"Really great directors, they come around every 30 years - and I truly believe that Darren is one of those cats.” That was Mickey Rourke, former career implosion turned hot Tinseltown property, on Sunday night, clutching his Best Actor Golden Globe for his role in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler. “He hates it when I say that he's tough,” Rourke continued, beaming at his 39-year-old collaborator. “But he's a tough son of a bitch!”

On cue, Aronofsky raised his middle finger to Rourke and waved it vigorously. It was an intriguing moment, and it seemed to describe a jocular relationship that was nonetheless defined by the butting of heads and the clashing of egos.

Flashback two months previously, and Aronofsky is in the back seat of a black Mercedes, contemplating the nature of his friendship with Rourke while inching through the early morning traffic of North London (a native New Yorker, he lived briefly in the area in the early Noughties with his fiancée, the actress Rachel Weisz, and stays there whenever he's in the city). “The reality is that Mickey needs to be pushed, because sometimes he likes to take the easy way,” says the director, clutching a coffee while the car crawls forward towards Knightsbridge and a full feverish day of media promotion for The Wrestler.

The movie is, on some level, an affectionate and often gruesomely compelling homage to Rourke himself (who infamously mangled his career in the early 1990s through a combination of boxing, booze and self-destruction). It features the 52-year-old in the role he was fated to play, as a veteran wrestling champ, Randy “The Ram” Robinson. He is a man consumed by guilt, and by the sacrifices that he has made to achieve his fleeting fame. Between his opening bouts and his final shot at redemption he is mostly in a place of emotional turmoil. But, to get him there, Aronofsky admits that he had to use everything in the director's handbook. Rourke, for instance, refused to even attempt one elaborately choreographed fight sequence. “He's like, ‘Why don't you do the routine?'” says Aronofsky. “So I got into the ring and I did the f***ing routine, the whole thing. And that f***ing shut him up for the day.”

Elsewhere Aronofsky describes a key emotional scene where Randy is confronted by his angry neglected daughter Stephanie, played by Evan Rachel Wood. Not a fan of multiple takes, Rourke tended to “blow his load,” says Aronofsky, on the first shot. “Then take after take after that he was flat, and Evan was, like, kicking his ass. So, after one take I just grabbed him and said, ‘Mickey, you're like a virgin on his first date with a porn star. You can't keep doing this, you gotta reach deep and bring something back.' And he did.”

It is essential to add here that Aronofsky intersperses these anecdotes with declarations of his affection and admiration for Rourke (“He has more talent in his little finger than most actors do in their entire bodies,” he says). But he makes no attempt to hide the fact that handling his notorious leading man was a difficult process - the director Alan Parker described Rourke on the set of Angel Heart as a “nightmare”. The relationship between Rourke, Aronofksy and The Wrestler itself can be best summed up, it seems, by another anecdote the director tells about an ostensibly throwaway scene where Randy, forced to work in a supermarket for extra cash, takes a shift behind the deli counter, serving customers and packing hoummos.

“He hated doing that scene, and he fought me,” Aronofsky says. “And I was, like, ‘Why are you fighting me? This is the easiest scene; all you've got to do is serve these people.' But then later I realised that he was connecting to the shame of that character. Because one of the first things he said to me when I met him was, ‘You don't know what it's like to walk into a roomful of people and just feel totally ashamed.' Which is how he lived for years, because of what he had done to himself.”

If The Wrestler works, and it often works spectacularly, it's because of how boldly it channels the shame and the pain of its central character. It is familiar territory for Aronofsky, who has built his movie career around characters at odds with the surrounding world while facing a near-total internal combustion of their own. The director, who grew up in the Manhattan Beach area of Brooklyn, the son of two teachers and came of age in the borough's tough state school system (“You had to survive with your mouth or your fists, so I can dish it out pretty well”), says that film-making seemed impossibly out of reach during his childhood years. “I had no idea what a director did,” he says, out of the car now and swishing down the corridors of the Knightsbridge Hotel, conversing on the go, West Wing-style. “I thought that was something that only happened in Los Angeles.”

Inspired by the emerging independent movie scene in New York, and specifically by Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch, Aronofsky enrolled in Harvard University's film programme in 1987 and, after a series of short films and misadventures (including an abortive stint in LA) released his feature debut, Pi, in 1998. The movie, about a paranoid mathematician who ultimately takes an electric drill to his own head, was followed by Requiem for a Dream (2000), a propulsive and fantastically bleak trip into the junkie hell of Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) that culminated in a brutal amputation and sexual humiliation. His biggest-budgeted project to date, the $35 million metaphysical head-tripper The Fountain (2006) dared to look at mortality across the ages, bravely casting Hugh Jackman three times as a conquistador, a scientist and a spiritual astronaut in eras thousands of years apart, but all searching for the truth about the life-death divide.

The Fountain was a commercial failure (“Turgid!” hissed Variety) and a blow for Aronofsky. “I didn't realise how venomous the critical response would be,” he says. “But it didn't find its right audience. It just found a lot of people who wanted to see, you know, James Bond.”

It certainly dented his ability to raise financing, and that, coupled with his wilful decision to hire only the uncommercial wildcard Rourke for The Wrestler made scraping together that movie's budget something of a challenge - the executive producer Jennifer Roth (The Squid and the Whale) eventually managed to get a tiny $6 million for the film.

Today, of course, everything has changed. Aronofsky, like his leading man, is king of the heap. He lives in Brooklyn with Weisz and their two-year-old son Henry. “It's amazing how much time in our adult relationship is taken up with talking about the third person in that relationship,” he says, adding, “I can't even begin to understand how much it has changed me.” He has three films allegedly in development - a rebooting of the Robocop franchise, a film about Noah and a boxing movie to be called The Fighter. “But don't listen to any of the rumours,” he warns. “It's not announced. I have an idea that's getting close, but we'll see what happens.”

In the meantime, it's his odd-couple relationship with Rourke that lingers, and the sense that two very different men, both down on their luck, somehow came together and reinvented each other's career. And that's surely priceless, even with the middle-fingered insults. “Look,” Aronofsky says, clarifying one last time, “there's a lot of teasing going on between me and Mickey. But deep down inside I think there's actually a lot of respect and love.”

The Wrestler is released on Friday

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