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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Todd Haynes

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Secret

Always

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

" I was lucky enough to be exposed to film, art, literature, culture, and then told, 'Yes, you can do that, too.' It's not something that everybody's circumstances allow for. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've been really lucky with critical reaction, overall, even if my films don't often resemble each other. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

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

" 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. "

" Love stories require an obstacle between the lovers, something that keeps them from one another. You have to yearn for the love that can't be fulfilled. And it gets harder to conceive of viable cultural or racial or sexual obstacles between people as we move forward progressively. "

" 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 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 think many of the ideas that opened up in the '60s got implemented in the '70s and that certain minority voices that were not being heard in the '60s, like women and gay people, were being heard in the '70s. Black Civil Rights had also found its foothold, and those ideas were also very pertinent. "

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

" 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. "

Todd Haynes

Fun

Music

" I felt 'Brokeback Mountain' re-imbued the love story with an authentic and unquestionable series of obstacles that these men faced. I think that's certainly true for 'Carol' as well. "

" Each production is its own experience. "

" 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 love stories of love cropping up unexpectedly in life almost as a problem, as something you don't ask for. Something that messes everything up and makes you rethink everything. "

" I'll never forget watching 'I'm Not There' with Cate Blanchett, because it was the first time she saw the finished film and saw her performance in it. I was sitting next to her experiencing it vicariously through her fresh eyes and hoping she liked it. "

" I think camp is a really fascinating thing, and it's hard to define and hard to apply consciously. It's almost something you take from material that's already existed in the world, a reading of the world. But I think it speaks of a long tradition of gay reading of the world, before gays were allowed to be visible. "

" 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. "

" I'm a lover of cinema, and I don't want that to completely expire. "

" The best love stories on film are rooted in the point of view of the more woundable, vulnerable party, the more amorous party. "

" 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. "

" With 'Carol,' I was just really looking at and thinking about the love story as a genre, not the domestic melodrama. "

" 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. "

" 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. "