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.Collection: Movies
In high school - that's when I first fell in love with his music and his voice. 'Blonde on Blonde' above everything. I vaguely remember 'Desire' coming out. I definitely remember 'Street Legal' and 'Slow Train Coming.' The first time I saw Dylan was on that tour: '79 in L.A.Collection: Legal
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.Collection: Movies
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.
I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.
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.
I don't want to make people feel better.
Without sounding sexist, you have to cast a real man opposite Cate Blanchett. You need a guy who's grown up.
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.
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.
You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.
What was so interesting about the glam era was that it was about bisexuality and breaking down the boundaries between gays and straights, breaking down the boundaries between masculinity and femininity with this androgyny thing.
I'm used to always having struggles getting finances together and keeping precarious budgets alive in the independent film world.
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.
The highest-caliber dramatic work produced for TV - not just in cable but something like 'The Good Wife' at network - is consistently great.
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.
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.
I saw experimental film-makers teaching in college. They did what they wanted and didn't worry about the market, but the circumstances ended up offering me other possibilities.
I think when I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist.
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.
I'm drawn to female characters; not all of them are strong characters.
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.
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.
I think all my films can be enjoyed. In fact, they've often surprised me with how they're received.
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.
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.
It's absurd: half the movie audience are women, but Hollywood bosses are still aiming for men who are 20.
I love how 'melodrama' is a denigrated term - a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that's what life is, man.
I worked with Jim James on my film 'I'm Not There' - he sang 'Goin' to Acapulco' with Calexico backing him up. We just hit it off, and it's such a beautiful moment in that film.
The way I sort of approach my work is that the historical and socioeconomic and cultural worlds that the music is exploring dictate the visual experience and the way that we approach it specifically on film.
'Evil Urges' has some stuff in it that's unbelievable.
When you're shooting concert scenes in films, we try to bring in, where appropriate, as much of a sense of live performance as possible.
'Carol' takes place at a time the country was crawling out of the shadows of the war years, feeling the new vulnerabilities of the Cold War and conflicts within the union.
We yearn for the desire to triumph, and it almost never does in the greatest love stories because we're left yearning for it more in the end, and we wish the world were different as a result. I do love that.
I live in Portland. I'm a man of the world, and I live in Portland.
'Mildred' was the first film I shot on Super 16 with Ed Lachman, and we decided to continue doing so for 'Carol.'
I don't think there's any more synesthetic medium than film.
I'm pretty single-minded, unlike a lot of directors who miraculously seem to be holding six projects in their hand at a given time and juggling them accordingly.
I always learn a lot when I do so. You know, when you step out of your comfort zone and even your cynical zone, and open yourself up to what other people might experience and why they do so.
They always find new ways of talking about my movies.
When 'Safe' came out, it was treated respectfully but kind of forgotten. Then, by the end of the '90s, it somehow made it onto all these best-of-the-decade lists.
I've been really lucky with critical reaction, overall, even if my films don't often resemble each other.
I'm always interested in what classic crime writers got into when they stepped away from the genre stuff they were known for. That's why 'Mildred Pierce' is like noir without any real crime.
All actors are protecting something, in their own way, that happens in front of a camera.
Every actor prepares differently and to different degrees of privacy. Some want to talk everything out. Others really don't want to talk anything out - or rehearse much.
The bond company comes in if you exceed your costs; they're the insurers of the film. In the worst-case scenario, they take over the production.
Looking at photographs of New York in 1952, you find a powerfully pre-Eisenhower era - sagging, tired, distressed - and the palette is slightly dissonant.
The best love stories on film are rooted in the point of view of the more woundable, vulnerable party, the more amorous party.
I don't know if I ever entertained an academic career, nor did I ever think I'd become a feature film-maker in the market.
When you premiere somewhere like Cannes, it's huge. It's nerve-wracking.