The Fountain's pen

It's 11:30 on a Wednesday morning in November, and I'm sitting in a café in lower Manhattan with Ari Handel. About 50 blocks uptown, the first paid showing of The Fountain, the film based on a story Handel co-wrote with Darren Aronofsky, has been underway for an hour. The film -- which features a scientist, played by Hugh Jackman, and his wife, played by Rachel Weisz -- is the first Handel, 37, has been involved in. But he's calm and collected as he orders a quiche Lorraine. "It's a strange thing," he muses. "The work has been done for a long time. There's a delay between when the world sees it and you've completed it. So now it's the anticipation of what people I know are going to think. How is the world going to react?"It's a feeling not unlike what Handel might have felt as a graduate student in neuroscience at New York University when a journal was about to publish one of his papers on the role of the substantia nigra in saccadic eye movements. The work those papers were based on, of course, would have been performed months or years before. On the other hand, the responses, at least on their surface, are different in the two worlds. "In the scientific world, you get more objective feedback," says Handel, who finished his PhD in 2000. "There's a way of evaluating things based on standards. There are reviewers, and citations. In film, there are critics, and the amount of money the movie makes -- neither of which is really the point."Handel has been trying to bridge the gap between those two worlds since graduating from college at Harvard in 1991. Handel and Aronofsky met during their sophomore year. Aronofsky was studying film, and Handel was studying Russian literature, before he made a switch to biology and neuroscience. One of Aronofsky's roommates, Dan Schrecker, was studying animation. "He would get us to do his work for him, coloring in strips, moving clay," says Handel. "For me it was a break from orgo or whatever, to go move some clay around for three hours. It didn't occur to me that I was interested in working in film."Film followed him around, however. Immediately after college, he did an internship at NOVA. He found himself among "very good filmmakers and documentarians" -- who would all turn to him, because of his BA in science, when they had questions. He then went to work at TERC (Technical Education Research Centers), which created projects that allowed students to collaborate on science. The experiences made him want to become a journalist, a teacher, or someone else who could build a bridge between the general public and the scientific community. He got what he calls the "crazy notion" of going to graduate school in science to do that. Everyone told him it was a bad idea, but he did it anyway. He chose neuroscience "because if you understand that, you understand the human experience." Meanwhile, the rest of the group that would eventually work together on The Fountain was off studying film: Schrecker went to study interactive telecommunications at NYU, and Aronofsky earned an MFA in directing from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. They would periodically all get together to talk informally about ideas in New York when Aronofsky was visiting. Aronofsky enjoyed critical success with 1998's Pi and Requiem for a Dream (2000), but movies were still just a hobby -- if that -- for Handel.When Handel finished his PhD, he realized he had no clue what he wanted to do with his career. Almost on a lark, he started playing with ideas for a new film of Aronofsky's involving one man's search for the Fountain of Youth, told in three time periods: In the 16th century, the man is a Spanish conquistador; in the 21st, he's a scientist; and in the 26th, he's an astronaut. "I became the point person for talking to scientists, historians, and astronomers," he says. That would sometimes mean going through five books in a weekend and finding the ten paragraphs of interest, then sending them to AronofskyOther times, it meant scouting cancer and neurobiology labs, or observing human surgeries. In the film, scientist Tommy Creo injects a substance derived from a tree directly into the brains of macaques with brain tumors. Macaque operations were from a world Handel knew, but the rest of the team didn't. His job was to translate academic language into film language -- and translate the world of the lab into the world of film. "Meanwhile, I was always looking at what the set decorator might want," he says. He would ask a scientist to show him the piece of equipment in the lab that most excited him, and would often be shown an important but boring-looking box. Then he would gently suggest that when the rest of the crew showed up, the scientist should show the decorator his sub-zero freezer. After some puzzled looks, scientists generally got it.The walk-throughs helped scientists become more comfortable working with the filmmakers. "There are two kinds of scientists in film," Handel notes. "One is a negative image, either megalomaniacal or short-sighted. The other is a positive image, Dr. Who or 10,000 Years to Earth, the scientist who is a little bit smarter than the average person, and not swayed by their emotions...It's very rare to see a scientist presented as a human being with the full range of emotions a person has." Creo, played in The Fountain by Jackman, experiences a wide range of emotions, mostly centered on his wife, Izzi (Weisz). Izzi suffers from a terminal brain tumor, which drives Creo to change the focus of his work. At first, Handel wondered how realistic such a shift would be. "As I spoke to scientists, I realized that's a common story," Handel says. "I would be happy if people, and particularly scientists, feel that science was presented here -- given that it is fiction -- as relatively realistic and that the character is human," he adds. "I don't think that we see that very often."Still, the film is "not a documentary on science," he says. "It's a fictional film. In a film, you have to create an entire reality. The closer it's grounded in and correct to true reality, the more coherent it's going to feel." The reason he and the team "tried to get the science right, or close to right, or in the spirit of right, is because we thought it would make a better film." Aronofsky, he says, is "very interested in knowing what's real. Where things deviate from reality, that's by choice."The film took six years to make and was originally scheduled to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. When the project was shelved in 2002, just weeks before filming was set to begin in Australia, Handel joined Protozoa Pictures to help reinvent the project. The film uses no computer-generated imagery, a point Aronofsky took pains to make at the screening of the film I saw a week before I met Handel. When Aronofsky wanted to recreate the look of a distant nebula as a 26th-century astronaut inspired by David Bowie's "Space Oddity," aka Major Tom, he turned to time-lapse photos of yeast growing. Peter Parks, a biologist turned award-winning microphotographer, provided those images. Handel and Aronofsky are working on a new project, which Handel says he can't say much about. Visiting labs, he sometimes feels pangs, but he's not going back to the bench anytime soon. "Maybe one of the reasons I'm not a practicing scientist is that I liked lab meeting more than I liked the lab," he suggests. And he's hoping the next film doesn't take six years: "Making a film should not take as long as it takes to write a thesis," he laughs. Our lunch ends, and then he's off to check preliminary results -- the first reactions to The Fountain.Ivan Oransky ioransky@the-scientist.comLinks within this article:The Fountain http://www.thefountainmovie.comA. Handel, P.W. Glimcher, "Response properties of saccade-related burst neurons in the central mesencephalic reticular formation," J Neurophysiol 1997 Oct;78(4):2164-75. http://www.the-scientist.com/pubmed/9325383TERC http://www.terc.eduPi http://www.pithemovie.comRequiem for a Dream http://www.requiemforadream.comProtozoa Pictures http://www.protozoa.comPeter Parks Gordon Sawyer Award http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/2003/03.12.17.html

The Fountain's pen

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