finishing NYU's graduate filmmaking pro-
gram, he made a feature, Origin of the
Species, which he had not written. "I felt
after directing that film I needed to con-
centrate on scripts that fit me more," he ex-
plains, "and that was why I wrote it in my
little East Village tenement apartment."
The Tenant -- and considers "that psycho-
logical spiral Polanski does so well" to be one
of the major influences on The Understudy. "I
watched Repulsion and just could not get it
out of my head for weeks. Also, right around
that time, I read `The Double' by Dostoevsky
and, all of the sudden, I found a story," he
says. "You just feel it in your bones when you
have a good story, when you can kind of see
the film already from beginning to end."
ries. The script opened with a murder, which
created the opportunity for a young actress
to step into the lead of the show. While a de-
tective investigates the mystery, the per-
former becomes increasingly paranoid that
her understudy -- a character designed to be
played by the same actress, according to
Heinz's original vision -- is trying to murder
her and take her part.
of the ballerina world that he was fascinated
with and, specifically `Swan Lake,' because al-
ready in our first meeting he had that idea of
how he wanted to rewrite this," Heinz recalls.
Pictures was unable to make the director's
deal, so development on The Understudy
moved forward without him. Heinz esti-
mates that he spent a year and a half mak-
fonso Cuarón, none of which factored into
what Black Swan would ultimately become.
something set in the off-Broadway world. For
one, there are no understudies in the ballet
world," says Aronofsky, whose obsession with
making a ballet thriller remained unabated.
Instead, the director turned his attention to
The Fountain, a passion project with its own
gauntlet of setbacks and obstacles, but not be-
fore calling in another writer, John McLaugh-
lin, to try his hand at Black Swan.
pilot called Riverview Towers, about a haunted
housing complex, and was tasked with trying
to translate The Understudy to the world of
ballet. Together, he and Aronofsky spent a lot