‘The 90s were remarkable – we weren’t all living in existential terror!’ Darren Aronofsky on Caught Stealing, his love letter to New York

Famed for intense dramas like Black Swan, the director’s latest film is a riotous retro crime caper. He explains why he’s battling TikTok – but embracing AI

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arren Aronofsky’s new film is a blast from the past; a half-cut retro tour of late-1990s New York. Beetling around the tatty East Village, casually framing the twin towers downtown, it lifts the lid on a time that has been and gone: when the city was a melting pot of miscreants and misfits, when lowly bar staff could still afford Gotham rents,, and when every car came equipped with a cigarette lighter. “Don’t they have those any more?” says Aronofksy, frowning at his untouched cup of herbal tea. “I don’t know, maybe not. It’s been many years since I smoked a cigarette.”

Caught Stealing, he says, could almost be his parallel-universe first movie, given that it’s set in 1998, around the time he was shooting his actual first film, Pi, on the same East Side streets. He was in his late 20s back then, subsisting on pizza and living in a fifth-floor walk-up. He was anxious and ambitious; he had his eyes on the prize. He now thinks he ought to have enjoyed himself more.

He’s nostalgic, but so what? It doesn’t mean he’s not right. “The 90s were such a remarkable time, an exciting time to be alive. It was a lot more loose. There was a sense of innocence. The Soviet Union was gone. Climate change wasn’t on 99% of people’s minds and the big scandal was Bill Clinton having an extramarital affair. People were looking forward to the new millennium. It was going to be The Jetsons. It was going to be sci-fi.” The director grins and shakes his head. “We weren’t all living in a state of existential terror.”