The 'Black Swan' director will see his biblical epic take to the big-screen next month and he's admitted that as he wanted the film to avoid the clichés of traditional takes on the story of Noah's Ark, he looked to other books and films which were set in the same period.
He told Empire magazine: "What would animals have looked like back then? Was it a world that looked like the modern Holy Land? The aim was for it to be as self-contained as Middle-earth; we definitely looked at Lord of the Rings.
"I wanted to create a fantasy world that was based on the Bible as well as on other books written around the same time that didn't make it into the cannon."
The 45-year-old film-maker also revealed that as well as gaining ideas for what the animals and set should look like from other stories, they also found inspiration for new characters which they incorporated into the story.
He explained: "We read The Book of Enoch and other texts that expanded on that world and we created our own world out of the clues we picked up from them.
"There're things like Nephilim; six armed angels who walked the Earth; we turned them into characters in the film."
Tagged in Darren Aronofsky