Todd Haynes: ‘We don’t always move in a progressive line towards tolerance’

People often remark on how clever Todd Haynes seems. It says something about modern discourse that this is not always meant kindly. Reviews of singular films such as [safe], Far From Heaven, I'm Not There and, now, Carol, warily trot out his background as a semiotics boffin at Brown University.

If things had gone differently, Professor Haynes may have ended up wearing a corduroy jacket in the senior common room at Oxford or Yale.

“I don’t know if I ever entertained an academic career,” he says, “nor did I ever think I’d become a feature film-maker in the market. That period of time oriented me to examples. I saw experimental film-makers teaching in college. They did what they wanted and didn’t worry about the market, but the circumstances ended up offering me other possibilities.”

Indeed, they did. A key figure in the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s, Haynes first attracted attention with Superstar: a surprisingly thoughtful, much suppressed study of Karen Carpenter's decline told through the medium of (gradually whittled) Barbie dolls. The creepy Poison and the brilliant [safe] followed. In 2002, Far From Heaven, his creative disinterment of Douglas Sirk's melodramas, secured four Oscar nominations.

The fine Carol, adapted from an early novel by Patricia Highsmith, has already brought Haynes further raves. A hit at this year's Cannes Film Festival, the picture stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as, respectively, a New Jersey society lady and a Manhattan shop worker, conducting a romance in the prohibitive 1950s. "It was a great experience to make this film," he says. "Now we have to put it before people. When you premiere somewhere like Cannes it's huge. It's nerve-wracking."

The Price of Salt, on which Carol is based, was Highsmith's second novel. It came after Strangers on a Train, but it preceded her near total immersion in the world of crime. There is a sense of societal opprobrium forcing the two lovers into the same sort of subterfuge that attends the writer's later criminal antiheroes.

“In my mind, those connections had little to do with the fact that they have lesbian desires,” Haynes says. “To me it’s to do with how all people falling in love feel. It’s to do with a heightened awareness you then have to every signal you’re trying to glean from the object of desire. You construe all kinds of scenarios, just as the criminal mind does to imagine ways they might avoid capture.”

Therese, the character played by Mara, feels herself aside from the rest of society because she is taken over by desire? “It happens even before she can identify herself with falling in love with a woman,” he says. “She can’t put the two terms in the same sentence. ‘I would call it “love” if Carol were not a woman’, it says in the book. There’s no language for what she’s feeling.”

When Haynes began making experimental films, almost no gay stories made it into mainstream cinemas. Such concerns only found expression in the fringes.

One might argue that the situation has not improved much – but gay voices are somewhat more audible. Right? A little?

“Yes, somewhat, but there is not a simple progressive line on the grass. We don’t always move in a progressive line towards tolerance, but there are surprising moments of radical spirit. The overall movement towards gay and lesbian rights is the correct progression. But I am still a product of the era of Aids activism and a belief in the power of outsider status.”

Does something get lost when such gay artists get accepted into the establishment? “Oh yes, without a doubt,” he says. “That outsider status sharpened the critique and gave you a weapon to talk about the status quo. That’s a different kind of queer culture to what exists today.”

Raised in southern California, from a middle-class background, Haynes shot a few experimental films in high school. While at Brown, he directed a characteristically high-brow short entitled Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud. By the time he emerged from college and made his way to New York, Aids was ravaging the gay communities.

The New Queer Cinema that emerged was very much a response to the challenges kicked up by the disease. Work by Gregg Araki, Bruce La Bruce and the young Gus Van Sant reflected the pain and danger.

“It was absolutely describing the most specific life and death crisis that was inadvertently directed towards the gay community,” he remembers. “It was no accident. There was no serendipity to the urgency of that work. It was manifest in creative work and unbelievable activism. So, it was a concentration of the upmost urgency. There was no other way of describing New Queer Cinema. It was about the necessity to speak out.”

Haynes doesn't exactly churn them out. It's been eight years since I'm Not There, his brilliant Bob Dylan fantasia, puzzled and delighted punters. In the interim, he shot a fastidiously faithful adaptation of James M Cain's Mildred Pierce for HBO TV.

Surely it must get easier for a film director of his standing. I remember reading tales of financiers lurking menacingly on the set of Far From Heaven.

“I think it remains a film-by-film process,” he says, “and since I am relatively selective and slow, it can take a while. In the past I have worked single-mindedly to get one script produced. More recently, I do allow myself to entertain different things at different stages of development.

"That's been nice. Carol was still low budget. We were still up against it. Mildred Pierce, with HBO as the support, stood out as a very different, very good experience,but this is more what I know."

He goes on to note that he was aware that the “bond company” was present on set. He should be past that now? “Yeah, I know. Right? Ha ha!”

The other thing people say about Todd Haynes is that he is terribly nice. Actors who work with him make swooning noises when his name is mentioned. So we're happy to hear that he's now settled among the notoriously bohemian glades of Portland, Oregon. Is the city as Carrie Brownstein, co-star of Carol, lampoons it in Portlandia?

“Ha ha! It has those aspects a bit, but there are seasons. I have a house. I grow vegetables in my garden. I swim in the river during summer. I dig it.”

There are worse ways of becoming middle-aged.