Disaffected directors like David Lynch study the world through a forensic lens, offering up movies like suburban autopsies. Todd Haynes, meanwhile, attacks social convention with a more viral approach, telling outsider stories from the inside. Perhaps you know his cult short-film debut, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, in which Haynes used a Barbie doll to play the anorexic '70s chanteuse and still managed to craft a more sincere portrait than most live-action biopics. His next three features -- Poison, Safe and Velvet Goldmine -- detonated even deeper beneath our collective skin, daring to puncture audience complacency with the shrapnel of self-examination. In relatively short order, Haynes has proven himself a master at deconstructing repressed identity and artifice, themes he pushes even further in his new film, Far From Heaven. The movie, which stars Julianne Moore as a '50s housewife who seeks companionship from her black gardener after discovering that her husband is gay, is nostalgically styled in the tradition of Douglas Sirk's melodrama All That Heaven Allows, but actually serves as a much more contemporary critique. Now, in his own words, Todd Haynes reveals five films that provoke hisimagination.
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All That Heaven Allows(1955, dir: Douglas Sirk, starring: Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson)
There's a beautiful film called All That Heaven Allows that my film draws a great deal from. Rock Hudson's a sort of visionary gardener who reads Thoreau, and Jane Wyman's a widow who's older than him, and they strike up a friendship that sort of scandalizes their very pent-up social world. Sirk reached a sort of apex in his filmmaking in the '50s, and there is something different from his stories about women than what we might call "women's films" from the '40s or the '30s that often starred Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn, who became far more dazzling, charismatic, strong, striking figures than most of us know in life. What's really poignant about the Sirk films is that they're about very ordinary, limited people who struggle with very basic social pressures and prejudices and often don't come out heroic on the other end. They often buckle under the pressures of their worlds, and I love that about these films. What films today would sort of end with is Kathy coming home and saying, "Oh, Cybil, I've spent my whole life in the shadow of the men around me, and I've lost everything, but now I know who I really am." It would sort of articulate what she's learned for you, and these films didn't do that. Their characters were very mute in that way, and I think that demands you to think more about what's going to happen to them. A lot of films that do everything for you leave you with nothing to do at the end, and I think that's robbing spectators of a terrific potential.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul(1974, dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, starring: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem)
Another film that I would put on my list is Fassbinder's beautiful remake of [All That Heaven Allows], called Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in America. He took the same basic ideas and applied it, as he often did, so brilliantly to contemporary German culture, where the woman was actually in her sixties, a female janitor who cleans bathrooms. She stumbles into a Turkish bar one evening in the rain and sees this hugely tall, handsome 20-something-year-old black Turk, and they strike up a friendship that becomes romantic. It's just a really beautiful, poignant movie that follows All That Heaven Allows very closely, more than my film ultimately does, but in a really brilliant way. He turned it into something having much more to do with the sort of repressed and conflicting social realms in Germany in the '70s, particularly with tensions between minority cultures and German working-class cultures at that time. All of his films have those sort of rigorous politics involved even if he almost always uses the melodrama as the form, but this manages to be really touching and moving. It's the only direct adaptation of a Sirk film that I know of that came before Far From Heaven.
Night of the Hunter(1955, dir: Charles Laughton, starring: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters)
It's just a magnificently radical movie for the period in which it's made. I mean, just simply at the level of the use of the image, the shadows, the lighting, the amazingly evocative scenes on the river with the kids and those animals in the foreground. It has a gorgeous understanding of artifice, that films are allegorical basically, and it embraces that idea fully. It's a story of a little boy and girl whose father gets shot when he steals money, and they're enlisted to hide the money even beyond the eyes of his widow, who Shelley Winters. And Robert Mitchum plays this completely evil pseudo-minister who met the father in prison, so his quest is to get the money out of these kids' hands, and he does it with all the manipulations of love and power and dominance over them. It's just a really exquisite journey that the film takes, and basic binaries are called into question at the end. It's a film about good-and-evil and love-and-hate (as depicted in Robert Mitchum's knuckle tattoos), but I think the way the little kid's feelings for his father end up mirroring his feelings for Robert Mitchum is what completely severs me at the end of that film.
2001: A Space Odyssey(1968, dir: Stanley Kubrick, starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood)
It's an astoundingly experimental, formally experimental film in every way. It's just shocking when you go to see it again and you realize how much time is spent watching a triangle move into a rectangle or a sphere into a cone. It's almost the most basic geometric reduction of narrative conflict. It's powerful in its restraint, and then in its sort of muscular expanse as well, almost at a philosophical level. I applied a lot of its style and restraint and use of beautiful sustained long shots and controlled zooms to my film Safe, which is about Los Angeles in the '80s and the story of a housewife encountering her toxic intolerance to her environment. To me, it was a really interesting metaphor for a way of dealing with an increasingly controlled environment that we all live in, controlled by technology and by chemicals. Almost the sense of being in an airport where everything is modulated, the air, and the speed that you walk down runways, and every aspect of life is determined by our machines and technology.
Performance(1970, dir: Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg, starring: James Fox, Mick Jagger)
It's just a wonderfully rich use of cinematic language, with the strongest, most provocative and radical aspects of the medium being used through editing and cutting. But also it's a really rich depiction of that cultural moment, that climate of sexual questioning and the mutability of sexual and other forms of identity. It was definitely an inspiration, maybe my prime inspiration for Velvet Goldmine in terms of style, sort of a fusion of experimental film meeting rock culture and drug culture that was beginning to come into mainstream venues in surprising ways in the late '60s and early '70s. It's about the London underworld in the late '60s. James Fox is a kind of a thug connected to the Mob, and he has to go into hiding and finds this exiled rock icon and his crazy entourage of characters, and sort of ends up being indoctrinated into this out-of-time world where drugs and dressing up and constant questions about transformation and identity are sort of the rules of the game. He transforms, and there's this strange kind of psychological bonding that goes on between him and the Mick Jagger character that's both sexual and plays with their opposites. Part of what's great about these movies and what sort of elicits young people's obsessions is they're sort of begging for interpretation and their wonderful blurriness and their provocative allure of ideas.
