Aronofsky conceived the premise by connecting his viewings of Swan Lake with an unrealized screenplay about understudies and the notion of being haunted by a double. The director also thought of Black Swan a companion piece to his previous film The Wrestler, with each films’ worlds involving demanding performances for various kinds of art. He and Portman first discussed the mission in 2000, and after a short attachment to Common Footage, Black Swan was produced in New York Metropolis in 2009 below Fox Searchlight Pictures. Portman and Kunis trained in ballet for months. Notable figures from the ballet world helped with movie production to shape the ballet presentation. The film premiered as the opening movie for the 67th Venice Worldwide Film Festival on September 1, 2010. The film could have a limited release on December 3, 2010.

Darren Aronofsky first grew to become excited about ballet when his sister studied dance at the High School of Performing Arts in New York City. The fundamental thought for the movie began when he hired screenwriters to remodel a screenplay referred to as The Understudy, which was about off-Broadway actors and explored the notion of being haunted by a double. Aronofsky mentioned the screenplay had elements of the movie All About Eve, Roman Polanski’s movie The Tenant, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella The Double. The director had additionally seen quite a few productions of Swan Lake, and he linked the duality of the White Swan and the Black Swan to his script. When researching for manufacturing of Black Swan, he found ballet to be “a really insular world” whose dancers have been “not impressed by movies”. Regardless, the director discovered energetic and inactive dancers to share their experiences with him. He also stood backstage to see the Bolshoi Ballet carry out on the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Aronofsky referred to as Black Swan a companion piece to his earlier film The Wrestler, recalling one in every of his early tasks about a love affair between a wrestler and a ballet dancer. He ultimately separated the wrestling and the ballet worlds as “too much for one film”. He in contrast the 2 movies: “Wrestling some take into account the lowest artwork-if they’d even name it art-and ballet some people contemplate the highest art. But what was superb to me was how similar the performers in both of those worlds are. They both make unimaginable use of their bodies to precise themselves.”In regards to the psychological thriller nature of Black Swan, actor Natalie Portman in contrast the film’s tone to Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby,while Aronofsky stated Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976) had been “huge influences” on the final film.Actor Vincent Cassel also compared Black Swan to Polanski’s early works and additionally compared it to David Cronenberg’s early works.