Todd Haynes first got wind of the fact that someone was hoping to make a film of Carol, Patricia Highsmith’s lesbian love story of 1952, from his friend and long-term collaborator, the “insatiably brilliant” Oscar-winning costume designer, Sandy Powell. It was 2012, and the two of them were appearing at a 10th anniversary screening of Far from Heaven – Haynes’s lush homage to the 50s melodramas of Douglas Sirk – at a New York museum. “She told me she’d been doing all these guy movies,” he recalls. “Then she said: ‘But there is a frock film coming up: it’s an adaptation of The Price of Salt [the original title of Highsmith’s novel] and Cate [Blanchett] is attached.’ It sounded right up my alley.”
Haynes, busy with other things, thought no more about it until 2013 when Christine Vachon, his long-time producer, had a conversation with Elizabeth Karlsen, the producer of Carol. The film was, as they say, in transition, which on this occasion meant that it was in need of a new director; by happy coincidence, Haynes was in a similar state of interregnum. Soon after this conversation, he read both Phyllis Nagy’s script and Highsmith’s novel and, as predicted, he was sold: “truly taken with all of it”.
Carol is, he says, irrefutably a love story: in its day, its controversial reputation had as much to do with the fact that Highsmith, who published it first under a pseudonym, allows her protagonists a measure of happiness as with their sexuality. But he saw immediately that it is also a thriller, and this had a deep appeal. “The suspense lies in the audience’s anticipation of how these women will find intimacy. Whose territory is going to offer the other the most freedom? When, if ever, are they going to consummate their relationship? Everything is filtered through the eyes of Therese [the younger, less sophisticated of the two lovers], and this is the key. While she is an open book, unformed, we don’t always have access to Carol’s world, and so there are these inexplicable moments of silence and drifting, maybe even, on our part, impatience with Therese. I love that tension. That is so much what falling in love is like.”
It’s for others to review Carol. All I can tell you is that I watched it in a kind of swoon. It seems to me to be a masterpiece. Its woozy, saturated colours and clanky, echoing sound-mix; its sets, so casually precise, and its costumes, all brooches and gloves and fiddly fastenings: these things lend it such authenticity, you struggle to believe it’s ersatz, not a product of the 50s at all. And then there are the immaculate performances: Rooney Mara as Therese and Cate Blanchett (loyally attached right till the end) as Carol. Blanchett, in particular, seems to have been lit from within.
The script, faithful to the spirit of Highsmith, is minimalist, almost terse, and yet the audience experiences Carol’s emotions, her unexpectedly masculine rapaciousness shading eventually into something more undefended, with a force that is almost physical. Even the extras are perfect, as if the film’s director had torn a page from an old Life magazine and somehow brought it to, well, life.
How did he do it? This is my first question, and my last, and I expect him to tell me everything. Haynes – a warm, energetic and gracious man with extremely round eyes – laughs, and then pulls something from a bag. “Well, I do a look book,” he says. “As all directors do. But what’s interesting about this one is that it really looks like the movie, or at least, the movie looks like it.” Placing it on the table between us, he turns its pages. “The settings, the mood, the temperature… There are references here to other films, but what I found myself looking at more was photography from the time.”
One name in particular drew his eye: Saul Leiter (1923-2013), a contemporary of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, and a founder the New York School. “He’s known for shooting through windows, for using reflection. His work is impressionistic: these exquisite frames, and then that blown colour palette, muted overall with flashes of colour. I’m so proud that people look at this and think: wow, that’s the film. It means that we got it.”
Carol was shot in Cincinnati, Ohio, over the course of 35 days: “The state had newly introduced tax rebates for film-makers, so it was a financial decision first of all. But then we went there, and we were like, oh, my God.” The city had everything he needed, 50s-wise, including a well-preserved but gloriously empty department store [when the film opens, Therese is a shop girl: this is how she meets Carol, who comes in to buy a Christmas present for her child]. “It had all its original skin and bones. We even found a lot of glass cabinets on the premises.” But there was more.
![Todd Haynes with Cate Blanchett on the set of Carol: 'Cate and Rooney [Mara] continue to talk about the way [Cincinnati] took them someplace else'](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7dfed615c10f7ead125afa055962a8c94c262bc8/0_0_1200_799/master/1200.jpg?width=620&dpr=2&s=none)
“Oh, the extras. These were Cincinnati folks, non-union extras. At first, I thought: uh-oh, aren’t they going to be really self-conscious? But it was the opposite of that. They looked like real people, they moved like themselves, they had a normal, messy human way that came through.” The effect of the city and its denizens on cast and crew alike was, he says, hugely important. “Cate and Rooney continue to talk about the way it took them someplace else.”
His stars didn’t know each other well before shooting began, though they chose to take – not every film actor does – two weeks of rehearsal. “They’re similar in lots of ways,” he says. “They come well prepared, are attentive to detail, conscientious, hardest on themselves, and kind to the people working with them. But the fact that they didn’t know each other, and that we also spent a lot of time shooting them apart – we see Therese’s world, and then Carol’s, before we ever see them together – supported the differences between their two characters: differences not only of class and age, but of knowledge. It’s a gulf, and you need to feel it. The fact that they weren’t hanging out on set together every day probably helped that.”
Ever since Cannes, people have been asking Haynes if the long slog of getting Carol funded can be attributed to the fact that its characters are gay. But he isn’t convinced. The truth, if anything, is even more depressing. “It’s a movie about two women,” he says. “Cate and Rooney are in every single frame. It has no lead men.” And what about those moments of “silence and drifting”? His film refuses to tell its audience what to think. Didn’t anyone try to persuade him to make it more literal, or faster paced?
“Actually, I have to say I was so supported by my production team and ultimately by Harvey Weinstein . He wasn’t around on set. He just had a pick-up deal [ie to distribute it], and he waited until I was ready to show him a cut. He saw it only once, and he gave us hardly any notes. He knew exactly what to do with it, he knew what potential it had. It was the first of my films that he knew exactly how to market, and he was delighted. But then, to his credit, there have been films of mine that have been more structurally complicated, with less commercial potential, and he has always kept coming back.”
Would he stand his ground in a fight with Weinstein, or anyone else? “I would. I have absolutely been in that position before. Some directors do recut their films, but I don’t, if I disagree, and what you suffer is a less passionate marketing campaign, less investment in the film at the other end, which is… fine. I get it.” So he’s able to take criticism? “Oh, yeah. A key part of the process for me is having screenings: not official test screenings, just gatherings of people, some I know and some I don’t. We ask what is working, and what isn’t. So it’s not as if I’m shutting out input. 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.”
As for Carol’s extraordinary last scene – skip this paragraph if you plan to see the film – an epiphany that nevertheless arrives lightly mottled with doubt, he was confident: not just when he saw the rushes, but even before that, on the day of filming itself. The actors were ready. Everyone knew what the camera was going to do. This wouldn’t require too many takes. “I kept thinking of the final scene of The Graduate. That moment, when they [Benjamin and Elaine, played by Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross respectively] are on the bus and it’s quiet at last. There’s a feeling of… now what? The ending is also the beginning – of real life.”
As he goes on, speaking more quickly now, he starts to muddle characters and actors, as if they were one and the same. “There’s so much meaning there. She sees Carol, and we push in on Rooney, and she’s going to make this walk. But she has changed. They both have. Therese is different. She’s no longer that open book. She has erected defences.” A slight pause for emphasis. “The ending is the beginning. They have a shot.”
Haynes grew up in Los Angeles. His parents weren’t involved with Hollywood – his father imported cosmetics – but there were family links. “My grandfather worked at Warner Brothers in the 40s; he started as a union organiser, worked his way up, and then left in the [McCarthyite] blacklist period, when a lot of his friends were affected. He was a huge presence in my life, so we knew people, and then I went to a private high school: arty, hippyish, a lot of actors’ kids. I was exposed to that world, but not of it.”
Can he remember the first film he saw? He makes a noise that’s close to a squeal. “Yes, I can, and it was Mary Poppins, and it conducted an intense power over me. Oh, my God. Something about it conspired to make it an indelible piece of… psychic formative work for me. It produced obsession, utter obsession. I was only three, and this was a time [before video] when you saw a film only once. I would spend days drawing pictures of it, and acting it out, and dressing up, making everyone into Mary Poppins: ‘Mom, put this hat on and then I’m going to put flowers on it!’ It was a way of life.”
To a greater or lesser degree, all his films can be traced back to Mary Poppins. “After I did Velvet Goldmine, which is also set in London and a fantasy, a crazy but well informed fan made me a T-shirt that had Jane and Michael Banks [the children in Mary Poppins] looking up at the star next to a picture of Ewan McGregor and Christian Bale [who appear in Velvet Goldmine] looking up at the spaceship. They all have the exact same expression, the same lighting… Yes, I see the continuum.”
The teenage Haynes wasn’t exactly a film nerd – he was into the theatre and painting as well – but he saw a lot of movies. “I took full advantage of that revival house culture [repertory theatres showing classic movies] that was very prevalent in cities in the 70s, especially in Los Angeles, and that was combined with something that I took for granted then, which was that we were in the most remarkable period of American film-making. The riches were all around us, to the extent that I didn’t really appreciate them. I remember thinking: oh yeah, Chinatown, that looks really commercial. I’m not going to see that.”
After school, he went to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “Yes, I cheated and clawed my way there. It was the east coast, so it was a whole different world for me, but more than that, the English department where I’d accidentally landed was the one place there where film production courses could be found, though you had to go through theory: they called the programme Semiotics.”
A nostalgic sigh. “You forget – I’m so old – that all those Laura Mulvey [the influential British feminist film theorist] articles had only just been written then. New French theory and feminist film criticism were new, and our department would later make an impact on the academy, though we didn’t know we were at the cutting edge at the time.
“At high school, I had made some big projects on Super 8 film that took years to finish. [A film called] The Suicide was a big opus for me. But at Brown I was exposed to experimental film and that paved the way for my asking theoretical questions about representation and narrative form and feminism. I started to feel, then, that I would end up being an experimental film-maker like the ones who taught at Brown. They made their living by teaching, but had the freedom to do their work. That was a beautiful plan to me.”
In 1985, though, he moved to New York, where Christine Vachon, whom he’d known at Brown, helped him get a job writing capsule reviews at Cable View magazine, and eventually they and another friend launched Apparatus Productions, a non-profit organisation whose aim was to help experimental film-makers get their shorts made. Meanwhile, Haynes began work on his own experiment: Superstar, a Karen Carpenter biopic that uses Barbie dolls in place of actors.
“It’s not a joke at all,” he says, when I laugh slightly about this (though I should add that I love it – to me, and this can only be a good thing, it’s the bastard child of Thunderbirds and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?). “It’s surprisingly emotional. You forget you’re watching dolls. It’s quite serious, and I have to say that it collects all the themes and instincts of every film I’ve made since in one little movie. It’s about pop culture, women, domestic life; it experiments with formal traditions; it sets up certain boundaries that the viewer has to overcome.”
Superstar eventually disappeared from view, Richard Carpenter having sued Haynes for copyright infringement (he had used Carpenters songs without obtaining the proper licences). But by then, it had done its work. “At first, no venue would touch it,” says Haynes. “They thought it was campy. The tone wasn’t dead serious, as it is in most experimental film. No one knew what to do with it. But then the Museum of Modern Art showed it, and it got a review in the Village Voice, and so it had a robust couple of years of free display everywhere. Its days were numbered, but this was more than I had expected – and when Christine saw it, she said she wanted to produce my next film, an offer that put us in these roles in which we have remained, and built our careers from.”
His first feature, the queer-themed Poison (1991), inspired by Jean Genet, was in part powered by what had happened to Superstar. “After Superstar, I was encouraged. I felt audiences wanted to be challenged. But there was the Aids epidemic, too. The urgency of those times, the dire situation, but also the empowerment of grass-roots activism, produced artistic results. Time was fleeting, lives were being cut short, and that combusted into a period that was formative for me. It defined me as a film-maker.”
His mainstream career – the junkets, the awards, the red carpets – has come, he says, as a huge surprise: “Yes, it’s utterly strange.” Safe, his 1995 film about a housewife (played by Julianne Moore) who is allergic to the 20th century, flummoxed audiences at first, but somehow it stuck around, and after this, he was off: it was followed by his glam-rock tribute, Velvet Goldmine, the Oscar-nominated Far from Heaven and I’m Not There, in which seven actors play seven characters who may, or may not, be Bob Dylan. “My films rely greatly on critical staying power, on their resonance with journalists,” he says – which is, perhaps, one reason why he actively enjoys days like today (the Carol press junket, which takes place at a Soho hotel). But as a director who delivers remarkable, screen-stealing roles for ambitious actors, he is also someone who usually bags the names he wants. This helps.
His optimism for the future is not, however, uncomplicated. “A lot of the hope in film-making right now lies with cable and streaming. The healthy competition among cable providers has enabled the presentation of characters who would have a hard time being in films because they are ambiguous or outright dislikable, complicated and sullied. That’s almost a requirement these days of dramatic long-form television, and that is great. But as a film-maker who loves film and who was formed in a movie house in the dark sharing that experience with strangers… to see how much that has dwindled is hard. Film stock isn’t even being produced.”
Movies, meanwhile, are becoming ever more conformist in ways that we may not even notice – though as Haynes points out, this is perhaps just a reflection of wider society. “What’s funny is how much of the conforming has come from within the gay community itself,” he says. “It’s part and parcel of the tremendous, almost unimaginable legislative advancements we’ve made. I’m not married myself, but I support gay marriage, gays in the military, all that. But those are the last places. When we were in our activist years, when the government was just allowing people to die from Aids, our understanding of the threat that marginal lives imposed on dominant lives was a tool for exposing the hypocrisy of the status quo, let alone [the government’s] heartlessness and neglect. Now, for the most part, everyone’s new favourite topic is how much they all love gays and lesbians, and transgender people are the trend.”
What does he feel about this? What he says next is one of the most surprising things I’ve ever heard in a hotel that is full to the brim of movie stars and their publicists (though, as he and I both know, that is not saying very much). “Well, for the little kid, the teenager coming out, that’s great. It’s essential. But there are things we have traded in for that as well. Where is the outside now? Who stands beyond capitalism? Who is questioning corporate culture? The market has won. It accepts gay and lesbian lives because those people can spend money like anyone else. It is issues of poverty and race than need attention now, because they can’t spend the money.”
Carol is released 27 November
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