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Darren Aronofsky and Eric Watson optioned the novel "Requiem For a Dream" for $1,000. Aronofsky remembers that, at the time, coming off of Pi (1998), this was a huge amount of money for them. Tappy Tibbons (Christopher McDonald) is a character Aronofsky created that isn't in Hubert Selby Jr.'s novel. In the novel, Sara Goldfarb mostly watches soap operas and game shows. Aronofsky wanted the film to be timeless and knew the programs they had the character watching could easily date the film. Tappy Tibbons was a character in a screenplay Aronofsky wrote after film school, inspired by self-help gurus like Anthony Robbins aka Tony Robbins. Over the years, he developed the character as well as the Month of Fury infomercial Tibbons hosts. According to Aronofsky, Tappy Tibbons' Month of Fury is a self-help plan. The plan consists of three things you have to do in order to revolutionize your life. 1) no red meat. 2) no refined sugar. Aronofsky doesn't give away what the third step is. He says you have to search on the Internet to figure it out. The director's cut DVD contains the information in the chapter selection menu, clicking twice on the Chapter 21-24 tab and hitting then "Enter". A hidden Tappy Tibbons infomercial begins playing. The third thing is no orgasms. This one drives people crazy.
(at around 44 mins) During Ellen Burstyn's impassioned monologue about how it feels to be old, cinematographer Matthew Libatique accidentally let the camera drift off-target. When director Darren Aronofsky called "cut" and confronted him about it, he realized the reason Libatique had let the camera drift was because he had been crying during the take and fogged up the camera's eyepiece. This was the take used in the final print.
Darren Aronofsky shot the film like a hip-hop montage (a sequence of extremely short shots) to get the sense of overwhelming addiction and loss of control. An average 100-minute film contains 600 to 700 cuts; this one contains over 2,000.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Ellen Burstyn stated that in her opinion, playing Sara Goldfarb was her best acting achievement.
Director Darren Aronofsky asked Jared Leto and Marlon Wayans to avoid sex and sugar for a period of 30 days in order to better understand an overwhelming craving.
Director Darren Aronofsky described this film as exploring different types of addiction: "The Harry-Tyrone-Marion story is a very traditional heroin story. But putting it side by side with the Sara story, we suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, what is a drug?' The idea that the same inner monologue goes through a person's head when they're trying to quit drugs and cigarettes, as when they're trying to not eat food so they can lose twenty pounds, was really fascinating to me."
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