Natalie Portman : "I'm a Pleasure Seeker, Not Self-Punisher"

Actress Natalie Portman -- who Sunday won a Golden Globe for her performance in Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan" -- went method for her role as tortured ballerina Nina Sayers.

Living a role for a movie is hard work -- living the physically punishing life of a ballet dancer is even harder. But it's worth it when you get awarded with a Golden Globe for your efforts.

Though at a press conference in London she said she was more of a "pleasure-seeker" than a "self-punisher," Portman described the grueling training she underwent for the film, and how mid-way through shooting the film she suffered a dislocated rib.
"We were doing five hours a day of training that was three hours of ballet and then we would swim a mile and tone for two hours," Portman said.
"You really understand the discipline, the rigor, the willingness to work through physical pain," she explained of the physical demands on ballet dancers.

Not only did she have to train as a ballerina, she also had to embody the friable emotional state of a young girl cracking under pressure.
"I think the really tricky part was balancing the physical with the emotion," she said.

"Black Swan" is set in a fictional New York ballet company, where highly strung young women battle it out for star roles. Portman plays a corps dancer given the role of a lifetime: that of the Princess Odette in Tchaikovsky's classic ballet, Swan Lake.
But not only does her character have to portray the good princess Odette, who is turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer; she also plays the sorcerer's daughter Odile, the black swan of the film's title.

Dancing as the two swans proves psychologically unsettling for Sayers, a good girl required to turn bad for the role of Odile. She is goaded by the ballet company director (played by French actor Vincent Cassel) into exploring her dark side for the role.

Portman explained that she was drawn to the world of ballet, which she sees as "a particularly female art form that is still dominated by men," because she wanted to represent the "larger world of women, you know, where one woman gets too old, or out of shape, and there's a younger woman that's going to be slipped into her place."
Exploring that world is fitting for an actress used to working in Hollywood since childhood.

Portman was born in 1981 in Jerusalem and moved to America soon after. She made her acting debut in 1994 as Mathilda Luc Besson's film "Leon," about the relationship between a young girl and a hit man.

Portman, now 29, said she was pleased to have had the experience of her 20's before embarking on the demanding role of Nina. She likens her experience as a child actress to that of her character in "Black Swan."

With a Golden Globe win, many are wondering if Portman will get an Academy Award nomination too.
But while she says she finds the awards buzz "flattering," Portman also said that audience reaction is most important to her.

"Just to see people engaging so passionately about it is your greatest dream while making a movie," she said.