There's no better place to do a longform project than HBO. I loved the creative teams I got a chance to work with.
— Todd Haynes
There were interesting ways that queerness could hide out and get played out pre-Stonewall. It is part of a vast history that is getting forgotten quickly as we trumpet forward into gay marriage and gays in the military and a much different cultural attitude toward gay lives.
Sirkian films really aren't - at least the way I see them, they're not about identification. They don't have voiceover. A lot of the love stories that are rooted, classic love stories rooted in point of view, use voiceover as a mechanism for locating you there.
The film division at Amazon is made up of true cineastes who love movies and really want to try and provide opportunity for independent film visions to find their footing in a vastly shifting market. They love cinema.
At the time I made 'Safe,' I was really intrigued by the whole culture around AIDS, which was turning to people like Louise Hay and these other West Coast New Age thinkers.
Love stories require an obstacle between the lovers, something that keeps them from one another. You have to yearn for the love that can't be fulfilled. And it gets harder to conceive of viable cultural or racial or sexual obstacles between people as we move forward progressively.
I had really loving parents and a happy childhood.
There's this homogenization, this big sucking motion in dominant society, to absorb all the disparate elements that define the margin or define the culture or define those who are thrust outside the status quo.
When you premiere somewhere like Cannes, it's huge. It's nerve-wracking.
The best love stories on film are rooted in the point of view of the more woundable, vulnerable party, the more amorous party.
Every actor prepares differently and to different degrees of privacy. Some want to talk everything out. Others really don't want to talk anything out - or rehearse much.
I've been really lucky with critical reaction, overall, even if my films don't often resemble each other.
I always learn a lot when I do so. You know, when you step out of your comfort zone and even your cynical zone, and open yourself up to what other people might experience and why they do so.
'Mildred' was the first film I shot on Super 16 with Ed Lachman, and we decided to continue doing so for 'Carol.'
You'll see in 'Carol' a lot of shots shot through windows, glass and awnings, with interruptions between where we are and where our object is. To me, I hope that that conjures the whole act of looking as a predicament, as something that is never easy and never completely attainable.
'Evil Urges' has some stuff in it that's unbelievable.
I love how 'melodrama' is a denigrated term - a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that's what life is, man.
I'm used to always having struggles getting finances together and keeping precarious budgets alive in the independent film world.
'Carol' is so distorted by point-of-view.
Aspects of guilt or handwringing that one might expect in a film set in the '50s about women who discover their love for other women - a lot of these things are not in 'Carol.'
'Carol' takes place in the really early '50s, before Eisenhower has taken office. It's based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, her second and most autobiographical book and the only one outside of the crime milieu.
I remember going to see '2001' with my dad.
Films like 'The Godfather,' 'The Exorcist,' 'Klute,' 'Chinatown,' 'Network,' and 'The Parallax View': They were drawn from the genre tradition, but they dressed down the stylistic telling of those traditions and genres.
I don't want to make people feel better.
Melodrama is sometimes broadly applied and sometimes derogatorily applied.
I saw experimental film-makers teaching in college. They did what they wanted and didn't worry about the market, but the circumstances ended up offering me other possibilities.
Looking at photographs of New York in 1952, you find a powerfully pre-Eisenhower era - sagging, tired, distressed - and the palette is slightly dissonant.
All actors are protecting something, in their own way, that happens in front of a camera.
When 'Safe' came out, it was treated respectfully but kind of forgotten. Then, by the end of the '90s, it somehow made it onto all these best-of-the-decade lists.
I'm pretty single-minded, unlike a lot of directors who miraculously seem to be holding six projects in their hand at a given time and juggling them accordingly.
I live in Portland. I'm a man of the world, and I live in Portland.
'Carol' takes place at a time the country was crawling out of the shadows of the war years, feeling the new vulnerabilities of the Cold War and conflicts within the union.
The way I sort of approach my work is that the historical and socioeconomic and cultural worlds that the music is exploring dictate the visual experience and the way that we approach it specifically on film.
It's absurd: half the movie audience are women, but Hollywood bosses are still aiming for men who are 20.
Cannes is a lot of work, since it's a market festival and a serious festival, and they really work you, understandably.
When you think of the later '50s and 'Far From Heaven' and Eisenhower and Sirk, you think of that Hollywood panache and gloss to American middle-class life.
Serious films for grown-ups - 'Michael Clayton,' 'In the Valley of Elah,' 'A Mighty Heart' - these are big Hollywood films, but they have substance and craft and really beautiful performances.
Each production is its own experience.
I felt 'Brokeback Mountain' re-imbued the love story with an authentic and unquestionable series of obstacles that these men faced. I think that's certainly true for 'Carol' as well.
My parents are very supportive and proud.
I have a hard time making movies that affirm life and say life is a good and happy place. That's not true about the world.
I think it remains a film-by-film process, and since I am relatively selective and slow, it can take a while.
I don't know if I ever entertained an academic career, nor did I ever think I'd become a feature film-maker in the market.
The bond company comes in if you exceed your costs; they're the insurers of the film. In the worst-case scenario, they take over the production.
I'm always interested in what classic crime writers got into when they stepped away from the genre stuff they were known for. That's why 'Mildred Pierce' is like noir without any real crime.
They always find new ways of talking about my movies.
I don't think there's any more synesthetic medium than film.
We yearn for the desire to triumph, and it almost never does in the greatest love stories because we're left yearning for it more in the end, and we wish the world were different as a result. I do love that.
When you're shooting concert scenes in films, we try to bring in, where appropriate, as much of a sense of live performance as possible.
I worked with Jim James on my film 'I'm Not There' - he sang 'Goin' to Acapulco' with Calexico backing him up. We just hit it off, and it's such a beautiful moment in that film.
