Interview: Mark Heyman (Co-writer of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan)

People say you don’t go to film school just for the education, that the connections are sometimes even more important. For Mark Heyman, that was definitely the case. Sure, he’s proven himself a skilled producer, a great development executive, and now screenwriter, but had he not been forced to hang around class late one day, he’d never have met the reigning national champ of filmmaking Darren Aronofsky. Yes, I do believe that the really good people out there will succeed in this business with or without the right partnerships, but Heyman’s serendipitous beginnings with Aronofsky cannot be ignored when it comes to discussing his career.

In less than 10 years, Heyman has gone from unpaid personal assistant to the director, to producer and writer of what should be considered not only the finest film of Aronofsky’s career, but best of this decade (despite this decade being really young, I stand by that assertion). Heyman cut his teeth on The Fountain, then got his first producer credit on The Wrestler, but all the while had Black Swan in his back pocket.

This project has been in the works for the length of Heyman’s employment with Protozoa Pictures. Aronofsky and partner/producer Scott Franklin purchased the rights to The Understudy, a spec script by UCLA grad student Andres Heinz, about 10 years ago, back when it was about understudies in off-Broadway theater. A few years later, Aronofsky decided he wanted to place it in the world of ballet, and got Natalie Portman loosely attached. A few years after that, he decided to give Heyman a crack at the script, and along with co-writer John McLaughlin, a few years after that, voila, we have a classic.

Today, Fox releases Black Swan on DVD/Blu-Ray. Here’s my interview with Mark Heyman who is currently penning Machine Man.