Top 60 Todd Haynes Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won’t matter if the movie doesn’t work emotionally as well as intellectually.

‘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 like to rehearse before blocking.

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

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

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

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.

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 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 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 love how ‘melodrama’ is a denigrated term – a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that’s what life is, man.

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.

My parents are very supportive and proud.

I don’t want to make people feel better.

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.

Pop music can get inside us and enter our memory bubbles. It provides those true Proustian moments, unlocking sensations, unlocking our imaginations. Music inspired me as a filmmaker.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I live in Portland. I’m a man of the world, and I live in Portland.

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.

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

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 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.

It took an entire generation of critical thinking for Douglas Sirk’s films to be really appreciated.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Each production is its own experience.

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.

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

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.

I had really loving parents and a happy childhood.

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.

They always find new ways of talking about my movies.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.