Todd Haynes considers his being one of the frontrunners in the 1990s revolutionary New Queer Cinema movement – spurred on due to the inaction and devastation of the AIDS crisis – to be one of the great honors in a storied career that has already produced timeless classics such as “Far From Heaven” with Julianne Moore, “The Velvet Goldmine” with Ewan McGregor, Christian Bale, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Toni Collette and “Carol” starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.
Rather than relax on those laurels, the 64-year-old filmmaker remains as busy as ever and even sees a renewed demand to stand up and be active, both as citizens and creatives. (A gay-themed drama he was slated to helm and star Joaquin Phoenix and Danny Ramirez got tabled five days before shooting was set to begin in Mexico when Phoenix abruptly withdrew.)
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In an phone interview about the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s upcoming retrospective “Todd Haynes: Far From Safe,” the Los Angeles native provided a glimpse into working with his actors and talked about a revitalized creative change that might result in light of today’s volatile American political climate, a time in which AIDS funding, conservative views of LGBTQ rights are rolling back gains, and civil liberties and freedom of speech face renewed threats.
All of which concern Haynes.
“… We have to get back on the streets again when we thought a lot of these battles had been fought and won that had to do with queerness,” he said.
Recent developments “are obviously going to force us on the left, in the gay community and elsewhere and in other minority communities to stand up and fight,” he said. “So let’s hope that it also produces a new energy and fortitude in film and in art. But we have much bigger things to address.”
Many of filmmaker Todd Haynes best-known works are being screened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives. (BAMPFA)
The Haynes retrospective runs from March 8 through April 12, with tickets available for screenings in which Haynes does not appear. Ones in which he appears for a post-screening conversation are sold out.
From the start of his film career, Haynes brought his brand of energy and fortitude and also courted a bit of controversy. That played out with is quirky 1987 experimental documentary “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” which focused on the singer’s battle with anorexia and used stop-motion animation, archival footage and Barbie dolls to do so. It got banned but it also got bootlegged.
Haynes’ career got the big boost from both critics and audiences alike at the Sundance Film Festival and later the Berlin Film Festival (he served as jury president at the fest’s 75th iteration held last month) when his 1991 experimental indie “Poison” made a splash at both.
Inspired by the works of playwright/novelist Jean Genet and built around three interwoven tales that metaphorically address AIDS and isolation amongst other issues, “Poison” tapped into themes of identity and sexuality, common threads throughout much of his work.
“Poison” went on to win the Teddy Award (one of the highest honors to be bestowed on an LGBTQ film), and will screens at 6:30 p.m. April 5 at BAMPFA; Haynes will not appear then.
The film also riled conservatives such as Senator Jesse Helms and the Rev. Donald Wildmon. Undaunted and undeterred by their reactions, Haynes — who has said he grew obsessed at an early age with movies, particularly “Mary Poppins,” thanks to its incandescent star, Julie Andrews — went on to partner with who would become one of his frequent acting collaborators, Julianne Moore.
The San Fernando Valley-set medical malaise drama “Safe” (2:30 p.m. March 8 with Haynes in conversation) unnerved many as ‘80s well-off housewife Carol White (Moore) sees her health problems pile up to the point that she is convinced environmental dangers are lurking around every suburban corner. He knew that Moore was ideal for the tricky part from the instant he met her.
“I was thrust into astonishment the very first time that we met, which was her reading for me…,” he recalls. “Everything I will continue to say about her through all these years was evident in that room on that day, which was among so many things, just an incredible understanding of the scale of the medium and how to make it her own. And how to sort of proportion her performances to the camera, a kind of resistance to being digital or made to follow rote emotional investment that we make in characters whether they’re women or gay people or Black people. She was gonna play it on her own terms and make the viewer have to kind of reach at times to find her.”
Moore collaborated with Haynes on two other films, receiving a best actress Oscar nomination for playing a sexually frustrated wife of a closeted gay man in 2002 Douglas Sirk-inspired “Far From Heaven” (6:30 p.m., March 9) and as a woman who created a scandal when she had an affair and then married a teen lover in 2023’s uncomfortable-making “May December.” (6:30 p.m., April 12)
As a screenwriter and director, many of his 12 films focus on complex female characters, a characteristic that furthers the tradition of what came before from the likes of George Cukor (1939’s “The Women,” 1964’s “My Fair Lady”) Sirk (1955’s “All That Heaven Allows”) and Vincente Minnelli (1958’s “Gigi”).
While it might be easy to call the parts “strong female” roles, actresses who have appeared in his films often reject that term, Haynes said, because the term is a narrow simplification of what female characters can be.
“A lot of my films,” he adds, “are about very unremarkable people who struggle very much under their circumstances and are not particularly strong. But there are other films of mine in which female agency is definitely a part of the story and sometimes part of other kinds of conflict that they discover.”
Critical in getting those characters portrayed well has a lot to do with hiring the right actor, and Haynes credits casting director Laura Rosenthal, with whom he’s worked since 1998, for helping him do just that. She helped land “Riverdale” star Charles Melton for the role of Joe Yoo, the much-younger lover and eventual husband of Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore), in “May December” (6:30 p.m., April 12).
Many actors vied for that part, but Haynes said he felt Melton was unique, later adding, “The best thing that could possibly happen for a director is you learn more about what you’re doing through the unexpected discovery of different people and what they bring.”
Everyone in the A-list cast – Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Christian Bale and Toni Collette – of his Ziggy Stardust-inspired glam rock “Velvet Goldmine” gem (7 p.m., March 8, conversation with Haynes) brought the unexpected for that 1998 classic.
“We felt something was happening while making that movie,” he recalls, adding that the hardest role to cast was for Collette, who portrayed the wife of glam-rock star Brian Slade/Maxwell Demon.
Haynes idolized Bowie, but the artist didn’t allow him to use tracks in the film (Lou Reed and Iggy Pop didn’t hesitate).
And while he didn’t hear anything directly from Bowie in reaction to the film, he does recall hearing remarks about how it viewed events from the lens of a gay filmmaker’s point of view “or something like that.”
“Which was funny, just because the way he kind of would take and then dispossess ownership of his own radical queer appropriations throughout his career, and it marked again the fascinating changes as an artist in his life.”
“Velvet Goldmine” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where he was distracted during that screening by the two people seated behind him, Brian Eno and Bryan Ferry – who had rekindled their friendship after some bad blood got spilled that led Eno to leave the group Roxy Music.
“Half my head was trying to experience my movie,” he said while the other wanted to hear what they had to say about the movie. When a song from Reed got played, “they just shared their love for Lou. I thought that was pretty cool.”
That film endures particularly for glam-rock fans but other Haynes films hold a special place as well, including “Carol” (7 p.m., March 26), his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price of Salt.” Set in 1950s New York around Christmastime, the ill-fated love story stars Blanchett as a fashionable older woman who is undergoing a divorce and falls for a clerk (Mara). The film has turned into a bit of a seasonal tradition for lesbian fans.
Is it, though, in his estimation a Christmas film?
“I think it’s a Christmas movie when I never expected it to be,” he said. “But any sort of ritual that surrounds films that you make is always such a sweet, unbelievable event. So I’m all for it.”
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.
TODD HAYNES: FAR FROM SAFE
When: March 8 through April 12
Where: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St., Berkeley
Tickets: $5-$18; free to visitors 13 and under; bampfa.org
