Darren Aronofsky is working on a Black Swan musical

When you think “Darren Aronofsky,” your first thought may not be “song and dance man.” Or if you do think of dance, it’s more of the dark, psychologically twisted Black Swan variety. Yet why couldn’t that film (an Oscar-winning vehicle for Natalie Portman) be translated for the stage? Throw in a few haunting musical numbers and it would be ready for the Great White Way!

That may just be Aronofsky’s plan; as he tells Murtada Elfadl in a new interview with The A.V. Club, “We’re trying to do the Black Swan musical.” Asked by Elfadl if he’s aiming for Broadway, the director stays coy: “We’ll see what happens. But we’re working on it.”

The 2011 film, of course, surrounds a staging of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, so it has music (and, yes, dance) embedded in its DNA. And there’s a niche to be filled here, since there aren’t that many Broadway musicals that lean into psychological horror. (Which isn’t to say there are none around: a musical based on Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca will be staged in London 2023 after a scandal took it off the Broadway lineup in 2012.)

But Black Swan isn’t the only musical on Aronofsky’s mind. He “would love to” make a movie musical, “and I’ve talked to many people about it. And I’ve come close to a few ideas,” he shares with The A.V. Club. “It’s a very tricky thing because music from musicals is not popular music anymore. So what do you do? I think Hamilton was brilliant because Lin-Manuel Miranda fused hip-hop with musical music. And so he had this breakthrough that was really brilliant. But figuring that angle of it, of what the music would be, where it comes from, is the big challenge.”

“But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it,” he teases. “And hopefully one day I could figure something out.”