Darren Aronofsky defends Mother! after F rating: 'I wanted to howl, and this was my howl'

Black Swan and Noah director Darren Aronofsky's latest film mother! has come in for a good deal of ridicule, culminating in becoming one of 11 films in history to earn an 'F' rating from CinemaScore this week.

The studio behind it, Paramount, took the rare step of responding to the critical reaction and now Aronofsky himself has spoken about it.

Talking to radio host John Horn in a Q&A that followed a screening of the film at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, Aronofsky said (via Deadline): "How, if you walk out of this movie, are you not going to give it an ‘F?’ It’s a punch. It’s a total punch."

mother! currently has a not-terrible rating of 67% on Rotten Tomatoes, but many reviews have been savage, with critic Rex Reed writing in the New York Observer: "I hesitate to label it the ‘Worst movie of the year’ when ‘Worst movie of the century’ fits it even better."

Aronofsky admitted: "We always knew it was a strong cocktail. When I was trying to tell the history, or the story, of people on Mother Earth, I was like, ‘Oh, the Bible could be a really kind of good blueprint to sort of hang all these stories’. Whatever you believe, it doesn’t matter. But there’s power in those stories because we can relate to them and they have different types of meanings for different types of people."

He also described mother! as punk and suggested it was intentionally a kind of cinematic 'fuck you'.

“We wanted to make a punk movie and come at you. And the reason I wanted to come is because I was very sad and I had a lot of anguish and I wanted to express it. Filmmaking is such a hard journey. People are constantly saying ‘No’ to you. And to wake up every morning and get out of bed and to face all those ‘No’s,’ you have to be willing to really believe in something. And that’s what I look for in my collaborators and what I pitched the actors.”

He concluded: "So I wanted to howl. And this was my howl. And some people are not going to want to listen to it. That’s cool."

Paramount's worldwide president of marketing and distribution for Paramount, Megan Colligan, commented:

“This movie is very audacious and brave. You are talking about a director at the top of his game, and an actress at the top her game. They made a movie that was intended to be bold. Everyone wants original filmmaking, and everyone celebrates Netflix when they tell a story no one else wants to tell. This is our version. We don’t want all movies to be safe. And it’s okay if some people don’t like it.”