Todd Haynes: The Amorous Imagination

“The script came to me, but I read Patri­cia Highsmith’s book first. And then I read the script, and then the book again. That book is some­thing else. It’s a real­ly extra­or­di­nary piece of writ­ing. It fol­lows through her career of crim­i­nal sub­jects in the most inter­est­ing way. It’s con­sis­tent in how it describes the over­ac­tive, fes­ter­ing sub­jec­tiv­i­ty of its core sub­ject – the char­ac­ter of Therese. In most if not all of her oth­er nov­els, this sub­jec­tive pres­ence is a crim­i­nal mind. What she plays up so beau­ti­ful­ly is the par­al­lels between the amorous imag­i­na­tion and the crim­i­nal one, and how sim­i­lar kinds of cre­ative work, pos­tu­la­tions and hypothe­ses and fic­tive sce­nar­ios are con­stant­ly being con­jured by this type of imag­i­na­tion. Of course, the kind of love she describes in the book was, at the time, against the law. It’s a love which she bare­ly has the lan­guage to describe. What I love about the book most of all is that it’s uni­ver­sal – it’s real­ly about feel­ings expe­ri­enced by the uncer­tain lover what­ev­er your sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion may be.”

“I don’t think the term ​‘melo­dra­ma’ is fit­ting for this movie. It’s not the way I approached the mate­r­i­al. It’s a term that gets used in a lot of incon­sis­tent ways at the very least. Some­times it’s a pejo­ra­tive term, some­times it’s a very spe­cif­ic term that comes out of film his­to­ry and the his­to­ry of lit­er­a­ture. Melo­dra­ma as a term to iden­ti­fy a tra­di­tion in film is some­thing that I hold in very high esteem, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to Amer­i­can film. There are so many extra­or­di­nary works. It’s not that the gen­res don’t over­lap, but in this case, to me this is more of a love sto­ry. I looked back at this tra­di­tion in film as a way to organ­ise my thoughts and work out how this sto­ry should be told, how it would look, and par­tic­u­lar­ly how the point-of-view would be structured.”

“David Lean’s Brief Encounter was a sem­i­nal point of ref­er­ence for me when mak­ing Car­ol. The intense sub­jec­tiv­i­ty in that movie, for instance, of the Celia John­son char­ac­ter. It’s her recount­ing this episode and it’s all being remem­bered on the night it ends as she sits qui­et­ly with her hus­band in the liv­ing room. That sense of place and that sense of root­ed­ness in her expe­ri­ence isn’t at all like Sirkian melo­dra­ma. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing­ly dif­fer­ent. To me, they’re both amaz­ing cin­e­mat­ic tra­di­tions and I learn a lot each time I com­mit to learn­ing more about a cer­tain style or a cer­tain direc­tor. But I like the dif­fer­ences – I think they’re impor­tant to be aware of.”

“The con­cept of find­ing a cure for cer­tain incur­able afflic­tions is cer­tain­ly a recur­rent theme for me. It def­i­nite­ly has recur­rent ques­tions attached to what the whole notion of ​“cures” are. I think there’s a crit­i­cal ques­tion being raised about our notions of nor­mal­cy. I guess cures in my movies are always aligned against what are the tra­di­tion­al or repres­sive mod­els of those things con­sid­ered to be the norm. Char­ac­ters are find­ing them­selves – often against their own will – fight­ing against their own bod­ies. They’re rebelling against the social norms. All of this, of course, comes out of ques­tions that were cir­cu­lat­ing around the AIDS era in the late ​’80s and ear­ly ​’90s. In the case of Car­ol and Far from Heav­en, it’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent because it’s deal­ing with the cure for love, and it’s a cure of which you imme­di­ate­ly find your­self ques­tion­ing the valid­i­ty. Where the agency of that is actu­al­ly com­ing from. These attempts at ​“cor­rec­tion” ulti­mate­ly fail, and you’re left with those ques­tions at the end of films like Super­star: The Karen Car­pen­ter Sto­ry and Dot­tie Gets Spanked, and Car­ol as well.”

“I feel that going back to the past deep­ens and makes more excit­ing the jour­ney or the trans­port that a film offers us. It gives us a win­dow onto a dif­fer­ent time, where we can see dif­fer­ent kinds of expe­ri­ence. I also feel that in some ways, when peri­od films have issues that reflect back – or for­ward – to con­tem­po­rary issues, they’re almost stronger Their argu­ments can become more mean­ing­ful when it’s the audi­ence mak­ing those con­nec­tions them­selves. It gives us a dis­placed way of look­ing at our­selves. I think that’s what ulti­mate­ly draws me to the past. And I think it’s also just my own self­ish desire to keep learn­ing about his­to­ry and the spe­cif­ic social set­tings, tra­di­tions and cus­toms. I want to get into the real intri­ca­cies and details of a cer­tain time, but also I want to get into the lan­guage of the cin­e­ma asso­ci­at­ed with cer­tain eras. That’s part of my tute­lage as I devel­op. When every­thing isn’t imme­di­ate­ly known or famil­iar, you have to look at it with keen­er eyes.”

“What my Peg­gy Lee movie will be, when it hap­pens and how it hap­pens, will be as close to get­ting to the core of what her music is about. My goal is always to start with what’s real­ly unique about that artist has cre­at­ed with­in their field. I need to find a nar­ra­tive and a cin­e­mat­ic par­al­lel to what that is. That’s real­ly the goal. Peg­gy Lee is such an extra­or­di­nary and unique fig­ure in mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can his­to­ry and jazz. She com­bines the arti­fi­cial with the gen­uine, the hot with the cold, the min­i­mal­ist with the max­i­mal­ist, she’s just this amaz­ing com­bi­na­tion of things. The film will try and express some of that.”