‘I still feel like that kid who auditioned for everything’

Adam White speaks to ‘Caught Stealing’ director Darren Aronofsky and his lead man, Austin Butler, about Percy Pigs and why the actor looks to Leo DiCaprio for picking projects

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In the summer of 1998, the filmmaker Darren Aronofsky could be found spray painting stencils of the pi symbol all over his native Manhattan - a bit of guerrilla marketing for his feature debut, π (or Pi).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, little Austin Butler was a creative seven-year-old with an allergy to people. He'd play GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 when he wasn't being shoehorned into after-school softball tournaments by his parents. “I'd come home crying,” Butler grins. “I didn't want to be around other kids.”

Today, the 34-year-old is one of Young Hollywood's most in-demand actors, a pouty Brando disciple with an Oscar nomination for Elvis. Aronofsky, 56, is the man responsible for divisive shockers such as Mother!, The Whale and Black Swan; a director from the more-is-more school of cinematic button-pushing. They've collided for Caught Stealing, a brisk new thriller set in the summer of 1998 and, in many ways, inspired by that era's filmmaking maxim: toss together some chugging action, real-world location shooting and a handful of beautiful stars and voila! Instant movie-dom.

We meet at the end of a day of press interviews that are decidedly different to those of the Nineties. “Have they got you eating Percy Pigs yet, Darren?” Butler asks. “Any Colin the Caterpillars?” Aronofsky, with the look of someone who's just had needles stuck under his fingernails, winces. “They've had me doing some things,” he sighs. Aronofsky is, admittedly, a lot more bouncy and fun than you'd imagine for a man who transformed the 68-year-old Ellen Burstyn into a sallow, amphetamine-popping husk for Requiem for a Dream. But the games, props and zany taste tests of modern film junketing seem a bridge too far.