Todd Haynes Quotes

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Todd Haynes

Profession : Director

Birth : January 2, 1961

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

Todd Haynes

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

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

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

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

My films have often looked at the whole dilemma of identity as a straitjacket for people, for societies, for cultures, for historical moments.

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

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

Todd Haynes

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

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

After 'Superstar,' I was encouraged. I felt audiences wanted to be challenged.

Todd Haynes

I like to rehearse before blocking.

Todd Haynes

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

Todd Haynes

Films like 'Velvet Goldmine' are an accumulation of research and references. I create an almost random resource of connections and am constantly distilling that into narrative specifics.

Todd Haynes

I love visual mediums, and I've always painted and drawn.

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes

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.'

Todd Haynes

A lot of actors just don't seem grown up no matter how old they get... just juveniles with grey hair.

Todd Haynes

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.

Todd Haynes