All tag results for 'black swan'

Darren Aronofsky has had just about enough of the speculation that Natalie Portman didn’t do much dancing in Black Swan, and that her dance double Sarah Lane was the true dancing star of the film.

Said Darren:

"Here is the reality. I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math that's 80% Natalie Portman. What about duration? The shots that feature the double are wide shots and rarely play for longer than one second. There are two complicated longer dance sequences that we used face replacement. Even so, if we were judging by time over 90% would be Natalie Portman.”

He continued:

“And to be clear Natalie did dance on pointe in pointe shoes. If you look at the final shot of the opening prologue, which lasts 85 seconds, and was danced completely by Natalie, she exits the scene on pointe. That is completely her without any digital magic. I am responding to this to put this to rest and to defend my actor. Natalie sweated long and hard to deliver a great physical and emotional performance. And I don't want anyone to think that's not her they are watching. It is."

While Sarah Lane was still integral to the film, we can finally rest knowing that Natalie Portman is a total badass dancer.

Phew!

[Image via Adriana M. Barraza/WENN.com.]

Tags: ballet, black swan, dance

While Natalie Portman trained tirelessly to learn how to do ballet and deserves the praise she has gotten for the role, there’s an unsung hero who hasn’t gotten the praise she deserves — Sarah Lane, Portman’s dance double who performed a large amount of the dancing seen on camera.

The studio pretty much tried to erase her performance from the record. They even asked her to stop giving interviews leading up to the Oscars.

Said Sarah:

“They were trying to create this façade that she had become a ballerina in a year and a half. So I knew they didn’t want to publicize anything about me.”

And to top it all off, Natalie Portman didn’t include Sarah in her list of people she thanked during her Oscar acceptance speech (although we can let her slide on that one — it would be hard to remember names on stage in front of millions of people).

This is sort of a shame. We’re not saying that Natalie Portman deserves any less credit for her performance — just that Sarah deserves more!

[Image via Sebastian Kim.]

Tags: ballet, black swan, dance, double

It’s been well-documented that the actresses in Black Swan were put through extremely intense eating and workout patterns during the shoot. But what we find equally interesting is what they splurged on after production ended!

"It was just pasta and bread and pizza all the time," said the star of the film, Natalie Portman.

Ha!

She deserved some carbs after the training she went through.

"Working five to eight hours a day for a year … it's what real dancers live through," she says. "It was an amazing experience, but definitely a difficult one."

It’s truly amazing what she put herself through for this role!

[Image via L. Gallo/WENN.com.]

Tags: black swan, bread, diet, food, pizza

We gain more and more respect for Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis’ with each new story we hear about the training they did for Black Swan.

Mila Kunis said she started training the day after she got the part:

"The preparation was, get as skinny as you possibly can as fast as you can and then learn to get en pointe while doing it. I got the part, let's say on a Wednesday. Thursday morning I went into the ballet studio in L.A. with Alexandra Blacker who was my ballet instructor. [She] was 20 years old at the time and had already broken her back and had fractured ribs and things. I went in there, started working with her for seven days a week, five hours a day and was put on a 1,200-calorie diet for a total of five or six months."

Mila said that she only got one break over the entire six-month period.

"I did get one day off, and that was my birthday; Alexandra made me a root beer float."

She didn’t even get a day off for the Emmy’s, and had to get up for a 6 AM training session the day of!

We are absolutely going to see this movie! Not only because it looks AWESOME, but because we want to see what these women can do after their crazy training!!

[Image via Apega/WENN.com.]

Tags: ballet, black swan, dancing, training

Natalie Portman recently revealed that the director of Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky, forbid the cast and crew from using plastic bottles while on set. He instead supplied eco-friendly bottles and set up water stations.

Said Portman:

“Darren is a huge environmentalist and talks about it all the time. He made sure that there were no water bottles anywhere on set which is a huge deal. We should not have water bottles anywhere and we were drinking tons of water, obviously, because we’re dancing and expending so much energy.”

She continued:

“Everyone was given containers and there were things to fill it up on the set. At lunch every day, instead of having Styrofoam which most movies have, we got eco-containers instead of just wasting stuff that’s poisonous.”

Why isn’t every director doing this?!!

[Image via WENN.]

Tags: black swan, eco friendly, water

From what we can tell, the Black Swan was a crazy intense movie to shoot.

Both Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis had to go to extreme measures to get into their characters. For her role, Mila slimmed down to less than 95 pounds, which she says her family wasn’t happy about.

"My mom freaked out. Everybody started panicking. She was like, 'You have to promise me this isn't going to affect you.' I was like, 'I promise it won't, but it might take me a little time to be OK with having a little more fat on me.'"

Kunis says that she didn’t like being so skinny, and was happy to gain the weight back.

"I could see why this industry is so f**ked up, because at 95 pounds, I would literally look at myself in the mirror and I was like, 'Oh my God! I had no shape, no boobs, no as… All you saw was bone. I was like, 'This looks gross'. But in photographs and on film, it looked amazing… “

She continued:

"It took me five months to lose 20 pounds, but it took me just five days - days! - to gain it all back."

We’re glad she gained it back! That’s tooo skinny!

[Image via Apega/WENN.com.]

Tags: black swan, skinny, weight

Natalie Portman spent months training in dance studios for her role as a ballerina the film, Black Swan. But due to her training she became extremely skinny, and the director of the film, Darren Aronofsky, urged her to start eating.

Said Aronofsky:

"[Portman] took [the role] very seriously. These dancers get really, really skinny. At a certain point I looked at [her] back and she was so skinny and so… I was like, 'Natalie, start eating.' “

He continued:

"I made sure she had a bunch of food in her trailer."

While Natalie was completely dedicated to the diet, she was super excited to eat normal foods again once shooting ended.

"The (day after the shoot ended) I was like, pasta, pasta, pasta! No working out. It was pretty immediate. I was ready to leave the ballet life. I was like, 'Please don't let there be re-shoots for this because I don't think I could get back into the costumes!'"

We can’t wait to see this movie!

[Image via WENN.]

Tags: ballerina, black swan, diet, skinny