Darren Aronofsky Responds To Mother!'s F CinemaScore

Here comes the mother!-load. 

Director Darren Aronofsky's newest mind-melting film mother! has been puzzling audiences since before it even launched in theaters, causing a ton of uncertainty as to what it's really about (though lead actress Jennifer Lawrence has some ideas). Confusion turned to controversy when CinemaScore, a film polling company that surveys and analyzes audience reactions about movies exclusively opening night, gave mother! the dreaded "F" grade. 

Aronofsky has now opened up about the notorious score, speaking in an interview with The Frame's John Horn following a screening of mother! at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Surprisingly, the director understands why the film received the score it did. 

"What's interesting about that is, like, 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," Aronofsky said. 

The filmmaker added: "We were excited by that. 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."

mother!, for Aronofsky, wasn't a "popularity contest" of a project, but rather an exploration of modern society and its devolution and destruction. "We're basically holding up a mirror to what's going on. All of us are doing this. But that final chapter hasn't been written and hopefully things can change. And, to go back, the fact that it's going down right now and things are really falling apart in a way that is really scary," he said. 

Aronofsky also noted that the film was his chance to "howl," though he admitted he realizes that "some people are not going to want to listen to it."

The film, which stars Javier Bardem as the Man to Lawrence's Mother, is the unlucky 13th film to be stamped with a CinemaScore "F." It joins pics like William Friedkin's Bug, Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly, Richard Kelly's The Box, I Know Who Killed Me starring Lindsay Lohan, Greg McLean's Wolf Creek, Steven Soderbergh's Solaris, and Robert Altman's Dr. T and the Women.