Why are so many young, talented filmmakers drawn to drug movies, particularly heroin movies?
At this point, heroin movies are almost their own genre. “Requiem for a Dream” is not about heroin or about drugs. In fact, I was never interested in making a movie about junkies — I find junkies really boring and uninteresting. What was amazing to me about the novel, and what I tried to do in the movie, was the counterpoint of this Sara Goldfarb story, which completely deconstructed the movie as a drug movie. The Harry-Tyrone-Marion story is a very traditional heroin story. But putting it side by side with the Sara story, we suddenly say, “Oh, my God, what is a drug?” What Selby is saying is that anything can be a drug — it doesn’t have to be smack. It could be TV, it can be coffee, it can be chocolate, it can be food, it can be hope, it could be love, it could be sex. The idea that the same inner monologue goes through a person’s head when they’re trying quit drugs as with cigarettes, as when they’re trying to not eat food so they can lose 20 pounds, was really fascinating to me. I
