“Here’s a perfect example of trying to mix styles. We had Tyrone using a term li

“Here’s a perfect example of trying to mix styles. We had Tyrone using a term like ‘dynamite’, which is such a Jimmy Walker, 1970s term, yet he’s wearing very very 90s clothes. Just really mixing the aesthetics, because we felt that slang, like clothing styles, comes in and out of style, so we can mix them all together with modern technology, with modern day cars, and just sort of hopefully try and create a timeless feel.

Because ultimately, this film is about addiction. It’s about the human struggle with addiction, which we felt was an age old story that went all the way back in time, all through human history, and had no time period. And probably was a struggle that when we were amoeba in the primordial soup, we were searching for carbon molecules to get high off of. And this film was about how you can use anything to get high off of, how anything can be used to fill that hole.

Ultimately,Requiem for a Dream is about the lengths people go to to escape their reality, and that when you escape your reality, you create a hole in your present, because you’re not there, you’re chasing off a pipe dream in the future. And then you’ll use anything to fill that vacuum. So it doesn’t matter if it’s coffee, if it’s tobacco, if it’s TV, if it’s heroin, if it’s ultimately hope, you’ll use anything to fill that hole. And when you feed the hole, just like the hole on Jared’s arm, it’ll grow and grow and grow, until eventually, it will devour you.”

-Darren Aronofsky, from his commentary for his film Requiem for a Dream