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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Todd Haynes

Music

Exploring

Experience

" Sirkian films really aren't - at least the way I see them, they're not about identification. They don't have voiceover. A lot of the love stories that are rooted, classic love stories rooted in point of view, use voiceover as a mechanism for locating you there. "

" Melodrama is sometimes broadly applied and sometimes derogatorily applied. "

" You have to be somewhat ruthless with your work. You have to let things go. Even your favourite little part might not work in the end. "

" Serious films for grown-ups - 'Michael Clayton,' 'In the Valley of Elah,' 'A Mighty Heart' - these are big Hollywood films, but they have substance and craft and really beautiful performances. "

" It's absurd: half the movie audience are women, but Hollywood bosses are still aiming for men who are 20. "

" Every actor comes with their own experience, method, methodology. "

" 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. "

" 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 love visual mediums, and I've always painted and drawn. "

" There were interesting ways that queerness could hide out and get played out pre-Stonewall. It is part of a vast history that is getting forgotten quickly as we trumpet forward into gay marriage and gays in the military and a much different cultural attitude toward gay lives. "

" 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. "

" At the time I made 'Safe,' I was really intrigued by the whole culture around AIDS, which was turning to people like Louise Hay and these other West Coast New Age thinkers. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Todd Haynes

Crime

Classic

" I live in Portland. I'm a man of the world, and I live in Portland. "

" My problem on 'Safe' was that when I liked something, I would giggle. "

" 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. "

" The term 'new queer cinema' and the films of mine that were associated with that term are from a very, very different time, one almost entirely defined by the AIDS era. It was a very different social and cultural regard for the lives, the experiences, the worth of gay people. "

" They always find new ways of talking about my movies. "

" There's this homogenization, this big sucking motion in dominant society, to absorb all the disparate elements that define the margin or define the culture or define those who are thrust outside the status quo. "

" The highest-caliber dramatic work produced for TV - not just in cable but something like 'The Good Wife' at network - is consistently great. "

" A lot of actors just don't seem grown up no matter how old they get... just juveniles with grey hair. "

" I do think that, yes, one should always be receptive to the fact that there are many different types of audiences, and they are not necessarily in a clean, reductive demographic like they once were. "

" 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 figured I would be teaching my whole life and making experimental films on the side. "

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

" 'Mildred' was the first film I shot on Super 16 with Ed Lachman, and we decided to continue doing so for 'Carol.' "

" I love serial drama. "