Darren Aronofsky: ‘Jennifer Lawrence injured herself on set after losing control’

The filmmaker said JLaw got 'emotionally overwhelmed' on the set of Mother! 
The Weekender

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Darren Aronofsky has said his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Lawrence tore her diaphragm while acting in his horror film Mother! because she got “emotionally overwhelmed” and “lost control”.

The Oscar-winning actress, 27, also dislocated a rib as she violently hyperventilated for the scene in the movie, which she described as an allegory for “the rape and torment of Mother Earth”.

The couple split shortly after its release in September, with friends blaming the 21-year age gap.

In an interview for The Economist Radio, Aronofsky, 48, said the injury was the result of Lawrence’s “extreme” immersion in the role, rather than his direction.

'Lost control': Jennifer Lawrence went method for Mother! (Getty Images)
Kevin Winter/Getty Images

He said: “I wasn’t pushing Jennifer on that day, if anything I was pulling her back to remember that we were just making a movie...

“I don’t work well with method actors, I work best with actors who basically when you say ‘cut’ it’s over and the emotion is gone and when I say ‘action’ they’re able to go deep into it.

But part of acting is finding emotions and finding places to go that are extreme because that’s the stories we tell.

“If you look at real human movies you’re looking for true emotions and often characters are in places where extreme things happen to them.

Jennifer Lawrence - style file

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"You approach it with honesty and truth and you are always thinking about safety.”

Aronofsky, whose films include Requiem For A Dream, The Wrestler and Black Swan, told the interviewer, Anne McElvoy, that he had never before experienced a situation on set when an actor had lost control and hurt themselves.

Lawrence, who rose to fame in The Hunger Games films, has said she initially felt “severely miscast” in Mother!.

But at the UK premiere in Leicester Square last September she said she had been able to “pull out this personality that I didn’t know existed.”

She added: “I tore my diaphragm hyperventilating. People thought I was beaten up so I want to clear it up that I did it to myself. It was my own doing.”

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