Who

Aronofsky is the director of such feel-good, fun-for-the-whole-family films as Pi, the traumatic heroin saga Requiem for a Dream, and The Wrestler.  His fiancée is Rachel Weisz.

Backstory

After making acclaimed student films at Harvard and at AFI film school, Brooklyn native Aronofsky began working on his first feature, Pi, in 1996. When he ran out of money midway through production, he and his producer asked everyone they knew to chip in $100 to help finish the project. A black-and-white brainteaser about mathematics and madness starring Aronofsky's Harvard classmate Sean Gullette, the film became an art house sensation upon its release in 1998: Produced for $60,000, it was eventually purchased for $1 million and Aronofsky's friends received $150 back for their contributions. In 2000, Aronofsky followed up with a relentlessly grim adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.'s novel Requiem for a Dream, a story of four lives wrecked by drug addiction. Ellen Burstyn was nominated for an Oscar for her performance, and the film also received unofficial but universal recognition as the Most Depressing Film Ever to Star a Wayans Brother.

Of note

Aronofsky's first foray into Hollywood filmmaking led to his first major letdown: In 2002, his big budget adaptation of The Fountain collapsed after Brad Pitt walked off the set. Half the movie's budget evaporated—along with a 10-story Aztec temple built in Australia—but Aronofsky stuck with it and six years after Requiem, the director released a Pitt-less version of the film starring Hugh Jackman. Unfortunately, the $35 million movie was an unmitigated bomb—it netted a paltry $10 million at the box office and was booed at the Venice Film Festival. Nonetheless, Aronofsky rebounded in 2008 with the release of The Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei. The film became a critical darling, and led to Oscar nominations for both Rourke and Tomei. Aronofsky's now hoping to follow up the success with his next projects: boxing flick The Fighter, in which Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon are slated to star; a psychological thriller set in the world of ballet, Black Swan; and Riverview Towers, a series he's developing for AMC about paranormal activity in a set of apartment buildings.

Personal

The director is engaged to English beauty (and Fountain star) Rachel Weisz. The two had a son, Henry Chance, in the spring of 2006. They divide their time between a flat in London and an apartment on East 11th Street that they purchased for $3.4 million in 2005.

True story

Before the updated Batman Begins was made by director Christopher Nolan, Warner Brothers asked Aronofsky to take a crack at the franchise. His vision? "A hard, R-rated Batman" with "no super-powers, no villains, just corruption." Not surprisingly, the studio passed.