The filmmaker Todd Haynes is American cinema’s chief translator of desire and repression, but he doesn’t feel that way on set. “All of my movies feel headed for disaster when I’m making them,” he says. “Just, like, dancing on the precipice of it.” He’s fixed his eyes on me, winsome behind dark spectacles. “But isn’t that why we’re on this earth? Do something scary! Do something you haven’t seen done before! Put things together in a way that just makes sense to you! And maybe, if you’re lucky, it’ll make sense to somebody else.”
Across nine feature films, a documentary about the glam chaos of The Velvet Underground and one 40-minute short in which Karen Carpenter’s tragic self-destruction is dramatised by a Barbie doll, Haynes has yet to meet a dangerous premise he couldn’t wrestle to the ground and tame. No one was eager to make his David Bowie simulacrum movie Velvet Goldmine (1998), with its glitter, feather boas and Christian Bale and Ewan McGregor rutting on a rooftop. Nor his offbeat biopic I’m Not There (2007), which cast six different actors as Bob Dylan – among them a small Black child and a bewigged Cate Blanchett. And who else has been able to get not one but three films off the ground about desperate women corseted by societal sickness and sexual dissatisfaction? Those were Safe (1995), Far from Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015), for the uninitiated – the first two helped cement Julianne Moore as one of our greatest living actors, the latter saw Blanchett and Rooney Mara ache for one another over a perfume counter at Christmas.
