By James Mottram
“The project had been gestating for some time, way before I came onboard,” director, Todd Haynes, revealed to FilmInk of his latest work, Carol, at The Cannes Film Festival in 2015. “I first heard about it when I did this thing at The Museum Of The Moving Image with [friend, collaborator, and costume designer] Sandy Powell. We were talking about films that she would like to design female clothes for. She said, ‘Oh yeah, there might be this frock film coming up…it’s a lesbian love story with Cate Blanchett.’ And I was like, ‘Fuck, what’s that?’ And she says, ‘It’s based on a Patricia Highsmith novel,’ and I was like, ‘Hmmm.’ I had other things that I was working on at the time, but it certainly sounded up my alley, so to speak.”
With its stylish veneer of fifties respectability and torrid undertow of repressed desire, combined with its rich and uncompromising female characters, Carol is indeed right up Todd Haynes’ alley. Literately adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price Of Salt, by Phyllis Nagy, the retitled Carol – which scored six Oscar nominations – tells of Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), a timid but restless department store clerk who falls under the dark romantic spell of the rarefied Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a stifled suburban housewife whose marriage is splintering because she’s more interested in wooing women than making nice with her sadly desperate but increasingly brutish husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler). As the love that dare not speak its name between Therese and Carol deepens, their lives are thrown into turmoil. “I was woefully ignorant of The Price Of Salt,” Haynes smiles. “All my lesbian friends were like, ‘Oh, that’s standard college reading for any queer. What’s the problem?’ But when I finally read it, I loved it…I was so moved.”
Though under the guiding hand of successful independent producer, Elizabeth Karlsen (who had worked with screenwriter, Phyllis Nagy, on her 2005 directorial effort, Mrs. Harris), Carol only truly picked up speed when Todd Haynes entered the fray. “It remains the ridiculous, tiresome tale that people are scared of financing films about women,” Haynes sighs of the woes that beset Carol during its lengthy development period. “It’s Patricia Highsmith, and it’s Cate Blanchett…what’s the problem? It’s going to be a young, attractive woman playing Therese, making love to Cate. It’s a no-brainer. And yet there’s that stubborn amnesia within the industry and within the financing world that these films can be seen and can be of interest to anybody other than the sacred 21-year-old male viewer. It’s just the same old story that we hear time and time again, even after hits like Pitch Perfect and Bridesmaids.”
Directors usually assemble their own casts, but Haynes had no problem in accepting the already attached, Oscar winning Cate Blanchett (who ended up getting another Best Actress Oscar nomination for Carol), with whom he’d previously worked on 2007’s I’m Not There. “I read the script and the novel knowing that Cate was attached to the project, so she was Carol from the start,” Haynes says. “And then when I saw her in Blue Jasmine, I was like, ‘Oh my god, she gets more beautiful and fascinating on film as she matures.’ I just knew that Carol was going to be a beautiful role for her. That said, Rooney Mara’s Therese is the provisional subject of the film, and the possessor of its point of view, particularly in the novel. So Carol is the object of desire. That shifts at the end, but it’s hard to play the object of desire, especially when you’re the older person in the team. Therese is a blank slate – she’s coming into focus to herself, and to us in the movie. Carol is the one with all the complexities – the marriage that’s failing, the child custody battle, the economic status, all of the beauty and the elegance and all that stuff – so all the fire is on the other side. But in the novel, you’re stuck in the passive character’s world. But I like that…that was an interesting tension.”
Though Blanchett (who described Haynes to FilmInk as “audacious and nutty” in 2007) was already attached, the director was free to bring together the rest of the cast. Was Rooney Mara (also Oscar nominated) – the rising young star of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Her, Side Effects, and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints – his first choice to play the initially skittish but ultimately steely Therese? “She was, absolutely,” Haynes replies. “I’d been watching her work, like we all have done, and I’ve been so impressed by what she’s been able to do, particularly her ability to shift from role to role. I spoke to directors who just could not speak more highly of her.” Did he get his two stars in a room together first before he cast them? “Nope, I didn’t test them,” Haynes replies. “When you’re approaching actors of a certain status, you make offers, basically. You don’t get to test them, and I didn’t need to. I knew that this would work. It was not too hard to think of Rooney Mara in the role.”
A noted cineaste, Haynes whirled through his cinematic memory bank for inspiration not just on the look of Carol (much of that was derived from the work of famed New York photographer, Saul Leiter, who changed the face of the medium in the forties and fifties), but also for its narrative drive and tonal shifts. “I looked at how, in my mind, great love stories function, particularly because Patricia Highsmith’s novel was so rooted in one character’s point of view,” Haynes offers. “The point of view was also that of the weaker character, and the more amorous character, who’s uncertain about the feelings of her object of interest. Most compelling love stories share that, where you’re on the side of the desiring person. So I looked at films for that reason, and I just watched how that point of view shifts by the end of the movie to Carol, and that Therese has changed, and grown up. Carol discovers the value of that open person who actually doesn’t exist anymore, and then she’s the more vulnerable and desiring person. [David Lean’s 1945 classic] Brief Encounter was really helpful for me in terms of a cinematic reference, but there wasn’t any real, single movie that informed Carol, or any single director.”
Movies have been a part of Todd Haynes’ life for nearly as long as he can remember. Born in 1961, in Los Angeles, he grew up in nearby Encino, with his father, Allen E. Haynes, a cosmetics importer, and his mother, Sherry Lynne (née Semler), who studied acting. Obsessed with the Julie Andrews musical, Mary Poppins, from the age of just three, Haynes came of cinematic age at exactly the right time. “I took full advantage of that revival house culture in the seventies,” he told The Guardian. “That was combined with something that I took for granted then, which was that we were in the most remarkable period of American filmmaking. The riches were all around us, to the extent that I didn’t really appreciate them. I remember thinking, ‘Oh yeah, Chinatown, that looks really commercial. I’m not going to see that.’”
Haynes started making films at high school (most notably a “big opus” called The Suicide that he shot on Super 8), and continued his fascination when he was accepted into the prestigious Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he earned a bachelor of arts in arts and semiotics, and also made a short film called Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud. “At Brown, I was exposed to experimental film, and that paved the way for my asking theoretical questions about representation and narrative form and feminism,” Haynes told The Guardian. “I started to feel that I would end up being an experimental filmmaker like the ones who taught at Brown. They made their living by teaching, but they had the freedom to do their work. That was a beautiful plan to me.” It didn’t quite work out that way, however, at least not immediately. In 1985, Haynes made the shift to New York, where one of his colleagues at Brown University helped him get a job writing reviews at Cable View magazine. That friend just happened to be Christine Vachon, who would go on to become one of the most important independent film producers of the nineties, backing daring arthouse essentials like Boys Don’t Cry, Swoon, Kids, and Go Fish. Haynes and Vachon eventually launched Apparatus Productions, a non-profit organisation whose aim was to help experimental filmmakers get their shorts made.
At around this time, Haynes made the unlikely film that would effectively and surprisingly launch his career. 1987’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story details the life and times of the eponymous seventies MOR icon…with all of the characters portrayed in stop motion by Barbie dolls. The film begins with Carpenter’s career starting in 1966, and ends with her death in 1983 from complications resulting from anorexia nervosa. Ingeniously made on fumes, the 43-minute film pulls no punches. Though sympathetic to Karen Carpenter herself, her family and business associates are shown in a callous light, particularly her brother, Richard, the songwriting mastermind behind their hit duo, The Carpenters.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story was a hit on the festival circuit, and it built up steady word-of-mouth. Eventually, Richard Carpenter saw the film, and became incensed with the portrayal of himself and his family. He objected to the fact that their parents were shown to be controlling and uncaring; that Karen was shown to be mistreated by just about everyone around her; and that he himself was portrayed as a perfectionist with little regard for his sister. Litigious and relentless, it was Richard Carpenter who ultimately had Superstar buried, largely due to legal issues involving music rights: Haynes had used Carpenters songs, but he’d never obtained the rights. Richard Carpenter successfully sued Haynes for copyright infringement (had that suit been unsuccessful, Mattel was waiting to do the same regarding the depiction of their prized Barbie), and the court ordered all copies of the film destroyed. As is always the case, bootlegs survived, and can be found online. “It was really emotionally honest, with this Barbie doll barfing into the toilet,” Cate Blanchett has said of the film. “That will always be my most famous movie,” Haynes laughed to Indiewire in 2011. “All you have to do is ban something to make sure that it’s still out there. The desire for it is exponentially increased.”
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story had a profound effect on Haynes’ friend and business partner, Christine Vachon. “When I saw that film, I really felt like, ‘Okay, this guy is insanely talented and I want to produce for him,’” she told Agnes Films. “That was how my producing career began.” Vachon has produced all of Haynes’ films since, starting with his striking 1991 feature debut, Poison. A bizarre portmanteau film resounding with disparate influences including fifties sci-fi, educational films, melodrama, children’s fantasy, and the avant garde gay French writer, Jean Genet, Poison was an eyebrow-raising festival darling and mainstream media cause celebre packed to bursting with extraordinary, uncompromising imagery, and abundantly radical themes. It immediately put its openly gay director on the cinematic map.
With its twisted meld of science and social enquiry reflecting the concerns of an AIDS-afflicted gay community, Poison emerged as one of the definitive works of what would eventually come to be called New Queer Cinema, and the film still rates as a true stand-alone. “There’s just no way, man,” Haynes replied to Indiewire in 2011 when asked if he could make the film today. “It’s sad but true. In some ways, it’s because there was a need to make a movie like that, coming out of the AIDS crisis when it did. There was a whole different regard about the lives of people who were gay that we felt at that time. That was the determination for me to make that movie, and also for a lot of other filmmakers to produce work that was loosely characterised as New Queer Cinema. It’s because of that necessity, the feeling that this was a means of expression that could be made really pertinent to what was going on in our lives. That made me part of that camp. That doesn’t happen all the time, and creative media don’t usually have that extra fire motivating them.”
After the brief thunderstorm that had shuddered around Poison, Haynes directed Sonic Youth’s “Disappearer” music video, and then crafted a thirty-minute curio for PBS. Titled Dottie Gets Spanked, this stylised, fifties-set short film focuses on the upheaval of childhood sexuality, and the psychic pain of repression, all thread into the chintzy fabric of a story about a quiet six-year-old boy who becomes obsessed with the titular TV sitcom comedienne. The film was also consumed with the erotic fascination of spanking (as was Poison), which would become a strange, continuing cornerstone in Haynes’ work. “For a while there, I couldn’t make a movie without a big spanking scene in it,” he told Popcorn Reel in 2011. “My parents didn’t believe in spanking, but I do remember that once when I was about three, my dad lost control and did spank me. I don’t remember it being a highly charged erotic experience; in fact, I remember feeling very indignant, and very righteous in knowing that this was not what we believed in our family, and yet I was still being subjected to it.”
Haynes dealt with a different kind of pain in his next film. In 1995’s nightmarishly eerie Safe – set in the emotionally barren landscape of late eighties American suburbia – Haynes documents with cold, clinical precision the inexplicable physical breakdown of Julianne Moore’s Carol White, a Stepford Wives-style housewife on a horiffic downward spiral. Desperate for answers, she ends up at a clean living ranch-come-commune, convinced that she’s “environmentally ill”, a victim of the excesses of modern society, and the chemical swirl that surrounds her. Icy and almost startlingly restrained in tone, the influence of Stanley Kubrick on Safe is obvious and profound, but the film remains a true original: an existential horror film of the soul with a stunning female character and performance at its centre. “I definitely viewed it as a horror film,” Haynes told Bomb Magazine. “But it’s a completely latent horror film where everyday life is the most frightening thing of all.”
Proving that he could caterwaul from genre to genre with the best of them, Haynes went from the weirdness of America’s suburban heartland to the wildness of a fictionalised version of England’s make-up-and-stacked-heel Glam Rock era of the seventies with 1998’s wonderfully anarchic and sexually in-your-face Velvet Goldmine. With Jonathan Rhys Myers as a David Bowie-like folkie-turned-rocker, Ewan McGregor as his Iggy Pop-style muse, and Christian Bale as a music journalist high on the sexual frisson that their relationship creates, Velvet Goldmine is an audacious and eccentric attack on rock’n’roll mythologising. “Velvet Goldmine is maybe one of the most fanatically loved of my movies, especially among teenage girls,” Haynes laughs to FilmInk at The Cannes Film Festival. “They just love Velvet Goldmine. I feel like different movies of mine have hit different audiences at different times.”
After the unbridled excess and libertine swagger of Velvet Goldmine, Haynes metaphorically swapped his flares and high heel boots for a three piece suit with 2002’s Far From Heaven, a Technicolor salute to the torrid fifties melodramas of Douglas Sirk. The director turned once again to his Safe leading lady, Julianne Moore, who plays Cathy Whitaker, a suburban housewife who discovers that her husband (Dennis Quaid) is gay and leading a double life. “It was a given,” Moore told FilmInk of accepting the role, which sees Cathy’s relationships with her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), best friend, and maid, also intensify, ultimately exposing a web of latent desire and condemnation that runs through issues of race, class, gender and homosexuality. “She’s a victim of the society in which she lives,” Moore told FilmInk. “I saw her as someone who was making every effort to live the way she thought she should be living, but then she sort of becomes a realist. When I first saw the film, I was so struck by how much the character smiled. I thought to myself, ‘Oh my gosh – she represents American optimism.’ It’s about how America believes that anything is possible, and that we can change the world.” But when Moore’s character finally sees America’s inherent bigotry, she ceases to smile. “It’s like when American optimism realises what it can’t do. It can’t control the world, and everything’s not going to be all right. There was a time after 9/11 when we truly felt defeated. But it’s possible to rebound from that kind of event. You take it, you’re a little wiser, and you move on. That’s present in the film as well. It’s about gaining knowledge and becoming wiser and losing your illusions.”
Haynes continued his habit of confounding audience expectations by returning to the world of rock music for his next film, 2007’s I’m Not There, a confounding, utterly original deconstruction of the biopic genre, telling the story of the iconic Bob Dylan in a way that nobody saw coming. Haynes’ film expressionistically immerses itself in the flux and paradoxes of Dylan’s personas and life, through the use of six different on-screen Dylans…with none of them actually called Bob Dylan. Played by Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin, and Cate Blanchett, they lock together to create one kaleidoscopic portrait of one of the music world’s most enigmatic figures. “I was just confronting this depiction of Dylan as this person who was in constant change,” Haynes told FilmInk in 2007. “He’d frustrate people with those changes. In the sixties, he’d be talking to somebody one day, and then two months later, he’d be talking to another guy and he’d be a totally different person – in voice, look, and tone. It was just astounding to the people around him.” A literal explosion of the biopic genre, the head-scratching I’m Not There remains one of Haynes’ most polarising works. “Todd is a real asset to the American film industry, and a real breath of fresh air,” Heath Ledger told FilmInk upon the film’s release. “I’m sick of being spoon-fed and watching the same old films.”
Haynes certainly doesn’t deliver “the same old films”, but for his next project, he did tackle something that had been done before. Working on the small screen for the first time since his short, Dottie Gets A Spanking, Haynes teamed with prestige cable channel, HBO, for 2011’s Mildred Pierce, a five-part mini-series based on the James M. Cain book, which also served as the source for the classic 1945 film directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and starring Joan Crawford. The story of a wholly self-possessed single mother with two young daughters in the midst of The Great Depression, the series featured a bravura turn from Kate Winslet in the title role, and offered another opportunity for Haynes to indulge his love for buttoned down mid-century style. “I loved doing Mildred Pierce,” the director tells FilmInk at The Cannes Film Festival. “That was a great learning experience for me, and doing a multi-format extended piece was really interesting, and highly challenging. Working with Kate Winslet was fantastic, and having more resources was awesome. It was the closest that I’ve ever come to working with something like a studio, where you feel like there’s a foundation underneath you.”
Showered with praise and awards, the mini-series introduced Haynes to a whole new audience, but after directing a segment of the HBO documentary, Six For Sondheim (about the titular composer), the director has now returned triumphantly to the independent film world with Carol. “Going back to a low budget indie movie, without that foundation under me, was not the best,” Haynes tells FilmInk. “That was the harder part of it. Everybody cared so much, but it was a really low budget. We just tried to make the best choices possible, but we went over budget in production, and we paid the price in post. We didn’t have the money that we should have had for source music and for CGI stuff. But we figured it out.”
Though it doesn’t feature a spanking scene, Carol does tie to Haynes’ previous work in profound and obvious ways. It has a visual style not dissimilar to Mildred Pierce; it tackles themes of repressed desire in a ballpark manner to Far From Heaven; and it features female characters at its core, just as Safe, Far From Heaven, and Mildred Pierce did. “There’s a tradition that I’ve always been inspired by : male directors who focus on female stories,” Haynes tells FilmInk at Cannes. “The social constraints, and the burdens that curtail all of our lives, are almost always intrinsically bound to female stories. Male genres, meanwhile, might offer escapism from that, and a sense of freedom from those obstacles. It’s harder to find that in domestic stories about women, and those things interest me. I like looking at those things, and trying to draw a connection to those things, and empathy for those struggles.”
For Todd Haynes, the fight to find that subject matter has paid off. With a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination already on his resume for Far From Heaven, and a host of Emmy nods for Mildred Pierce, Haynes enjoyed even more Oscar nomination glory with Carol. The film also copped rave reviews, and it has continued Haynes’ long journey from the cinematic fringes into territory that is at least in seeing distance from the mainstream. “This is all so new for me,” the director says at Cannes. “Just the fact that the film is connecting at all with people is still new. Directors know their films better than anyone, and yet they are the least objective. It’s the spectators in a dark theatre seeing the film for the first time who have an experience that a director will never have. That’s what you hope for: a connection to be struck with the audience. Carol is a quiet movie, with a slow-burning rhythm, and it’s about suppressed feelings that slowly take shape over time. That stuff was important to protect. I didn’t know that it would necessarily affect everyone…you just don’t know. So this is all new. I get to make movies in the world, and I’m lucky. I’ve been able to make movies very much on my own terms, and I feel fortunate about that.”
Carol is released on digital on May 19 and DVD/Blu-ray from June 2
