Todd Haynes Quotes

I’m used to always having struggles getting finances together and keeping precarious budgets alive in the independent film world.

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.

I think it remains a film-by-film process, and since I am relatively selective and slow, it can take a while.

I figured I would be teaching my whole life and making experimental films on the side.

My problem on ‘Safe‘ was that when I liked something, I would giggle.

My parents are very supportive and proud.

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.

It’s absurd: half the movie audience are women, but Hollywood bosses are still aiming for men who are 20.

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 value what I learned from being cast in the margins and what that felt like.

I think all my films can be enjoyed. In fact, they’ve often surprised me with how they’re received.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

I’m drawn to female characters; not all of them are strong characters.

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.

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 think by around the time I was about 8 or 9, the idea of filmmaking probably took hold. 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.

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.

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.

Making a film is so scary, and there’s such a kind of void that you’re working from initially. I mean, you can have all the ideas and be as prepared as possible, but you’re also still bringing people together and saying, ‘Trust me,’ even when you don’t necessarily trust every element.

With ‘Carol,’ I was just really looking at and thinking about the love story as a genre, not the domestic melodrama.

‘Mildred’ was the first film I shot on Super 16 with Ed Lachman, and we decided to continue doing so for ‘Carol.’

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.

‘Carol’ is so distorted by point-of-view.

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.

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.

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.

You always feel like rock critics are frustrated musicians. I envy musicians their ability to live their art and share it with an audience, in the moment.

It’s funny: I don’t feel like I have any particular privileged feeling for the Fifties.

All actors are protecting something, in their own way, that happens in front of a camera.

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.

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 remember going to see ‘2001’ with my dad.

The best love stories on film are rooted in the point of view of the more woundable, vulnerable party, the more amorous party.

I’m a lover of cinema, and I don’t want that to completely expire.

I’ve been really lucky with critical reaction, overall, even if my films don’t often resemble each other.

They always find new ways of talking about my movies.

In a way, I think Roxy Music is high camp, in a brilliant way.

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.

When you premiere somewhere like Cannes, it’s huge. It’s nerve-wracking.

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.

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.

Films like ‘The Godfather,’ ‘Chinatown’ and ‘The Exorcist’ brought a realism and currency and understatement to their genres that we wanted for ‘Mildred Pierce.’