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" 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. "

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" I do know my own films don't necessarily work within that high-pressure reductive moment of the opening weekend - or all the ways that many people assess the value of movies. "

Todd Haynes

Weekend

People

Moment

" '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. "

" 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 think I'm drawn to female characters partly because they don't have as easy or as obvious a relationship to power in society, and so they suffer under social constraints or have to maneuver within them in ways men sometimes don't or are unconscious about, or have certain liberties that are invisible to them. "

" Aspects of guilt or handwringing that one might expect in a film set in the '50s about women who discover their love for other women - a lot of these things are not in 'Carol.' "

" I started 'Carol' as I almost always do, by looking at films from the time, and they were less - they actually felt less relevant to me in terms of their bigness, although we do have some big '50s-type moments in 'Carol.' "

Todd Haynes

Always

Moments

" 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 think it remains a film-by-film process, and since I am relatively selective and slow, it can take a while. "

" 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. "

" 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 don't want to make people feel better. "

" I love how 'melodrama' is a denigrated term - a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that's what life is, man. "

" Films like 'The Godfather,' 'Chinatown' and 'The Exorcist' brought a realism and currency and understatement to their genres that we wanted for 'Mildred Pierce.' "

Todd Haynes

Wanted

Genres

" 'Carol' takes place in the really early '50s, before Eisenhower has taken office. It's based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, her second and most autobiographical book and the only one outside of the crime milieu. "

" Each production is its own experience. "

" I noticed that there were all these kinds of practices in a working set that had to be un-practiced on 'Far from Heaven,' which was so interesting. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I have always had an interest in performers who play against the most obvious of expectations and are able to find something secret, something withheld, and some level of restraint. "

" I think all my films can be enjoyed. In fact, they've often surprised me with how they're received. "

" Cannes is a lot of work, since it's a market festival and a serious festival, and they really work you, understandably. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There are all these languages that keep people in place that conform us to a set of terms. It's why I think the whole idea of identity as something that is something of a straitjacket. That most of us like to think of as natural and innate. That we just find and go, 'Yeah, that's who I am.' "

" I don't think there's any more synesthetic medium than film. "

Todd Haynes

Think

Than

" I remember going to see '2001' with my dad. "

" All actors are protecting something, in their own way, that happens in front of a camera. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "