Todd Haynes Quotes

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Todd Haynes

Profession : Director

Birth : January 2, 1961

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.

Todd Haynes

I remember going to see '2001' with my dad.

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

Each production is its own experience.

Todd Haynes

'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.

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

Aspects of guilt or handwringing that one might expect in a film set in the '50s about women who discover their love for other women - a lot of these things are not in 'Carol.'

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

'Carol' is so distorted by point-of-view.

Todd Haynes

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

Cannes is a lot of work, since it's a market festival and a serious festival, and they really work you, understandably.

Todd Haynes

The highest-caliber dramatic work produced for TV - not just in cable but something like 'The Good Wife' at network - is consistently great.

Todd Haynes

At HBO, you've just basically got a studio full of artistically driven smart guys and women who really care about the quality first and foremost.

Todd Haynes

I do know my own films don't necessarily work within that high-pressure reductive moment of the opening weekend - or all the ways that many people assess the value of movies.

Todd Haynes

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.'

Todd Haynes

I've always been interested in visual art and used to be much more into theater when I was younger, or more knowledgeable about what's going on. And literature has played a big part in my life.

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes