I love serial drama.
— Todd Haynes
I came out of a sort of experimental background, and I didn't ever really expect - or even desire - a career as a feature filmmaker.
In a way, I think Roxy Music is high camp, in a brilliant way.
I think many of the ideas that opened up in the '60s got implemented in the '70s and that certain minority voices that were not being heard in the '60s, like women and gay people, were being heard in the '70s. Black Civil Rights had also found its foothold, and those ideas were also very pertinent.
I felt I would have the most creative freedom making experimental films and teaching, as I had many good examples of people around me who did just that.
Without sounding sexist, you have to cast a real man opposite Cate Blanchett. You need a guy who's grown up.
There are all these languages that keep people in place that conform us to a set of terms. It's why I think the whole idea of identity as something that is something of a straitjacket. That most of us like to think of as natural and innate. That we just find and go, 'Yeah, that's who I am.'
I'll never forget watching 'I'm Not There' with Cate Blanchett, because it was the first time she saw the finished film and saw her performance in it. I was sitting next to her experiencing it vicariously through her fresh eyes and hoping she liked it.
My problem on 'Safe' was that when I liked something, I would giggle.
You have to be somewhat ruthless with your work. You have to let things go. Even your favourite little part might not work in the end.
Films like 'The Godfather,' 'Chinatown' and 'The Exorcist' brought a realism and currency and understatement to their genres that we wanted for 'Mildred Pierce.'
In high school - that's when I first fell in love with his music and his voice. 'Blonde on Blonde' above everything. I vaguely remember 'Desire' coming out. I definitely remember 'Street Legal' and 'Slow Train Coming.' The first time I saw Dylan was on that tour: '79 in L.A.
I think I'm drawn to female characters partly because they don't have as easy or as obvious a relationship to power in society, and so they suffer under social constraints or have to maneuver within them in ways men sometimes don't or are unconscious about, or have certain liberties that are invisible to them.
It's funny: I don't feel like I have any particular privileged feeling for the Fifties.
My very first movie, 'Mary Poppins,' which I talk about, it just turned me into an obsessive, creative creature who had to sort of reply to the experience by drawing things, making things. It was like it forced - it made me into this obsessive, creative creature... I don't know any other way of putting it.
I do know my own films don't necessarily work within that high-pressure reductive moment of the opening weekend - or all the ways that many people assess the value of movies.
At HBO, you've just basically got a studio full of artistically driven smart guys and women who really care about the quality first and foremost.
Every actor comes with their own experience, method, methodology.
I was lucky enough to be exposed to film, art, literature, culture, and then told, 'Yes, you can do that, too.' It's not something that everybody's circumstances allow for.
I think camp is a really fascinating thing, and it's hard to define and hard to apply consciously. It's almost something you take from material that's already existed in the world, a reading of the world. But I think it speaks of a long tradition of gay reading of the world, before gays were allowed to be visible.
I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.
I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.
A lot of actors just don't seem grown up no matter how old they get... just juveniles with grey hair.
I value what I learned from being cast in the margins and what that felt like.
I love visual mediums, and I've always painted and drawn.
I like to rehearse before blocking.
A key part of the process for me is having screenings: not official test screenings, just gatherings of people, some I know and some I don't. We ask what is working and what isn't. So it's not as if I'm shutting out input.
It took an entire generation of critical thinking for Douglas Sirk's films to be really appreciated.
My films have often looked at the whole dilemma of identity as a straitjacket for people, for societies, for cultures, for historical moments.
I figured I would be teaching my whole life and making experimental films on the side.
With 'Carol,' I was just really looking at and thinking about the love story as a genre, not the domestic melodrama.
I've always been interested in visual art and used to be much more into theater when I was younger, or more knowledgeable about what's going on. And literature has played a big part in my life.
I do think that, yes, one should always be receptive to the fact that there are many different types of audiences, and they are not necessarily in a clean, reductive demographic like they once were.
The highest-caliber dramatic work produced for TV - not just in cable but something like 'The Good Wife' at network - is consistently great.
I'm a lover of cinema, and I don't want that to completely expire.
With 'Poison,' I'm sure some people just hated the movie, but it also got caught up into a debate about arts funding because it was a film that received a National Endowment for the Arts Public Grant, and it won the prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
What was so interesting about the glam era was that it was about bisexuality and breaking down the boundaries between gays and straights, breaking down the boundaries between masculinity and femininity with this androgyny thing.
I didn't quite realise until we started to put together our first cut of 'Wonderstruck' how much time is spent with no words spoken whatsoever.
Making a movie about the love between two women was really a tribute to the lesbian people in my life, my dear friends who are seminal in my life.
I love stories of love cropping up unexpectedly in life almost as a problem, as something you don't ask for. Something that messes everything up and makes you rethink everything.
The term 'new queer cinema' and the films of mine that were associated with that term are from a very, very different time, one almost entirely defined by the AIDS era. It was a very different social and cultural regard for the lives, the experiences, the worth of gay people.
Films like 'Velvet Goldmine' are an accumulation of research and references. I create an almost random resource of connections and am constantly distilling that into narrative specifics.
After 'Superstar,' I was encouraged. I felt audiences wanted to be challenged.
Some directors do recut their films, but I don't if I disagree, and what you suffer is a less passionate marketing campaign, less investment in the film at the other end, which is... fine. I get it.
The first time I saw Douglas Sirk was in college. I didn't encounter him on the late, late, late show like a lot of people; people a little older than me, maybe. But I saw him already as someone to take special note of in an academic context in college. I was immediately in a state of visual splendor.
I made little Super 8 extravaganzas when I was a kid, the first being my own version of 'Romeo and Juliet,' and where I played all the parts except for Juliet.
By the time I finished 'Poison,' the New Queer Cinema was branded, and I was associated with this. In many ways, it formed me as a filmmaker, like as a feature filmmaker I never set out to be.
I noticed that there were all these kinds of practices in a working set that had to be un-practiced on 'Far from Heaven,' which was so interesting.
I started 'Carol' as I almost always do, by looking at films from the time, and they were less - they actually felt less relevant to me in terms of their bigness, although we do have some big '50s-type moments in 'Carol.'
I have always had an interest in performers who play against the most obvious of expectations and are able to find something secret, something withheld, and some level of restraint.
