Yesterday we touched on the controversy over how much of Natalie Portman’s dancing in Black Swan was performed by a stunt double, a topic we quickly abandoned in favor of a
“They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” says Natalie Lane. “It is demeaning to the profession and not just to me. I’ve been doing this for 22 years…. Can you become a concert pianist in a year and a half, even if you’re a movie star?”
“I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff,” says Lane. “I do give her a lot of credit because in a year and a half she lost a lot of weight and she really tried to go method and get into a dancers head and really feel like a ballet dancer.”
If I could paraphrase, “Meee-yow.” Here’s Darren Aronofsky’s two cents:
“Here is the reality. I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math that’s 80% Natalie Portman. What about duration? The shots that feature the double are wide shots and rarely play for longer than one second. There are two complicated longer dance sequences that we used face replacement. Even so, if we were judging by time over 90% would be Natalie Portman.
And to be clear Natalie did dance on pointe in pointe shoes. If you look at the final shot of the opening prologue, which lasts 85 seconds, and was danced completely by Natalie, she exits the scene on pointe. That is completely her without any digital magic.” [EW]
(*yawns, suppesses urge to wank dismissively*) And here’s Kunis’s:
“Natalie danced her a– off,” says Kunis. “I think it’s unfortunate that this is coming out and taking attention away from [the praise] Natalie deserved and got.”
Kunis also says Portman has been honest about how much of the demanding footwork she was — and wasn’t — able to do. “She’ll tell you [that], no, she was not on pointe when she did a fouetté [turn]. No one’s going to deny that. But she did do every ounce of every one of her dances,” she says. “[Lane] wasn’t used for everything. It was more like a safety net. If Nat wasn’t able to do something, you’d have a safety net. The same thing that I had — I had a double as a safety net. We all did. No one ever denied it.”
(*drives by in dismissive wankmobile, to thunderous mouth farts*) WWWHHHHHHHOOOOoooooooo caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrresssss……
Hollywood gets so caught up in trying to trick us into believing something that they forget it’s a trick. Letting Marky Mark train to be a boxer for a year and a half probably kept them from what would’ve been a better decision, just using Micky Ward’s actual fight footage instead. Natalie Portman isn’t a ballerina, Jeremy Renner can’t defuse bombs, Sandra Bullock is a terrible football coach, John Wayne despised horses, and Santa Claus is a fat, made-up child molester. It’s make believe. We get it. In show business, the only sure thing is that Steven Seagal: 110% law man.