An assignment for LIS 518
Introduction
In 2001 Darren Aronofky's The Fountain was going to be a big budget Hollywood movie with a huge budget. Then in 2002, The Fountain was no longer a movie but a graphic novel and then finally in 2005 The Fountain was both a movie and a graphic novel (Weiland). Unlike the relationship between most movie/graphic novel, The Fountain graphic novel was not an adaptation of the movie, nor was the movie an adaptation of the graphic novel, they are both separate entities that draw from the same source material, and while they both similar in terms of narrative, story and characters, they also have some interesting differences that show what makes each medium unique.
Inspired by the high concepts of the popular movie The Matrix, Arnofsky wanted to create a ground breaking science fiction movie that would impress audiences the same way Star Wars, Space and Odyssey 2001 had done for previous generations. The result of his work was the original vision for The Fountain which was a huge Hollywood blockbuster with a budget of over 70 million dollars. Unfortunately, Aronofky's the original incarnation of The Fountain was not to be. Despite having spent millions of dollars on the movie building an elaborate set a dispute over the script led to the financiers of the movie pulling their funding shortly before shooting was supposed to start (Silberman).
The Graphic Novel
Fortunately for the story, Aronofsky was well aware that there was a good chance that The Fountain could never get made, so in act of foresight he ensured that he owned the "graphic novel" rights to his movie. Since the movie deal was through Warner Brothers, one of the stipulations for the graphic novel rights was that Aronofsky had to give DC comics (a subsidiary of Warner Brothers) the first crack The Fountain. As a result Aronofsky was put into contact with Karen Berger, the editor in chief of Vertigo comics who in turn recommended Kent Williams for the graphic novel adaptation of The Fountain.
Aronofksy was drawn to William's fully painted style of work, and felt that his art would be perfect for The Fountain., of getting Williams on board for project was fairly painless: "[Karen Berger] suggested the painter Kent Williams to me ," Aronofksy would later write in the afterword to The Fountain. "I didn't know his work, but the more examples of his work I looked at, the more excited I got. I gave him a ring. The day after I sent the script, he called. Kent got it, and he wanted to do it." (You can see a preview of the comic here)
The New Movie
However, Aronofksy was not content to allow The Fountain to die as a movie, and as the graphic novel started taking shape he was inspired to take another crack at the movie. "As pages started to be created, I stopped being able to sleep. One night, I snuck out of bed and flipped on the light in my office […] I realized that this story was not going to exit my veins until I did it. (Aronofsky)." Aronofky then went on to redo the script for his movie for a much smaller budget, was able to complete his new vision of The Fountain in time to be released the same time the graphic novel version was published.
The end result was two works based on the same source material, yet with two different interpretations. While the story for both works are quite similar, the presentation and story telling provides an interesting opportunity to compare the two mediums. Both comics and movies are usually created with a script used to direct the story, acting and narrative, yet once the process of creating is set in motion the end results for the audience can be quite different.
The Contrast between the two works.
The legendary comic book writer Alan Moore has an interesting take on how people digest comics and movies:
"So perhaps it is because of the combination of words and images in a readable form that comics does have this unique power. Now, of course, movies are a combination of words and images, but they have a completely different structure and completely different way of working. With a movie you are being dragged through the scenario at a relentless 24 frames a second. With a comic book you can dart your eyes back to a previous panel, or you can flip back a couple of pages to check whether there is some reference in the dialog to a scene that happened earlier (Moore)."
The distinction that Moore makes between comics and movies certainly applies to the two different adaptations of The Fountain. Both the movie and graphic novel are wrapped in a complex story that involves meta-narrative and three different time periods that are tangentially connected. The narrative flows unpredictably into each time period with little warning leaving the audience to piece together what is happening. One distinction between the movie and the graphic novel is that the movie skips between time periods much more often compared to the graphic novel which only visits each time period once. In the movie it is necessary to bring the audience back and forth between time periods to guide them through the narrative, whereas in the comic the audience is left to jump between the pages in order to construct the narrative for themselves.
A common theme throughout out the movie is of the various characters played by Hugh Jackman throughout the various time periods. Throughout the movie he is seen moving slowly towards a light, perhaps to remind the audience of the connections between each of the time
periods. However, no such theme exists in the graphic novel, although the art in each time period is quite different. The art in the past and future are lavishly painted, whereas the art set in the present are crudely drawn with only two or three colors.
Another distinction between the comic and the movie and the comic is the use of sound and music. The soundtrack for The Fountain was the result of a collaboration between Scottish instrumental band Mogwai, alternative classical group Kronos Quartet and composer Clint Mansell. The end result is a moody soundtrack that extenuates the intense emotions the characters are going through while at the same time drawing out emotions from the audience, a subtle element that is absent from the graphic novel.
The cost of making a movie compared to creating a graphic novel is also apparent between the versions of The Fountain. One of the main failings of the original incarnation of The Fountain was the amount of money that would be needed to create the Mayan battle sequences. In the subsequent movie version, the huge elaborate sets were dispensed with in favor of creating the scenes on a soundstage using blue screen technology. The end result in the movie is nowhere near as grand as what was originally envisioned, this is known because in the graphic novel an epic battle is depicted featuring hundreds of combatants with no expense spared.
Ultimately, the graphic novel and movie versions of The Fountain are great examples of two similar yet different mediums. Ari Handel, a producer for The Fountain sums up the contrast between the two versions best:
"There's definitely some overlap [between the versions], but that group is going to be happy to have both. I think it's different enough just because Kent is such a stylized artist and Darren's such a stylized film maker, they have such distinct voices in those fields that you're going to get so much of their own take ."(Weiland)
Works Cited
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Aronofsky, Darren., writer. The Fountain. Illus. Kent Williams.
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Fountain, The. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Perf. Hugh Jackman, Racel Weis. Warner Brothers, 2007. DVD.
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Moore, Alan. “Legendary Comics Writer on Alan Moore on Superheroes, the League and Making Magic.” Wired. com. By Adam Rogers. 23 February 2009. Web. 15 October. 2009
- Silberman, Steve. “The Outsider [interview with Darren Aronofsky]”. Wired.com n.d. web. 18 October 2009
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Weiland, Jonah. “Talking The Fountain Graphic Novel with Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel”Comic Book Resources. 6 April 2005. Web. 18 October 2009
