Tagline: What if you could live forever?
The Fountain movie storyline. What if you could live forever? The Fountain is an odyssey about one man’s eternal struggle to save the woman he loves. His epic journey begins in 16th-century Spain, where conquistador Tomas (Hugh Jackman) commences his search for the Fountain of Youth, the legendary entity believed to grant immortality.
As modern-day scientist Tommy Creo, he desperately struggles to find a cure for the cancer that is killing his beloved wife, Isabel (Rachel Weisz). Traveling through deep space as a 26th-century astronaut, Tom begins to grasp the mysteries that have consumed him for a millennium. The three stories converge into one truth, as the Thomas of all periods — warrior, scientist, and explorer — comes to terms with life, love, death and rebirth.
At once sweeping and intimate, “The Fountain” is a story about love and coping with mortality, which unfolds over three vastly different time periods. Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky got the idea for his screenplay when he realized that, although many cultures have stories about the quest for eternal life, relatively few films have been made about the search for the Fountain of Youth.
“The desire to live forever is deep in our culture. Every day people are looking for ways to extend life or feel younger,” suggests Aronofsky. “Just look at the popularity of shows like ‘Extreme Makeover’ or ‘Nip/Tuck.’ People are praying to be young and often denying that death is a part of life. Hospitals spend huge sums of money trying to keep people alive. But we’ve become so preoccupied with sustaining the physical that we often forget to nurture the spirit. So that’s one of the central themes I wanted to deal with in the film: Does death make us human, and if we could live forever, would we lose our humanity?”
To construct a story that could effectively communicate that theme would require an innovative concept. “What started out as a rough sketch on a restaurant napkin back in 1999 has been through many incarnations,” says the writer / director. “Darren had this idea of a box-within-a-box-within-a-box-structure before we even knew the name of our lead character,” expands producer Eric Watson.
Indeed Aronofsky found himself inspired. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night and look at my stacks of research and think, ‘I have to make this film; it’s in my blood.’” Aronofsky designed a tale that would unfold in three distinct eras. But with so many incarnations of the Fountain of Youth existing throughout history and mythology, he had to consider which one would best represent the film’s ideologies. Co-story collaborator Ari Handel explains, “As we started to conceive the story we researched Mayan culture. We looked at the Bible, too, and found that, in many narratives, the Fountain of Youth is embodied by something living, something organic or nourishing.”
With that in mind, Aronofsky created the film’s Tree of Life, which serves as the Fountain of Youth in the conquistador’s story. In the 26th century, Tom is traveling to Xibalba, a distant nebula, which becomes the film’s futuristic version of the Fountain.
“One of the first things that attracted me to this script was the spirituality of it,” notes producer Iain Smith. “And because that spirituality isn’t specific to any one belief system, it translates into a kind of magic.” As the various mythologies combine, a new myth is created, one that is both otherworldly and familiar by design.
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The Fountain (2006)
Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, Ellen Burstyn, Mark Margolis, Stephen McHattie, Donna Murphy, Ethan Suplee, Lorne Brass, Abraham Aronofsky, Renee Asofsky, Anish Majumdar
Screenplay by Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel
Production Design by: James Chinlund
Cinematography by: Matthew Libatique
Film Editing by: Jay Rabinowitz
Costume Design by: Renée April
Music by: Clint Mansell
Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: November 22, 2006
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