It's possible that the most thrilling event in Mark Heyman's life was that first kiss with that first girl.

Still, the Santa Fe High graduate has a lot to be excited about these days: He's the co-producer of the award-winning and nominated sleeper hit The Wrestler. This low-budget drama, directed by Darren Aronofsky for Protozoa Pictures, features Mickey Rourke as a former wrestling star trying to make a personal comeback despite a professional decline.

The film won the Golden Lion for best picture at the Venice Film Festival last year, and nabbed Rourke a Golden Globe for best actor earlier this month. He and co-star Marisa Tomei are both up for Academy Awards as well. The picture opened at Regal DeVargas on Friday.

Speaking by phone from his office at Protozoa Pictures in Brooklyn, Heyman said The Wrestler experience is "a blast on all levels."

"We are all very passionate about the film. It was something we all felt strongly about making," he explained. "It was low-fi — we had someone who had fallen out of the public eye and wasn't meaningful as a star anymore, so we had no expectations.

"But I remember when we went to Venice and won the Golden Lion, it was the first time we thought, 'This is a film people respond to.' And suddenly the game changed."

Heyman attended Santa Fe High in the mid-to-late 1990s, where he was involved in theater. He still recalls drama teacher Joey Chavez as a hero and inspiration. Heyman said making a film takes so long that the excitement of it all isn't condensed into one single moment — like that first kiss, which took place in Santa Fe. (Heyman won't name names, because the young lady still lives here.)

Heyman left Santa Fe to major in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. "I spent a lot of time at Brown trying to talk myself into other majors because it's such a ridiculous-sounding major, but nothing else stuck," he recalled with a laugh.

He then attended film school at New York University. That's where he met Aronofsky when the latter came to speak to students about filmmaking. Aronofsky, known for his intense, complex human dramas like Pi (1998) and Requiem For a Dream (2000), liked the way Heyman succinctly described the student film he was working on. He also liked the way Heyman succinctly described all the other students' film projects.

So Aronofsky offered Heyman a job as his assistant. The Santa Fean ended up leaving NYU and working on Aronofsky's 2006 science-fiction myth The Fountain. He was promoted to co-producer for The Wrestler.

That picture, budgeted at a minuscule $7 million, started shooting a year ago in various locales in New Jersey. "I was involved in developing the script in some way or another for a couple of years," he said. "What was interesting to all of us was this unexplored world, and the idea of this character who once had this kind of glory that was completely faded."

Though Nicholas Cage was once reportedly attached to the project, Heyman maintains Rourke — who galloped out of Hollywood's starting gate with critically acclaimed performances in such films as Diner (1981) and The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) before his career sharply ebbed — was always the logical choice. "We were cognizant of Mickey bringing an emotional reality to it," he said.

Producing may not sound as glamorous as writing, directing and acting, but within a creative and collaborative company like Protozoa, the producer's input is invaluable, Heyman stressed.

"When it's a small, independent feature, producers are vital because they are often the people who bring together the elements that make the film what it is," he said. Producing, he added, "is great for someone who has a lot of curiosity and interest in a lot of different things and doesn't have enough of an attention span to stick to any one of them."

But he went to NYU wanting to learn directing and writing, and that drive is still there: "Darren is fully supportive of that, but for me it's a matter of figuring out the right thing. Part of what's great about producing is you can have a lot of things going on at once which cushions the blow when one of them doesn't work out. As a writer/director, you have to keep pushing that one project along even if you get a thousand no's."

Contact Robert Nott at 986-3021 or rnott@sfnewmexican.com.