Todd Haynes in Locarno: Movies are where "we conjure wishes and we manage frustration"

At the end of Todd Haynes’ 1995 film ‘Safe’ starring Julianne Moore as a housewife who develops a debilitating allergy to the world around her, I remember feeling breathless. Usually with films I love, when they end, I feel like I want to know the characters and wish to inhabit their world in real life. The nightmare that Carol experiences in the film is hardly the stuff my cinematic dreams are made of and yet, more than twenty years later, Moore’s character is still part of my closest cinematic friendships.

Fast forward to 2002 and Haynes’ next collaboration with Moore ‘Far from Heaven’ or 2007 for ‘I’m Not There’, his film about Bob Dylan and even as recently as 2015 with the filmmaker’s Academy Award and Golden Globe pluri-nominated ‘Carol’, all these characters whose lives intrigue and enlighten, some more some less, have never left my side, affecting my subconscious and popping into my thoughts at the most unexpected times.

I believe that’s the power of Haynes’ genius, to offer a well-orchestrated story, highlight it with terrific performances and creating a world that although is at times unfamiliar and maybe also a little scary, is always perfectly human.

In person, Todd Haynes is the ideal sum of his films — well spoken, a little detached to allow us to draw our own conclusions and wonderfully calm. It’s perhaps this last quality which makes his characters, particularly his women, people you wish to be friends with in real life.

Haynes is at the Locarno Film Festival to receive the Honorary Pardo Manor award and to present ‘Wonderstruck’, his 2017 film ”in the land of kids” as Variety called it. I caught up with him at the stunning Villa Orsalina, where the view of Locarno and surroundings so far below us made the talk feel even more surreal and special.

How does it feel like to receive an award from the Locarno Film Festival?

Todd Haynes: Locarno is so unique because as old as it is — it’s as old as Cannes — it has maintained an integrity and a serious commitment to world cinema that is not typical. So it has prestige, history and longevity and its committed to the medium — not something you see everywhere. It’s a place in this extraordinary location where people can contemplate the work.

You have two great upcoming projects I hear, can you talk about them a bit?

Haynes: One of them is this Velvet Underground documentary that the Universal Music Group folks came to me to do, with Laurie Anderson’s recommendation — so it’s a complete and total honor, it’s crazy. And I’ve never done a doc before so that will be a great project. We’re really at the very beginnings of putting it together, put the production together and figuring out the time table of it.

And the Peggy Lee project?

Haynes: That’s an ongoing… Look, Peggy Lee is such an amazing subject and I’ve been involved in the development of the script and stuff. I think it’s a matter of figuring out when that can happen and how it will get financed. Those are the questions, in a changing world where there are different challenges afoot, financing different kinds of dramatic films and deciding whether they are meant for the big screen and otherwise. That’s always where I want to begin, on the big screen but there are so many opportunities and cool things happening on cable and video as well.

Yeah, like ‘Mildred Pierce’ on HBO!

Haynes: ‘Mildred Pierce’ was a fantastic experience for me. To do a multipart, extended, dramatic piece.

How did you deal with the death of David Bowie, the death of Lou Reed, although Iggy Pop is still on stage…

Haynes: Iggy will never die! But neither will Bowie or Lou. That was rough, the loss of Bowie felt like a personal loss. Because again, when I talk about cultural kind of hybrids that were brought together, that’s really what David Bowie was. He made William Burroughs somebody that people wanted to read, and think about what the cutup method was. He brought together literary and artistic traditions to his work and he made the cool. Made them part of how we acted out and separate ourselves from our suburban lives and upbringing and distinguish ourselves and feel like there was a world out there screaming for us to enter it.

And in that very way, I think he set up a model on how to be an artist. And it’s hard for me to imagine my own artistic life without that. They penetrate almost every medium.

Music changes us chemically I feel, when we hear a piece of music our mood is altered. Do you think cinema can change the world in the same way?

Haynes: Oh yeah. I think it also enters our bloodstream, it enters our dreams, it enters our psyches. In fact cinema emerged concurrently with the discovery of the unconscious as a property and described this location in the dark where we conjure wishes and we manage frustration through narrative. And that happens every night when we sleep. Maybe even more than music, that works through ideas of objects and narrative forms and character and a different kind of desire. A desire for objects and subjects that people dream in the stories of movies.

Another Honorary Pardo recipient Mathieu Kassovitz said that there is no possibility for a new masterpiece now, musically or at the movies, because there are so many products and people have no time to watch a movie or to digest it and accept it. What do you think?

Haynes: What is interesting about this statement is it suggests that great art is in how the subject receives them. They don’t exist outside us, we make them meaningful. I’ve always felt that about cinema. Cinema uses a language that we bring to life. It’s just shadows on a screen until we are elicited to invest in something. It’s true, we are in a combustive, crowded culture now where we are being thrown so much stimuli all the time, in a marketplace of competition. And I do worry at times about how it drains, particularly in young people. How do they stop everything for a second and read a book or watch a movie... And derive that unique profound pleasure that you get from stopping everything and concentrating on one thing.

How do you create these wondrous women characters, all of your women are more woman than a woman?

Haynes: They are or they’re not. I love the answer that Cate [Blanchett] would give to questions around the ‘Carol’ campaign, where people were like “it’s so great that you play strong women!” And just the very term “strong women” would get her going.

I didn’t use the word strong, purposely...

Haynes: I know, I know you didn’t! It seems like a benign thing to say but it’s like saying “an articulate African-American”, it’s like wait a minute, what are you saying?! And also why invariably certain representations carry a burden of correcting the society and showing the good example, which drains them at the onset of complexity, contradiction and humanity. That just describes the problem, that there aren’t enough roles for women, it’s still a tagged category that we think too self-consciously about. It’s definitely in the company of great directors who have inspired me over the years like Douglas Sirk, Fassbinder and great Hollywood directors who love women and made them centerpieces. The films of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, who I look to for guidance and who have exercised such a range of possibilities.