Director Showdown – Round 1, Match 4 – Sarah Polley vs. Darren Aronofsky
August 21, 2024
Welcome back to the fourth episode of Director Showdown! In this series, we pit 64 of the biggest directors to debut since 1998 against each other in an elimination bracket to determine who will be crowned the greatest director of the last 26 years!
In the last episode, we talked about ensemble films centred around crime, and the way a skilled director is able to bring large casts of characters to vivid life on screen. With Steve McQueen’s Widows up against Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, it was Iñárritu who ultimately came out on top, earning his place in the second round of our Director Showdown! But who will he face in Round 2?
Born in Toronto in 1979, Sarah Polley started as an actress before moving to directing, starring in the likes of The Sweet Hereafter, Go, and Zack Snyder’s directorial debut Dawn of the Dead. In 2022, she wrote and directed Women Talking — which we covered on the show back in Season 4, Episode 11 — for which she won her first Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Before Women Talking, Polley’s last narrative feature was Take This Waltz, a drama set in Toronto’s Little Portugal neighbourhood, featuring Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen as a couple in a rough spot in their relationship.
Facing off against Polley is one of the boldest filmmakers alive, Darren Aronofsky! Making his debut with the film Pi, during our cutoff year of 1998, Aronofsky has gone on to widespread acclaim and awards attention, with a slew of provocative films including Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan, and The Whale. His films have regularly been nominated for acting Oscars, with The Wrestler and The Whale in particular breathing new life into the careers of Mickey Rourke and Brendan Fraser (and Fraser taking home the statuette to boot). In 2017, hot off the heels of his biblical thriller Noah, Aronofsky would make another biblical horror film, mother!, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem as stewards of a house that becomes suddenly and inexplicably popular.
Both Take This Waltz and mother! centre around relationships, though what those relationships say and symbolize is, in a few words, quite different. How do Polley and Aronofsky use these devices, and how do the films around them hold up? In this episode, we discuss the benefits of audacity and the merits of nuance in filmmaking. Tune in as we discuss Take This Waltz and mother!
Joining us on today’s episode is Mark Morgan, previously heard on Season 4, Episode 23: Alien. Mark is a part of the Academy of Death Racers, which hosts a yearly online film festival, as well as an awards show early in the year to correspond with the Oscars! While tickets for this year’s festival aren’t available yet, we encourage any listeners to follow aodr.net for news as it comes out!
This episode was inspired by Rotten Tomatoes’ Best Director Showdown, which was conducted among RT users over the summer of 2023. The results of that competition are summarized in this article.
Special thanks this week to our good friend Cris, who made the cover art for this episode! Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Letterboxd to see more of her artwork, film opinions/reviews, or both!
