The director is into people constrained by societys rules.
His new film makes it harder to root for the rule-breakers.
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This article was originally published September 27, 2023.
Todd Haynesknows how to build a trap.
Other times, they fear societys judgment.
At the opposite end are his rock-star movies, which use the self-creation of performers as an aspirational motif.
Instead, we watch while she and Elizabeth circle each other, facing offPersonastyle.
Natalie Portmans character, Elizabeth, is an actor, somebody whom people look at and project onto.
This outsider is coming in to revisit the history of this relationship and to put a frame around it.
It uproots and destabilizes their life.
Joe is a fascinating character.Im so grateful Charles Melton came into our consciousness.
I didnt know him fromRiverdale.His looks were almost a deterrent.
Theres such remarkable physicality in the choices he made as an actor.
But inMay December, were in a more complicated position.It put me in a state of self-questioning.
Part of what makes that so interesting is how its set 23 years after this relationship first occurred.
When you set it back from the very moment were in, it forces a reframing.
It asks you to make the connections between then and now, between subject and self, yourself.
Especially, maybe, when its a very small push back into the past.
Your movies do feel like theyre responding to the present anyway especially the early ones.
It was both addressing the work and the receptiveness to the work that became very politically ignited.
On the one hand,Poisonwas critically praised.
It was getting attention.
You had to spend so much of your time doing a diplomacy tour.
And that the film was doing its job.
It was on the evening news.
All the people on the right would say, Oh, I didnt even see your film.
We just dont think taxpayer dollars should go toward financing art thats controversial.
It was a detour for what they were really talking about which was the content.
Poisonis clearly a statement about homophobia and AIDS panic especially in its B-movie segment where you really heightened it.
But its not exactly agitprop.
The gay characters arent innocent.
Theres a rape scene.
There wasThe Normal Heart.
We wanted to protect transgression and not water it down.
To not venture to make pacified, domesticated examples of gay subjects.
It was a revolution in form and in content.
Now weve got gay Christmas movies on Netflix.
There are rom-coms likeBrosorFire IslandorRed, White & Royal Blue.
Natasha Lyonne said to me recently, I dont like watching new movies because it feels like work.
Im doing my work.
I watch old movies for inspiration.
Im like, Oh my God, girlfriend, that is so much how I feel.
But I live in the world of Turner Classic Movies.
Therell be movies every month that have never even been broadcast before.
Im just like,Holy shit.Its the most remarkable resource.
It was the same withMary Poppins, the first film I saw at age 3.
That movie conjured so many elements of spectral excitement.
Romeo and Juliettouched a moment in the counterculture in the 60s I was very much aware of.
They sobbed convulsively when Romeo killed himself.
It penetrated my entire romantic being.
So I had to remake it a couple years later.
Luckily in the finished version, we got a friend to play Juliet at the last minute.
By the way, for years, I thought it was, Wherefar outthou?
because I was blending hippie idioms with Shakespearean language.Where far out thou, Romeo?
Does that change your memory of watching it?No.
I mean, its sad.
I know how much that film defined their careers and how much they stood by it specifically the nudity.
So it felt like a maybe unfortunate desire to turn the tables way after the fact.
Lets do something kind of weird.
She wanted to do a movie with pets, and I wanted to do a movie with dolls.
In both cases, it came out of narrative theory.
Why Karen Carpenter?We didnt know what it would be about.
I hadnt heard a Karen Carpenter song in so long, since she had passed away of anorexia.
All of a sudden, it just felt so rich and complicated.
I called up Cynthia, like, We got to do the Karen Carpenter story.
She was like, Okay, were using dolls, and that was it.
A lot of the women in the program had saved their Barbie clothes.
This is where I come clean thatVelvet Goldminewas one of my favorite movies when I was a teenager.
To feel like you might make a different version of yourself every day.
I was so ready to enter into this sumptuous, sexual, erotic world it opened up.
With glam rock, you were asked to dress up.
To put on the glitter.
Did you ever go toRocky Horror?Absolutely.
I didnt dress up, but Id revel in the spectacle of it.
Of course, but I dressed up.Didyou?
Why no costume, Todd?Oh my God.
I dont know.I felt older,even though it only could have been …
But I was dressing up in Bowie clothes while researching and writingVelvet Goldmine, even while promotingSafebefore it.
It was the most Method Ive ever been as a writer in my life.
Did those kinds of critiques bother you?No, they didnt.
I made precisely the movie I wanted to.
It was an incredibly hard movie to make.
But one thingChristine Vachonand I did do was provide a dreamscape for everybody making the movie to live within.
There was a party, if not every night, every weekend, often atSandy Powellshouse.
It took place in a chateau with a rolling field lit with purple and pink lights.
There were swirly colored cookies shone onto the clouds, and much smoking of cigarettes and hashish.
It went into dawn the next day.
That continued in premieres in London and Edinburgh and New York.
The film gave me so much pleasure in ways that I cant say I felt watchingSafeorPoison.
Theyre into avoiding chemicals and living a clean lifestyle.
The premise of environmental illness is it real?
Carol White makes life look incredibly unnatural, because it is.
As for what to do about these things theyre not easily solvable.
The world remainspoisonous.We can make a run at isolate ourselves.
Safewas the first film you worked with Julianne Moore on and her first lead role.
Has her process changed?It was so completely intact from the beginning.
The lines describing who Carol White is, they seem to disappear as you finish reading them.
It needed an actor to meet that challenge on the other end with a deft touch.
But I also think theres a very present, elemental compassion for these people.
She and I both share a preference for films that dont demonstrate massive overcoming of conflicts.
Im drawn to storytelling that doesnt necessarily depict heroic solutions.
Did you have women in your life whom those characters remind you of?I did.
But she struggled with aspects of femininity and relationships with her mother and daughter.
The contradictory roles women are offered in society clearly, we have not fixed it.
The film is riddled with constraints.
Its what gives it a sense of reality.
And why the romantic yearning in that movie is strong.
They can never quite say, I want you.Its too dangerous.
But we know it, we see it.
Have you ever worried about whether your films would make money?
Was that a concern for you?Not inordinately, no.
We were always lucky.
The critical reaction forFar From Heaven I remember going, like,Wait a minute, this is weird.
It came out of you.It did.
I mean, I struggled longer with the basic concept.
I needed a diagrammatic plotline.
Society is that person, and so everybody is captive to the conditions under which they live.
Once I found that, I knew I was drawing from a thrillingly specific series of source material.
It was SirksAll That Heaven Allows.
It was Max Ophulss gorgeous filmThe Reckless Moment.And that was it, pretty much.
I wanted to get away from New York at the time.
It was my personal life that was more the problem, due to the ending of some romantic relationships.
I felt productive by day and social by night.
It was an amazing 1909 Arts and Crafts bungalow with gardens and fruit trees.
And then I was like, Im not leaving Portland.
Im going to stay here.
I drew a sketch of Cathy Whitaker in markers and stuck it up on the wall.
It was hard forIm Not There, which I made next.
He put the sword down first.
And then some of those actors dropped out.
I dont know why.
Im going to go for it.
I rewatchedIm Not Thereat Pompidou sitting next to Cate Blanchett.
I hadnt seen it since it came out.
I think it might be my favorite of my films.
Before the pandemic, you were working on a series about Freud is that still happening?No.
Thats … thats the project I have to do before I die.
The most important thing for me.
It was a 12-part, 12-hour-long story about Freuds life and work that I started to develop before COVID.
And then COVID hit.
And then they all went away and that deal wasnt renewed with the new roster of people.
So that went onto the back burner.
It needs a lot more work.
Can you tell me what you picture for it?Its still in a tender stage.
To me, his ideas really parallel the birth of cinema.
Nothing about cinema or almost any psychic product of the 20th century can be disentangled from Freud.
To me, hes the most radical and fundamental thinker of our time.
Are you in analysis or have you been?No, Ive never been in analysis.
That framed the way I studied film in college.
It was thoroughly inspiring, creatively.
It was not just an academic or intellectual endeavor it was visceral.
Basically, Freud is a companion for me in the way I look at the world.
Im dying to know what he would say about Joe and Gracie.Oh my God, seriously.
When you were younger, you called yourself an experimental filmmaker.
Does that label still make sense to you now?It does.
I cant help but think ofThe Velvet Underground,my first documentary.
That was an experiment.
And I love that, because thats always what movies should do to you.
They should put you in a place youve never been before.
There are all these conflicting feelings going on.
Thats what cinema is to me.
May Decemberopens the New York Film Festival on September 29.
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