Todd Haynes is 'Far from Safe' - Innovative film director's retrospective at Pacific Film Archive

Born in Los Angeles, Haynes, 64, grew up making short 8mm films, including "The Suicide," completed in high school. His college project, "Assassins: a Film Concerning Rimbaud," will be screened at the PFA retrospective.

Fame
Hayne's early acclaimed film, "Poison" (1991) combined Jean Genet inspiration, Pierre & Gilles fetish and retro horror, while exploring aspects of AIDS at the height of the epidemic. The film was attacked by right-wingers for getting partial NEA funding, yet it won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Disease became another theme with chemically-sensitive Julianne Moore's character becoming increasingly allergic to everything in "Safe" (1995). Moore has starred in four other Haynes films, most recently the compelling actor/identity sex scandal drama, "May December," (2023) with Natalie Portman.

"The theme of identity comes up again and again in all of Todd's work," said Moore in a 2024 Vice interview. "Who are we? Who do we belong to? How do we find ourselves?"

While few of Hayne's films are visually similar, there is a consistency in precise style, of immersing into a location or a time era, as in the visually gorgeous 1950s interracial romance (and Douglas Sirk homage) "Far from Heaven" (2002), for which his screenplay won an Academy Award nomination.

Haynes hit greater stride with his sixth feature film, "Carol" (2015) based on the Patricia Highsmith novel, the lesbian-themed "The Price of Salt," and starring the glorious Cate Blanchett. The film received six Academy Award nominations, won five Golden Globe awards, nine BAFTA awards, and six Independent Spirit awards.

That Haynes was snubbed for a Best Director Oscar nomination is thought by some to be because the film is about empowered women, not tragic lesbians as in the past. The film now has a cult following that includes dress-up nights at screenings.

Heroes
Other recent films to be screened in Berkeley include the beautiful parallel-story adventure, "Wonderstruck" (2017) and Mark Ruffalo in the DuPont poisoning scandal, "Dark Waters" (2019). Haynes' early eccentric short "Dottie Gets Spanked" and Haynes' first film, the 1985 aptly poetic "Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud" will also be screened.

Music plays a prominent role in three of his screened films: "Velvet Goldmine" (1998), the glam rock fable with queer/bi love between a Bowie/Iggy-esque duo, and the fan who hunts down the past after a faked death; the beguiling multi-cast Bob Dylan biopic-ish "I'm Not There" (2007); and his rock-steady 2021 documentary, "The Velvet Underground."

For the PFA openers, Haynes has chosen four of his films to include a screening and Q&A with different film scholars. Unfortunately, they're already sold out. But the remainder of the retrospective will be viewable through April 12.

One upcoming project, cited as a gay detective drama set in 1930s Los Angeles, stopped production in 2023 when its star, Joaquin Phoenix, abruptly quit. But Haynes is moving on with a new project based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, set to star Kate Winslet.

In a phone interview from his Portland home, where he lives with his partner Bryan O'Keefe, Haynes discussed several of his films, and inspirations, ahead of his visit to Berkeley.

Jim Provenzano: After re-watching a few of your films, one thing I noticed, along with the great acting and camera work, were particular themes that ran through each movie: diffused glass windows in "Carol," the emerald in "Velvet Goldmine." How do you decide on these kinds of details when you're creating the process of getting a film together?
Todd Haynes: Each movie is this sort of thrilling, just in the visual sort of language, and the references and the kind of movies I'm looking at and the photographers or painters. Each movie is its own "journey," to use the most banal word in the world, and I make an image book, particularly from the visual standpoint in probably every film since "Safe."

I don't think I had one for "Poison." It's really like my first nonverbal communication with my director of photography, a way to talk about what I'm imagining, what the film's temperament and temperatures, color palette and visual references might be.

But even in the process of putting it together in a book form with the beginning, middle, and an end, I find that there are things that I'm learning about how to structure a narrative. It almost makes me think back to when I, like many of us, were obsessed mix tape makers, right?

Of course, yeah.
I was one of those guys who would either make a tribute tape to an artist or to a concept or a genre of music, and they were TDK, either 90-minute or 100-minute tapes. It was 45 minutes on each side, right? And I would just be obsessed about the segues from song to song, the emotional arcing up, and then starting to get intense and the last act of that side and then go down. I realized I was also creating a narrative experience in music on those tapes. And the length of those tapes was like a feature film if you play both sides.

Exactly. I have a whole box full that I digitized over the last decades. They have colorful cassette box covers.
All these ways, and the image book is probably central to this, is you're finding these preliminary parallel ways of building a narrative and emotional experience in all the various aspects, musical and visual, that are not just about the words on the page, on the script.

With "Carol" in particular, Saul Leiter, the American color photographer from the mid-century, was an influence. I was exposed to him by my production designer Mark Friedberg during "Mildred Pierce" [the series he directed with Kate Winslet].

The glass sort of abstracts, they turn almost into an abstract expressionist painting of actual lived moments, in a bus on the street, in a shop storefront looking out or looking in of a really specific time and place.

Also, because Therese [in "Carol"] is an aspiring photographer and is learning herself how to frame her life into a lens, and obviously centering that on her object of desire. How you learn how to do that, and how desire gets translated or transferred through different mediums, is essential, like the writing that comprises "The Price of Salt," Patricia Highsmith's novel.

It almost has that same obsessive delirious voice of her detective criminal subject in her other books because they're constantly thinking about outcomes and scenarios and, "What if I do this? It'll turn out this way. And if I do that, it'll turn out that way." Or, "Did they really see me doing this or did they see me doing that?"

The same thing goes on in the mind of someone falling in love and finding obsession in another person and trying to read the signs of that person. It's through this other way, through lensing and through framing, and through being on one side of that lens versus the other in "Carol" and sort of visual organizing principle. It's just cool that people notice.

You've mastered the overtly queer and the sub-textually queer. Each film has some aspect of it, not just homosexuality, but the otherness has been cited as one of your main themes. "How do we exist? Where do we belong?" I'm quoting Julianne Moore, who said that of you.
That's a good source.

Now that you've accomplished some of the most beautifully visceral queer stories of men and women, and more subtle takes on societal rebels, when do you think, 'Okay, now I'll do a gay one again'?
I would rather assign queerness to how we see the world rather than the content of a particular story. Filmmakers, idols of mine like Werner Fassbinder, who was openly gay and made 40 movies in such a crazy short amount of time; three of them are more like miniseries, multiple-part series.

I think he was absolutely equal opportunity in how harshly he looked at all his characters and subjects, whether they were gay or straight. If anything, there were more predominant female subjects in his movies than there were necessarily gay subjects in his movies.

But I think his interest was in how the world presses down on you, whatever you are. And he had specific experience and knowledge and an acute sense of what that meant as a gay man, but also transferred that understanding to an interest in female subjects.

This is certainly not new to the history of movies where gay directors like George Cukor or Vincent Minnelli had centered more often on female subjects and made part of their careers and bodies of work a tribute to their closeness to women as characters. But I expand out from that, in my kind of insistence that it's how we look at the world that matters, not what specific story we're trying to tell.

And I think of Douglas Sirk as a queer filmmaker and the artificial view of American heterosexual morality that's the subject of his movies. The fact that he cast a closeted gay man (Rock Hudson) and make him a star as the lead love object [in "All That Heaven Allows"].

He was too smart, Sirk, to not know that there was something lacking in Rock, in the authenticity city of kisses and embraces being exchanged with the female characters who fall in love with him in his movies. That it was intentional, right? That sadness that accumulates in his movies about these heterosexual lives, never fulfilled by the happy ending he slaps on at the end.

That about is about as queer as you can get. I don't care what he does in bed. It's that understanding of the world and it's a marginal perspective. It's a perspective of criticism about dominant culture. And there are many gay filmmakers who don't have that criticism at all. But that doesn't interest me.

I'm curious about some of your initial inspirations that led to like the 'spit baptismal' and gay wedding in "Poison."
It's funny, there's always something, even if it's almost like a dream you had, there's something sort of beyond language or beyond words. I felt that about "Velvet Goldmine." I just had this feeling about it before I started to make it or write it that I wanted to sort of find all the elements to fulfill. But just along your prior question and point, I think "Far from Heaven" is a film that totally does engage with queer subjects and a gay problem.

But it sort of puts it alongside other problems. And we're forced to kind of look at the different ways people who don't have direct access to power, or for whom that power or those liberties are compromised or challenged. How do they function in different ways while an unequal society pushes back against them, whether it's because they're Black or they're a woman or because they're a closeted gay man. How do we survive?

And that's just a film that's almost like a model, I guess, for what I think in my little way, what I think Fassbinder did in a very big way. Or what my evocation of what Sirk does in his movies, but making the gay aspect more explicit than Sirk was able to do. Although he probably would've loved to.

It's also interesting how you presciently predicted a resurgent interest in Bob Dylan, but in a completely unusual six-actor format.
I sometimes watch films of mine at screenings. A couple years ago, I hadn't seen "I'm Not There" in a while. Cate Blanchett had come to Paris with me for talks after "Carol" and "I'm not There" screenings. We were sitting together watching it again, and I hadn't seen it since it came out. It really was a kind of rush. I felt a new appreciation for the film that I hadn't felt in a while.

Cate was so self-possessive about our film when the new one came out. "I want them to be released," she insisted. "I'm going to go ahead and take it to film festivals. I want it out there."

And Ed Lawson, who shot it –whenever I talked to him about the fact that he just got nominated for an Oscar or just won the cinematography prize this year, and I'm congratulating him– he's like, "Yeah, but let's talk about the Bob Dylan movie." And I'm like, "Ed, it's fine." I haven't seen it myself, but I'm like, "If there's one thing I'm Not There' suggests is that there's room for endless version of Dylans in the world."

A Dylan multiverse.
I'm trying to just pull back and let that happen. But I love how many of my creative partners have been so newly embracing around what we did together.

You've worked with some of the same folks on many films; Moore, Blanchett, composer Carter Burwell, and with producer Christine Vachon.
"Poison" was the first feature she produced and the first feature that I directed. And we've been doing it ever since.

I was listening intentionally to the Carter Burwell's score in "Carol." What is it about his work that makes your films sound so good?
I thoroughly embrace the collaborative premise of film. It is a fundamentally collaborative process. And you need somebody to kind of take, follow through all the stages that it falls, unfurls into, and that's the direction. But if the director isn't there to fully embrace and appreciate how essential each component is and really kind of nerd out about it, whether it's the music or the production designer or that wig or that shoe that somebody–

Like Carol's gloves.
Yeah, it makes the costume designer feel like, "Damn, he's noticing all this stuff and he cares about it as much as I do." That's just another way of expressing your appreciation and your understanding of the necessity and the importance of all these components that come together.

So yeah, when I hear Carter's score; for a composer whose work is so exquisite throughout an entire career, and he's worked with such very different kinds of directors like the Coen Brothers, and then my films and so many other directors. That, to me, and I know I'm completely biased, is a hotline for an already extraordinary body of work.

In re-watching "Wonderstruck," I saw many personally evocative parts, including the '70s New York City you got right. It was just like some of my Bronx relatives' neighborhoods.
Wow. That's so cool to hear. [Production Designer] Mark Friedberg grew up there. I've worked with him on several other projects.

In every film I've ever done, it starts with me and the production designer in a car. And when it's me and Mark in a car, it's been among some of our best times, just the two of us. And we're just starting from scratch. We're just taking it all in and we're talking about ideas in the movie, very generally, but we're in a car and we're moving. We're seeing landscapes pass, and he knows New York City better than anybody I know. So that was a perfect film for him to design.

But then it's about casting all those extras. You need those kinds of bodies. You have to look for very specific kinds of bodies that you don't see any more on the streets of cities. The skinniness of the bodies from the '70s. The vintage clothes that we actually used as much as we could to dress them only fit certain kinds of skeletal bodies that are just almost not known anymore.

I have to give a nod, of course, to the costumes in "Velvet Goldmine," not just those worn by the rock stars. Younger people may not understand that as teens we actually wore that stuff. Christian Bale's character, Arthur Stuart, is inspired by yourself.
Yeah.

Those Chess King clothes.
They were fantastic in their awkwardness, in the polyester fabrics that were so common and brought out body odor. When I was in my preparatory process of writing it and researching it. I made the photos at the time I was promoting "Safe," but I was dressing like David Bowie everywhere I went.

I wanted to feel like what it felt like, to be teetering off platform shoes, wearing those cut-off tops and feeling the wind go through your puffed-up hair. It's a feeling that it is not like anything most men experience, or at least who aren't in drag or performing on stage, which I never unfortunately did. But yeah, it was part of the whole learning curve for that movie.

To re-feel the '70s.
To really feel it, smell it, feel how vulnerable you are, how kind of brazenly exposed you are. I think women can feel this way when they feel a certain surety about what they're wearing and when they're wearing very little and they feel so emboldened by it. But it's something men don't really get.

And up next, you're again working with Kate Winslet on a series.
I am. It's called "Trust." It's so amazing. It won the Pulitzer, I guess it was now two years ago, because time is doing its thing. It's written by Hernan Diaz and it's a remarkable piece of work. It's sort of a meditation on the financial industry, centering around the '20s and '30s. But it's really about how histories get written and it has a sort of "Citizen Kane" kind of reputation. And because it's about how stories are written, histories are written about the powerful and how certain voices get left out of those histories, like women's voices.

The whole book repeats and rewrites these various histories around this particular character. But it's also a sort of a roman a-clef version of his life that it begins with. It's just fantastic writing, but it lends itself to cinema.

'Todd Haynes: Far from Safe' at BAM/PFA, $5-$18, March 8 - April 12, 2155 Center St., Berkeley.
www.bampfa.org

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