Saosin Tattoo: Natalie Portman

Black Swan is a 2010 American film directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, and Mila Kunis. Variously described as a psychological thriller or a psychological horror film, its plot revolves around a production of Swan Lake by a prestigious New York City ballet company. The production requires a ballerina to play both the innocent White Swan and the sensual Black Swan. One dancer, Nina (Portman), is a perfect fit for the White Swan, while Lily (Kunis) has a personality that matches the Black Swan. When the two compete for the parts, Nina finds a dark side to herself.

Aronofsky conceived the premise by connecting his viewings of an actual production of Swan Lake with an unrealized screenplay about understudies and the notion of being haunted by a double, similar to the folklore surrounding doppelgängers. The director also considered Black Swan a companion piece to his 2008 film The Wrestler, with both films involving demanding performances for different kinds of art. He and Portman first discussed the project in 2000, and after a brief attachment to Universal Pictures, Black Swan was produced in New York City in 2009 by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Portman and Kunis trained in ballet for several months prior to filming and notable figures from the ballet world helped with film production to shape the ballet presentation. The film premiered as the opening film for the 67th Venice International Film Festival on September 1, 2010. It had a limited release in the United States starting December 3, 2010 and a nationwide release on December 17.

Black Swan: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack marks the fifth consecutive collaboration between Aronofsky and English composer Clint Mansell. Mansell attempted to score the film based on Tchaikovsky's ballet,but with radical changes to the music.Because of the use of Tchaikovsky's music the score was deemed ineligible to be entered into the 2010 Academy Awards for Best Original Score.The film also featured various new pieces of music by English production duo The Chemical Brothers, although they're not featured on the official soundtrack.Black Swan had its world premiere as the opening film at the 67th Venice Film Festival on September 1, 2010. It received a standing ovation whose length Variety said made it "one of the strongest Venice openers in recent memory".The festival's artistic director Marco Mueller had chosen Black Swan over The American (starring George Clooney) for opening film, saying, "[It] was just a better fit... Clooney is a wonderful actor, and he will always be welcome in Venice. But it was as simple as that."Black Swan screened in competition and is the third consecutive film directed by Aronofsky to premiere at the festival, following The Fountain and The Wrestler.In addition, Black Swan was one of seven films nominated for the Queer Lion prize, to be awarded to the best film with "homosexual themes or queer interests",though En el futuro (In The Future) by Argentinian director Mauro Andrizzi won the prize.Black Swan was presented in a sneak screening at the Telluride Film Festival on September 5, 2010.It also had a Gala screening at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival later in the month.In October 2010, Black Swan was screened at the New Orleans Film Festival,the Austin Film Festival,and the BFI London Film Festival.In November 2010, the film was screened at American Film Institute's AFI Fest in Los Angeles and the Denver Film Festival.The release of Black Swan in the United Kingdom was brought forward to 21st January. According to The Independent, the film is one of "the most highly anticipated" of late 2010. The newspaper compared it to the 1948 ballet film The Red Shoes in having "a nightmarish quality ... of a dancer consumed by her desire to dance".

Darren Aronofsky first became interested in ballet when his sister studied dance at the High School of Performing Arts in New York City. The basic idea for the film started when he hired screenwriters to rework a screenplay called The Understudy, which was about off-Broadway actors and explored the notion of being haunted by a double. Aronofsky said the screenplay had elements of the film All About Eve, Roman Polanski's film The Tenant, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novella The Double. The director had also seen numerous productions of Swan Lake, and he connected the duality of the White Swan and the Black Swan to his script.When researching for production of Black Swan, he found ballet to be "a very insular world" whose dancers were "not impressed by movies". Regardless, the director found active and inactive dancers to share their experiences with him. He also stood backstage to see the Bolshoi Ballet perform at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.Aronofsky called Black Swan a companion piece to his previous film The Wrestler, recalling one of his early projects about a love affair between a wrestler and a ballerina. He eventually separated the wrestling and the ballet worlds as "too much for one movie". He compared the two films: "Wrestling some consider the lowest art—if they would even call it art—and ballet some people consider the highest art. But what was amazing to me was how similar the performers in both of these worlds are. They both make incredible use of their bodies to express themselves."About the psychological thriller nature of Black Swan, actress Natalie Portman compared the film's tone to Polanski's 1968 film Rosemary's Baby,while Aronofsky said Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976) were "big influences" on the final film.Actor Vincent Cassel also compared Black Swan to Polanski's early works and additionally compared it to David Cronenberg's early works.

Aronofsky and Portman first discussed the ballet film in 2000, though the script was yet to be written.He told her about the love scene between competing ballet dancers, and Portman recalled, "I thought that was very interesting because this movie is in so many ways an exploration of an artist's ego and that narcissistic sort of attraction to yourself and also repulsion with yourself."On the decade's wait before production, she said, "The fact that I had spent so much time with the idea ... allowed it to marinate a little before we shot."When Aronofsky proposed a detailed outline of Black Swan to Universal Pictures, the studio decided to fast-track development of the project in January 2007.The project did not come together at the studio, and Aronofsky would go on to shoot The Wrestler instead. After finishing The Wrestler in 2008, he asked Mark Heyman, who had worked for him on the film, to write Black Swan.By June 2009, Universal had placed the project in turnaround, generating attention from other studios and specialty divisions, particularly with actress Portman attached to star.Black Swan began development under Protozoa Pictures and Overnight Productions, the latter financing the film. In July 2009, Kunis was cast.Fox Searchlight Pictures became the distributor for Black Swan. The film was given a production budget of $10–12 million, and principal photography began in New York City toward the end of 2009. Aronofsky filmed Black Swan with a muted palette and a grainy style intended to be similar to The Wrestler.Part of filming took place at the Performing Arts Center at State University of New York at Purchase.