New York Times
December 2, 2010
Movie Review 'Black Swan'

On Point, on Top, in Pain
By MANOHLA DARGIS

A witchy brew of madness and cunning, “Black Swan” tells the story of a ballerina who aches, with battered feet and an increasingly crowded head, to break out of the corps. Played by Natalie Portman in a smashing, bruising, wholly committed performance, the young dancer, Nina, looks more like a child than a woman, her flesh as undernourished as her mind. When she goes to bed at night, a nearby jewelry box tinkling “Swan Lake,”a crowd of stuffed animals watches over her, longtime companions that — as Nina and this dementedly entertaining film grow more unhinged — begin to look more like jailers than friends.

Crammed with twins — lookalikes, mirrored images, doppelgängers — the story follows that of the “Swan Lake” ballet in broad, gradually warped strokes. It opens with the artistic director of a fictional New York ballet company, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), announcing that the new season will begin with a “visceral and real” version of that old favorite. To that end he dumps his prima ballerina, Beth (Winona Ryder), and picks Nina to dance the dual role of the swan queen (an enchanted woman in bird form) and her villainous black twin. But as the pressure builds, things fall apart, or Nina does. She stumbles out of a spin and begins scratching at her skin. One day she strips a piece from her finger as lightly as if she were peeling a banana.

Part tortured-artist drama, “Black Swan” looks like a tony art-house entertainment. (Hey, there’s Lincoln Center!) But what gives it a jolt is its giddy, sometimes sleazy exploitation-cinema savvy. The director Darren Aronofsky is a well-schooled cinéaste, and in “Black Swan” he riffs on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ballet masterpiece, “The Red Shoes,” and the pair’s “Black Narcissus,” among other influences. But it’s also likely that Mr. Aronofsky, who was born in 1969 and grew up in Brooklyn, frequented Times Square when it was known as the deuce and lined with movie palaces playing the best and worst in trash cinema. I bet he also caught a few episodes of the “Red Shoe Diaries” on cable.

That isn’t a knock. One of the pleasures of “Black Swan” is its lack of reverence toward the rarefied world of ballet, which to outsiders can look as lively as a crypt. Mr. Aronofsky makes this world (or his version of it) exciting partly by pulling back the velvet curtains and showing you the sacrifices and crushingly hard work that goes into creating beautiful dances. Nina doesn’t just pirouette prettily, she also cracks her damaged toes (the sound design picking up every crackle and crunch) and sticks her fingers down her throat to vomit up her food. Mostly, though, she trains hard, hammering her toe shoes into floor much as Jake La Motta pounded his fists into flesh. She’s a contender, but also a martyr to her art.

Mr. Aronofsky is happy to see her bleed. A filmmaker who likes to play around with genre while mixing the highbrow with the lowdown and dirty, he has built a small, vivid catalog by exploring human extremes with wildly uneven degrees of visual wow, sensitivity and intelligence. He trawled the lower depths in “Requiem for a Dream” and struggled to scale the metaphysical heights with “The Fountain,” a fable about eternal (as in, when will it end?) love. For his previous movie, “The Wrestler,” he proved his commercial smarts by taking Mickey Rourke out of deep freeze and dusting off a comeback story that was old when Wallace Beery wiped Jackie Cooper’s runny nose with the script for “The Champ.”

“Black Swan,” by contrast, surprises despite its lusty or rather sluttish predilection for clichés, which include the requisitely demanding impresario (Mr. Cassel makes a model cock of the walk) and Nina’s ballerina rival, Lily (Mila Kunis, as a succulent, borderline rancid peach). But, oh, what Mr. Aronofsky does with those clichés, which he embraces, exploits and, by a squeak, finally transcends.

Such is his faith in his ability to surmount the obvious (and the lethally blunt) that he turns Nina’s mother, Erica (a terrific Barbara Hershey), into a smother-mother who out-crazies Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford in the mommy dearest department. You don’t know whether to laugh or shriek (both are reasonable responses), and it is this uncertainty and at times delicious unease that proves to be Mr. Aronofsky’s sweet spot.

It’s easy to read “Black Swan” as a gloss on the artistic pursuit of the ideal. But take another look, and you see that Mr. Aronofsky is simultaneously telling that story straight, playing with the suffering-artist stereotype and having his nasty way with Nina, burdening her with trippy psychodrama and letting her run wild in a sexcapade that will soon be in heavy rotation on the Web. The screenplay, by Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin, invites pop-psychological interpretations about women who self-mutilate while striving for their perfect selves, a description that seems to fit Nina. But such a reading only flattens a film that from scene to scene is deadly serious, downright goofy and by turns shocking, funny and touching.

With “Black Swan” Mr. Aronofsky has found a surprisingly accommodating vehicle for his preoccupations, including bodies in pain, and his ever more refined technique. Here, working with his usual cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, and largely shooting hand-held in both super-16-millimeter film and digital, Mr. Aronofsky opts for grit over gloss, an ideal strategy for a story with a harsh underbelly. Hand-held cinematography can be lazy shorthand for “reality” (as if life happens in shaky-cam), but here the hand-held visuals work because of their intimacy. The influence of the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne can be seen in the close, tag-along shots of Nina’s head as she hurries off, a point of view that brings you within breathing, at times panting, distance of a character whose behavior can be off-putting.

Though it had its moments, “The Wrestler” felt like the work of a director who, after proving his street bona fides and bombing at the box office, decided to try some pandering. It worked: Mr. Rourke was rediscovered, and Mr. Aronofsky’s future was salvaged, in part because he had closed the distance between the fallen star played by Mr. Rourke and the one he himself had become. Ms. Portman’s performance in “Black Swan” is more art than autobiography, and as a consequence more honest, but because it’s so demandingly physical the lines that usually divide actresses from their characters are also blurred. This is, after all, Ms. Portman’s own thin body on display, her jutting chest bones as sharply defined as a picket fence.

Although Mr. Aronofsky focuses on her head, shoulders and arms, mostly avoiding long shots that might betray a lack of technique, Ms. Portman does most of her own dancing (and plausibly, at least to this ballet naïf). The vision of Ms. Portman’s own body straining with so much tremulous, tremendous effort, her pale arms fluttering in desperation, grounds the story in the real, as do the totemic Lincoln Center buildings, the clattering subway and the grubby, claustrophobic apartment Nina shares with her mother. Together they create the solid foundation of truth that makes the slow-creeping hallucinatory flights of fantasy all the more jolting and powerful. Much like the new version of “Swan Lake” that Thomas creates, “Black Swan” is visceral and real even while it’s one delirious, phantasmagoric freakout.

“Black Swan” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Bedroom gymnastics and graphic violence.

BLACK SWAN

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky; written by Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin, based on a story by Mr. Heinz; director of photography, Matthew Libatique; edited by Andrew Weisblum; music by Clint Mansell; ballet choreography by Benjamin Millepied; production design by Thérèse DePrez; costumes by Amy Westcott, ballet costumes by Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte; produced by Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Brian Oliver and Scott Franklin; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

WITH: Natalie Portman (Nina Sayers/the Swan Queen), Vincent Cassel (Thomas Leroy/the Gentleman), Mila Kunis (Lily/the Black Swan), Barbara Hershey (Erica Sayers/the Queen) and Winona Ryder (Beth Macintyre/the Dying Swan).

Personal Comment: I’m so pleased that the NYT critic liked the film! Not that a critical success necessarily translates into a box office success. It has to be liked by the ticket buying public but that a film and dance critic for the Times thought it was great really helps. Sarah Lane, a Soloist for American Ballet theater, is the body double for Natalie during dance scenes where ballet technique mattered.

Sarah Lane ABT Soloist and Portman’s body double

Black Swan an appreciation

Natalie Portman costumed as Odile in the film Black Swan

The New York Times
HOLIDAY MOVIES
October 30, 2010
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

A Dark Transformation to Strains of ‘Swan Lake’

“WHEN I started thinking about ‘Swan Lake,’ ” said Darren Aronofsky, whose new film, “Black Swan,” is about a young dancer wrestling with the demanding lead role in that ballet, “a dancer, I think Julie Kent, said to me that the story is really about a girl who gets caught by an evil magician who turns her into a swan during the day and a half-swan, half-human at night. It popped into my head, ‘Oh, a were-swan.’ And I realized I was making a werewolf movie.”

It seems not to have occurred to him, even at that moment of enlightenment, that good werewolf movies are nearly as rare as good ballet films, but the thought probably wouldn’t have daunted him much. “I mean, that was probably one of the major things that attracted me to the story,” he said, “the idea of putting Natalie Portman through this physical transformation. That’s what the fairy tale is about.”

Physical transformation is, after all, what ballet is about too: the stretching and shaping and molding of a body into a form that makes impossible movements possible, and allows a creature of flesh and blood to transcend the limitations of the merely human and take flight (at least metaphorically) into the region of the sublime. Well, that’s the idea anyway.

The reality, as Ms. Portman discovered in training for her role in “Black Swan” (opening Dec. 3), can be as harrowing as a horror movie. “I’d studied ballet,” she said recently by phone, “from the age of 4 to about 13, at the American Dance Theater Workshop on Long Island, which is associated with the Eglevsky Ballet, and from the time I became an actress I think I always wanted to do a ballet film.”

Mr. Aronofsky, whose sister had also been a serious ballet student in her youth, approached Ms. Portman with the idea for the film while she was still in college, but when, years later, the time finally came to make the movie, she said, “I quickly realized that I wasn’t as advanced as I thought I was.”

Before shooting began, she trained for months with the former New York City Ballet dancer Mary Helen Bowers. She also “really immersed myself in ballet for a whole year,” she said, reading autobiographies of dancers (especially from the New York City Ballet) and discovering in them “almost a religious quality, not only in the deification of Balanchine, but also in all this sort of ritualistic, devotional behavior dancers practice — the repetitive barre work every day, breaking in the toe shoes and sewing the ribbons on and so forth.”

Nina, the young dancer Ms. Portman plays, lives a virtually monastic life, sharing a cramped Manhattan apartment with her overbearing mother (played by Barbara Hershey) and venturing forth only for company classes and rehearsals. And this, as Ms. Portman told it, was her existence too during the making of “Black Swan.”

“Basically,” she said, “I didn’t do anything except work. There was no, like, meeting up with friends for dinner or going to the movies. We’d do 16-hour days, then I’d go home and work out, because I had to stay in shape, and I’d prepare for the next day’s scenes and then get maybe five hours of sleep. It was really, really extreme.”

Her character, struggling to master the good swan, bad swan dynamic of the ballet’s central role and enduring the emotional manipulations of the company’s Balanchine-like artistic director (played by Vincent Cassel), gradually goes mad — which, in the strange, hermetic little horror-movie world of “Black Swan,” isn’t necessarily a detriment to her performance.

“I’m always very interested in performance,” said Mr. Aronofsky, 41, “and this story is about that, which gives it, I think, a clear connection to ‘The Wrestler,’ ” his 2008 film with Mickey Rourke. “When I finished at the American Film Institute, in my early 20s, I made a list of movies I wanted to make someday, and ‘The Wrestler’ was at the top, and a ballet film may have been the second.”

What attracted him to ballet as a movie subject is “an intensity in it that is so over the top, so overwrought, so melodramatic,” he said. “And the stories of ballets like ‘Swan Lake’ are often based on fairy tales, and they can be really Gothic and really tragic.”

He’s onto something there. Because ballet is a profoundly inefficient narrative medium, the stories have to be fairly simple and stark, as they are in fairy tales. And of course transformation into something that is not quite human (like the “were-swan” here) or even fully inhuman (like the automaton in “Coppelia”) is both inherently scary and, in this peculiar art, weirdly thrilling. The ability to play a seductive mechanical doll or a big beautiful bird is a measure of a ballerina’s virtuosity.

Poor ambitious Nina’s insanity is, in a way, just an occupational hazard: ballet dancers train for years, changing their bodies utterly, so they can get up on a stage and make us believe that they are someone, or something, they’re not. A certain over-the-top-ness is built right in. So Nina’s dancing gets better as she becomes crazier, growing more and more estranged from herself.

“I’d always been interested in doing something with Dostoyevsky’s ‘Double,’ ” Mr. Aronofsky said, “and when I saw ‘Swan Lake’ for the first time, I was blown away that it was one dancer dancing both roles.”

At a certain point the story of “Swan Lake” grafted itself onto a script called “The Understudy,” by Andres Heinz, which was, Mr. Aronofsky said, “set in the Off Broadway theater world and was kind of a combination of ‘The Double’ and ‘All About Eve,’ with a little bit of Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’ in there too.”

After a couple of more writers — first John McLaughlin, then Mark Heyman — and 20 or 30 drafts, Mr. Aronofsky was satisfied that he had a movie he could make, and one that, despite its relatively un-commercial subject matter, audiences might want to see.

“I thought,” he said, “that there hadn’t been many interesting movies about ballet, except for Michael Powell’s ‘Red Shoes.’ Ballet is such a unique world, very sexy and very specific, and I think one of the main reasons people go to the movies is to be taken to places they haven’t seen before.”

As it turned out, getting “Black Swan” onto the screen proved to be much tougher than he’d anticipated, “a super-difficult film to make,” he said, in part because that “very specific” world of ballet proved, at first, to be surprisingly unwelcoming.

“Usually when you say you want to make a film about a particular world, doors open up, you get tremendous access,” Mr. Aronofsky said. “But the ballet world wasn’t like that at all. It’s very insular. And dancers never want to do anything that might in any way interrupt their schedule.”

But he eventually engaged the New York City Ballet principal Benjamin Millepied to choreograph “Swan Lake” for the screen, and Mr. Aronofsky was, he said, pleasantly surprised by how much Ms. Portman was able to do. There are, he said, some 300 visual effects in the picture, but he’d expected to have to use many more.

“Natalie was able to give me a lot of stuff that I was unbelievably excited and impressed by,” he said. “Ninety percent of what you see is Natalie, un-retouched.”

There are remarkably few horror movies about the terror and violence of making art, but “Black Swan” is in that tiny company. (So is “The Red Shoes.”) Ballet, as it happens, is an ideal vehicle for a story about the blood, sweat and madness of creation, and it’s kind of appropriate that was itself something of an ordeal.

“It was a very serious set,” Ms. Portman said, “not a funny, silly set at all.” She paused a few seconds, then added, quietly: “It was scary, disciplined and rigorous, and I think, in a way, that fit into the mindset of the characters.”

Even now she sounded a little awed. Mr. Aronofsky’s film is about a feeling all performers are familiar with, the spooky sense, when you’re in full flight, that you’ve crossed over into the dark territory of dream, or fairy tale, somewhere you haven’t seen before. It’s the exhilaration of losing yourself, and the fear of being lost to yourself forever.

Personal Comment: I think this is the most realistic and positive article I’ve seen about Black Swan set in the compulsive world of ballet with its continual training and quest for perfection of line and technique with the human body. With Portman saying of NYCB dancers:

“almost a religious quality, not only in the deification of Balanchine, but also in all this sort of ritualistic, devotional behavior dancers practice — the repetitive barre work every day, breaking in the toe shoes and sewing the ribbons on and so forth.”

Absolutely! And there’s nothing wrong with that!

“Nina’s insanity is, in a way, just an occupational hazard: ballet dancers train for years, changing their bodies utterly, so they can get up on a stage and make us believe that they are someone, or something, they’re not. A certain over-the-top-ness is built right in.”

I wouldn’t have phrased it quite that way, but he’s right.

“Usually when you say you want to make a film about a particular world, doors open up, you get tremendous access,” Mr. Aronofsky said. “But the ballet world wasn’t like that at all. It’s very insular. And dancers never want to do anything that might in any way interrupt their schedule.”

Schedule conflict is a convenient excuse, but with the exception of cameo roles for established stars ballerina roles in dance films are quite often the kiss of death for a woman wanting a serious career with a national ballet company. There is a feeling that the dancer is taking time from perfecting her art to make a commercial film something a seriously committed dancer wouldn’t do.

“…Ballet is such a unique world, very sexy and very specific, and I think one of the main reasons people go to the movies is to be taken to places they haven’t seen before.”

It will attract a niche market of dance enthusiast and, occult followers but it will need the curious in the general public to be successful. I hope it is a huge success!