Todd Haynes (/heɪnz/; born January 2, 1961) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. His films span four decades with themes examining the personalities of well-known musicians, dysfunctional and dystopian societies, and blurred gender roles. Los Angeles, California, U.S.
1: “You’ll see in ‘Carol’ a lot of shots shot through windows, glass and awnings, with interruptions between where we are and where our object is. To me, I hope that that conjures the whole act of looking as a predicament, as something that is never easy and never completely attainable.”
2: “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.”
3: “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.”
4: “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.”
5: “I live in Portland. I’m a man of the world, and I live in Portland.”
6: “It took an entire generation of critical thinking for Douglas Sirk’s films to be really appreciated.”
7: “With ‘Poison,’ I’m sure some people just hated the movie, but it also got caught up into a debate about arts funding because it was a film that received a National Endowment for the Arts Public Grant, and it won the prize at the Sundance Film Festival.”
8: “Films like ‘The Godfather,’ ‘Chinatown’ and ‘The Exorcist’ brought a realism and currency and understatement to their genres that we wanted for ‘Mildred Pierce.'”
9: “Making a movie about the love between two women was really a tribute to the lesbian people in my life, my dear friends who are seminal in my life.”
10: “You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won’t matter if the movie doesn’t work emotionally as well as intellectually.”
11: “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.”
12: “I don’t want to make people feel better.”
13: “I think when I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist.”
14: “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.”
15: “I’m drawn to female characters; not all of them are strong characters.”
16: “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.”
17: “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.”
18: “I think all my films can be enjoyed. In fact, they’ve often surprised me with how they’re received.”
19: “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.”
20: “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.”