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.
Todd Haynes
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.
Without sounding sexist, you have to cast a real man opposite Cate Blanchett. You need a guy who's grown up.
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.
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 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'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.
I'm used to always having struggles getting finances together and keeping precarious budgets alive in the independent film world.
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.
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.
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.
With 'Carol,' I was just really looking at and thinking about the love story as a genre, not the domestic melodrama.
A lot of actors just don't seem grown up no matter how old they get... just juveniles with grey hair.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
Like the music and the period, I wanted 'I'm Not There' to be fun and full of emotions, desires and experiments that were thrilling and dangerous.
Looking at photographs of New York in 1952, you find a powerfully pre-Eisenhower era - sagging, tired, distressed - and the palette is slightly dissonant.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
My films have often looked at the whole dilemma of identity as a straitjacket for people, for societies, for cultures, for historical moments.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.'
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.
I don't think there's any more synesthetic medium than film.
Melodrama is sometimes broadly applied and sometimes derogatorily applied.
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.
My parents are very supportive and proud.
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.
'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.
Cannes is a lot of work, since it's a market festival and a serious festival, and they really work you, understandably.
I'm a lover of cinema, and I don't want that to completely expire.
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 think when I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist.
I love visual mediums, and I've always painted and drawn.
'Evil Urges' has some stuff in it that's unbelievable.
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.
In a way, I think Roxy Music is high camp, in a brilliant way.
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 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.
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.
