Todd Haynes
Todd Haynes
Todd Haynesis an American independent film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is considered a pioneer of the New Queer Cinema movement of filmmaking that emerged in the early 1990s. Haynes first gained public attention with his controversial short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which chronicles singer Karen Carpenter's tragic life and death, using Barbie dolls as actors. Haynes had not obtained proper licensing to use the Carpenters' music, prompting a lawsuit from Richard Carpenter, whom the film portrayed in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth2 January 1961
CityEncino, CA
CountryUnited States of America
Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative.
I would just say there are no two roles that are more demanding than Bob Dylan of 1966 [Blanchett's role in 'I'm Not There'] and Carol Aird of 1952. I challenge any director out there to come up with a wider divide. I had to convince her to take the Dylan role, and that took effort. But with 'Carol,' she was already attached.
I came to this project and 'Far from Heaven' from completely different vantage points. 'Heaven' was of course about the Douglas Sirk films of that period, with the very specific cinematic language and style of melodrama. With 'Carol,' it was presented to me already packaged, with Cate Blanchett attached and Phyllis Nagy's script complete - when it came to me it had a long history and pre-history.
Nostalgia could be considered a disease because you're living now.
A refusal of nature as a model is a tradition that goes right back to Oscar Wilde.
In my research, all roads led back to Oscar. It's definitely in a way trying to understand the truly English element to glam-rock. It really does not come from American culture.
The Johnny Depp generation has this kind of brooding, weighty, introspective quality, very James Deanish. Which is nice, great for a lot of characters.
I always bring it up to my lawyer every now and then. And another reason we have to revisit it is because there is a restoration going on right now for the film through UCLA and Sundance.
I figured I would be teaching my whole life and making experimental films on the side.
I sort of have a dog-minded single strategy but I am a little more open to stuff that's out there, now and looking at scripts in the world and seeing if something that already exists can spark my interest and my curiosity.
When I write my scripts, there's a point at which if I'm not starting to see them visually, I feel like I'm kind of cheating. So my scripts are laden with a lot of visual description, which makes them not so much fun to read - I kind of weigh them down.
It's only when you look back sometimes and you look at some people in your life and you're like, Oh my god, there was something so pure about that. The thing that kind of bugged me, maybe, is the thing that's so unique.
Once you are shooting a movie, even if it's your own script, you have to let it go at a certain point. That's true for every film. It breaks up into phases where the thing that you have in front of you is the thing you have to address, and you can't worry about what you imagined a scene was going to like and that it came out differently, because that's what you have to make work.
As an independent filmmaker, to develop the money and the financing and the structure and the whole process, and then promoting them and traveling with them, which is a part of the process that I've always enjoyed and I've learned a great deal from.