Building on that, how was it at Venice and getting the Golden Lion?
ARONOFSKY: To be honest we finished the film two days before. And about two weeks before we were thinking about pulling out. Not because we weren’t going to finish but because I wasn’t sure the Venice crowd would go for it. It’s a small film and they like literary efforts it seems like. Everyone dreams about winning a gold medal but to be honest, I never, ever dreamt that the Golden Lion would be possible. I didn’t even fantasize about it. I just thought “OK, we’ll go, and hopefully survive and get some good notices internationally and maybe might get recognized” because I knew that Mickey was doing some good work but it was a complete surprise. I remember the first thing that happened was that we went out to lunch after the judges had seen the film and we were at lunch with one of the distributors and she got a phone call and she said the jury really liked it. So I thought, that’s cool. I still never put it together of what that meant because she kind of slipped it. But then we had a
