The hour grows late at the London press junket. The schedule is running horribly behind time. Inside suite 206, the reporters find themselves packed in like sardines. They are perched on tables and windowsills, spilling coffee and mopping up the mess with their notepads. Each time the door opens, a fresh arrival comes in, which means that the walls inch ever-closer and there is less air. Tension is mounting and tempers are fraying. The night before, we all sat down and watched Mother! together. Today, it feels as if we might be living it, too.

Darren Aronofsky’s new film is an explosion, an assault, a haunted-house horror that whips up conflicting emotions. Some love it, some hate it and some pinwheel back and forth, like lost souls in limbo. On screen, Jennifer Lawrence plays an unnamed heroine whose domestic idyll is overrun by an endless procession of malignant houseguests. They are disturbing her in the bathroom; they are making out in her bed. “I’m confused,” she confides, just as the nightmare begins. And by God, she is not the only one.

Mother! review – no gob left unsmacked in Jennifer Lawrence's anxiety dream of horror and dismay Read more

“Yeah, well, that’s the journey,” shrugs Aronofsky, sipping bottled water, after I am granted entry to the tranquil suite next door. “I think it’s OK to be confused. The movie has a dream-logic and that dream-logic makes sense. But if you try to unscrew it, it kind of falls apart. So it’s a psychological freak-out. You shouldn’t over-explain it.”

Some directors dazzle and some seduce. Aronofsky simply tramples you in your seat. He is the ripsnorting bull of American cinema, flanks matted with sweat, hooves kicking up clods; meaning to shock and awe; and possibly impregnate us as well. This pedigree was apparent right from his 1998 debut Pi, which took a cerebral premise (a mathematician studying patterns in the Torah) and spun it into paranoid fantasy. It then proceeded to thunder through the junkie nihilism of Requiem for a Dream, the redemptive contortions of The Wrestler and Black Swan, before building to the bombast of 2014’s Noah (by far his least interesting picture).

“I’m always going to be a divisive guy,” he tells me. “What can I tell you, I’m like Johnny Rotten.” And yet Mother! – which was enthusiastically booed at its Venice press screening – takes a particular delight in tormenting its viewer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem in Mother! Photograph: Niko Tavernise/Paramount Pictures

How best to describe Aronofsky’s bloody beast? Mother! is like Lars von Trier’s Antichrist as rewritten by Edward Albee, or a garish horror-comic by way of primal-scream therapy. It is about a lauded poet (Javier Bardem) and his doting young wife (Lawrence), who live in a gothic gingerbread house in a clearing in the woods. The poet wants to fill the house with new ideas, either as means of inspiring his writing or distracting himself from it, and so he opens the door to a cadaverous fan and his busybody wife (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer, both deliciously creepy). Before long the place is teeming with demonic revellers who trash the furnishings and drive a seemingly unresolvable wedge between the husband and wife. Is it a redundancy to note that the film turns shrill and hysterical, on the outer edge of control? That, surely, was where Aronofsky was headed all along.

I am trying to resist over-explaining the film – but there is a major elephant at large in this room. Mother! is a film about a monstrous 48-year-old artist and his 27-year-old muse. And during production, Aronofsky struck up a relationship with his star. Aronofsky is 48; Lawrence 27. So I am wondering the most delicate way of broaching this subject. Did Bardem at any stage ask whether he was playing the director?

“Oh no,” says Aronofsky, who has the sensitive features of a rabbinical student and the foursquare physique of a New York docker. “No, no, not at all. Javier knows me. He knows I’m not a monster. Because a film director is a very different kind of artist. I only have to be a monster on set – for two or three months every few years. The rest of the time I’m a nine-to-five father [he has an 11-year-old son from a previous relationship with the British actor Rachel Weisz]. I take my kid to school, go to sleep, live a life. Then go see my parents at weekends.”

OK, I tell him. But does he realise he has left himself wide open for this kind of speculation? It is hard to believe the film is not just a bit about him.

“Oh sure,” he allows. “It’s a projection of my life and what I’m thinking about. But my ego is in every character in every film that I’ve made. I’m the ballerina in Black Swan. I’m the wrestler in The Wrestler. I can see how people will especially make the connection with this one. But it’s also all fiction; it’s all smoke and mirrors. And if anything, my empathy here is more with the mother. I’m probably more Jen’s character than I am Javier’s.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russell Crowe in Noah. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

Aronofsky was raised in Manhattan Beach, South Brooklyn, the son of two schoolteachers. He says his first exposure to culture was seeing Broadway musicals with his mother. They saw The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and he didn’t know what a whorehouse was and asked his mother too loudly as soon as the curtain came down.

A few miles up the road from his house was an amusement park at Coney Island, stinking of brine and cotton candy. He used to ride the Cyclone rollercoaster, sometimes 10 or 20 times a day in the summer. He has carried the experience with him ever since.

“It’s funny,” he says. “Sean Gullette – the guy who starred in Pi – is staying in Rome and so he just came to the Mother! premiere in Venice. He told me afterwards that he closed his eyes twice during the movie. And I thought: ‘Come on.’ If you keep your eyes open the whole time, well, it’s like riding the Cyclone with your belt unfastened and your hands not touching the rails. And the second you look away, you’ve ruined it. So that’s the dare – and then Sean went and blinked.”

Aronofksy likes to push his audience to the brink. I’ve heard that he likes to do it to his performers as well. Mickey Rourke – Oscar-nominated for his brilliant performance in The Wrestler – described the director as “an old-style Jew gangster”. He has a reputation for being combative and controlling, for breaking actors down and shooting them in extremis.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Natalie Portman in Black Swan. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

“No, no,” he says, briefly nettled. “It’s not about breaking them down. They break themselves down. They’re game.”

He gulps some water and thinks it over. “Actors,” he says. “Sometimes they forget, but I think the original reason they started acting was to be able to cry in front of class. Sometimes they forget that, when they become big action movie stars, because that’s more about modelling than acting. But they love it, really. So I’m always looking for actors who want to roll up their sleeves and let loose and just cry. Javier’s not afraid of crying; he’ll do anything. Jennifer, completely the same. She’s still very young; not jaded in the least. And, yeah, she was scared on this movie, because she knew she was going to have to go for some big emotions.”

In a recent interview with Vogue magazine, Lawrence discussed her own experience in making Mother! “I had to go to a darker place than I’ve ever been in my life,” she admitted. “I didn’t know if I’d be able to come out OK.” There were reports that during one gruelling scene, she dislocated a rib.

“Yeah, she ended up tearing her diaphragm,” Aronofsky says. “She was hyperventilating. Because of the emotion.”

Is it true that he then immediately ordered her to do the whole scene again?

The director snorts. “Well, yeah. Pull it together. That’s very British, right? Come on, let’s go.”

And how was Lawrence with such behaviour? Did she tolerate it?

“No, no,” he says, apparently worried I’m getting the wrong end of the stick. “I mean, we gave her time to recover. The thing is that she’d been thinking about that scene way too long, and it got all up in her head. So then the emotions flooded her and I saw what was happening – because I’m experienced – and was able to get the camera in the right place. The shot was originally on her back and I flipped the whole thing, let her recover and then said, ‘Get the camera on her face, right now’, because that’s the kind of emotion that you never, ever see.”

It takes me a moment to process this. It sounds as though he is saying that he used Lawrence’s recovery time to reposition the camera so as to better capture her pain.

But then Mother! is a film that positively luxuriates in pain. It’s a great, twisted howl of a movie; overheated and heady; an engrossing ordeal. As the house fills up, Lawrence is sent scurrying from one room to the next, vainly attempting to clear up the breakages, ordering the interlopers to get the hell out. One might view the film as a disease metaphor, in which tumours metastasise and infest the whole body. Alternatively, you can view it as a dark parable on the creative process, with the artist deciding what is let in and used up. In Aronofsky’s world, perhaps, there is not a whole lot of difference.

The director agrees, but only up to a point. Film-making is tough, he admits. Some might even go so far as to view it as a form of dysfunction. But he has never been the sort to start whining about his hardship.

“I love it,” he says. “Shooting movies, I love it. Those are the times in your life that you really remember. I remember, crystal-clear, shooting certain scenes in Requiem for a Dream, right down to the shirt I was wearing on a particular day. And it’s still so sharp, you know, because you’re alive, because your brain’s firing. Because you’re living, right there, in that little moment.”

He says that the first thing he did on arriving in London was pick up the phone to call his parents. He wanted to tell them about the premiere, over in Venice, and let them know that he had landed safely. His father was in a nostalgic mood. The old man remembered the family driving past the local cinema when it was screening Pi. Aronofsky was still in his 20s, his career barely warming up. And he pointed out of the car window and said: “Dad, all I want in my life is for people to either cheer or boo. I just don’t want anything in the middle.”

Aronofsky slams down his water and chuckles at the memory. He says: “Twenty years on, I guess not a whole lot has changed.”

• Mother! is released on 14 September in Australia and 15 September in the US and UK.