When Darren Aronofsky met Natalie Portman at a Times Square diner in 2000, the rising starlet was a junior at Harvard, fresh off the first Star Wars prequel. Aronofsky, who had just broken through with his grippingly bleak addiction drama Requiem for a Dream, wanted Portman to play a ballet dancer in his next film.

“He didn’t even have a script yet,” Portman tells Vogue . “But when he told me he wanted to make something in the world of ballet, I was just excited to explore that with him.”

Aronofsky’s younger sister studied ballet, and her stories of backstabbing dancers and gruesome injuries—combined with the plot of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double and a script that had been floating around about two actresses competing for a role in an Off-Broadway show—eventually morphed into B

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