Todd Haynes
Todd Haynes
Todd Haynesis an American independent film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is considered a pioneer of the New Queer Cinema movement of filmmaking that emerged in the early 1990s. Haynes first gained public attention with his controversial short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which chronicles singer Karen Carpenter's tragic life and death, using Barbie dolls as actors. Haynes had not obtained proper licensing to use the Carpenters' music, prompting a lawsuit from Richard Carpenter, whom the film portrayed in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth2 January 1961
CityEncino, CA
CountryUnited States of America
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.
I always loved theater and acting in plays and directing, writing little plays and directing friends in plays.
I was 3 years old and Mary Poppins [1964] made an impression on me that was seismic, apparently. I fell into some kind of total creative, imaginative rapture over that movie that propelled this industry of Mary Poppins drawings, plays, performances - just an obsessive, creative reaction to it.
I liked to act in plays when I was a kid, and then in college. But that's the last time I really acted. I always loved it. But my interests were more in looking at the whole, rather than getting completely swallowed up in a single part of the whole.
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.
It's very funny because every time I make a movie, and I've heard this re-echoed by other filmmakers and actors I have worked with, you kind of feel like you're naked again. You have to figure it all out from scratch, as if you had never done it before.
You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.
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.
I'm drawn to female characters; not all of them are strong characters.
I think when I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist.
I think all my films can be enjoyed. In fact, they've often surprised me with how they're received.
It's absurd: half the movie audience are women, but Hollywood bosses are still aiming for men who are 20.
I love how 'melodrama' is a denigrated term - a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that's what life is, man.
There is no single approach that actors take to their craft. And the best thing you learn is that you have to really listen and respect each actor's own process and own method, and that takes a kind of delicate, non-imposing patience and openness, I think, to get the very best out of the people you work with.