This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
The celebrated director discusses his latest film.
Watching a Todd Haynes film is like entering a realm. Stories told through his endearingly suspenseful, sardonic lens come for every single one of your senses: You ease into its initial poetic frames and very first strains of background noise or music until whoosh — you slide headfirst into a rabbit hole that plunges you into a subversive cultural send-up with protagonists who often bristle against isolation and repression, the binary, or the fame game, bested by the tragedy and comedy of their humanity.
The L.A. native director, screenwriter, and producer has kept us rapt, telling stories with his unique stamp of softcore camp, proving to be something of an auteur straight out of the gate. His 1987 short film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, reenacted the tragic story of Carpenter’s fame and anorexia with Barbie dolls. His creative risks have paid off with accolades aplenty: Poison (1991), his feature-film directorial debut, was a film noir, almost Hitchcockian take on AIDS and queerness, winning the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. Safe, his next feature film and first with Julianne Moore, took on the isolation of allergies and chemical sensitivities. Velvet Goldmine was a glam-rock queer mystery. Far From Heaven, another film with Moore, about a 1950s housewife with a secretly gay husband, earned him his first Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
Cate Blanchett famously became Bob Dylan in I’m Not There (2007) and tragically longed for Rooney Mara in Carol (2015). Haynes directed and co-wrote a series called Mildred Pierce, which earned Haynes three Emmy nominations. Wonderstruck (2017) focused on two children who get lost. Dark Waters (2019) followed a defense attorney played by Mark Ruffalo to his small hometown to reveal how DuPont poisoned the water. Haynes’ first feature-length documentary, The Velvet Underground (2021), was an impeccable account of how the revolutionary band rose amid the adult playground that was Warhol’s Factory.
Already accumulating award nominations for riveting performances from Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, and Charles Melton, May December, Haynes’ latest film, tells a story based on real-life teacher turned sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau and her relationship with a 12-year-old student who eventually became her husband and the father of their two children. Portman plays Elizabeth Berry, an actress who descends upon the rebuilt, post-jail time, near-empty nest life of Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Moore) and her husband, Joe Yoo (Melton), a former classmate of her son, to absorb their experience for a film and manages to absorb a few too many of Gracie’s quirks. Haynes recently hopped on a call with Shondaland to discuss the film and how he approaches what inspires him.
VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: What was your initial reaction when you read the May December script?
TODD HAYNES: I was completely fascinated by the script and impressed by it. I found that it put me into this zone of sort of indecipherability, of uncertainty, with constant questions about who these women were in particular because it’s sort of the first two acts of the film, I think, that centers so much on their energies. But there’s so much beneath the surface of what was going on in the dialogue that was sort of bristling for me when I read the script.
VMS: It’s interesting you say that because it directly leads to my next question. The film requires you to capture so much emotional nuance because there is so much that is unsaid and implied. These women have no boundaries, and they’re capable of suspending belief to such tragic ends. So, how do you approach saying what’s unsaid?
TH: My answer to that, I think, is that it’s sort of what all great films do. I think we are just very lucky in the material we’re given — that I was given — and the challenges that this particular story presented creatively and artistically to me. But when I really think about it, if I’m really being honest with myself, film is a visual medium. If everything exists in the dialogue, you’ve lost it — you’ve lost the power of the image to sometimes tell you almost the opposite of what characters are saying, and to always be in a place where all your senses are being called upon to interpret beyond the surface of what you’re being told. This film, this story, this script, and obviously the opportunity of working with these two actors provided just an infinity of different recourses, of different strategies, of how to ignite that for the viewer. I felt like it was my job to make some very quick choices about what the limits of that infinity was, where we stop, where we hold, and what we lock in to so the audience could really focus. I wanted it to be a film you had to constantly question and read but that allowed you a compulsive pleasure in doing so.
VMS: It’s interesting you say that because I did feel as if I had to remain riveted to the screen for fear of losing a poignant moment or a clue. It was all leading me on a journey. Every sense was required to be fully engaged, to not miss anything. Which is the best part.
TH: I love hearing that!
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VMS: Music plays a big part in that in this film. You use it in other films too. I watched Superstar yesterday so I could do my homework and get to know you a little bit. Those formative projects tell so much about where someone’s coming from. It’s like the suspenseful, almost horror-movie music plays such a huge part in building anticipation in both films. How does music inspire you as an artist, and how does it inform your work?
TH: Well, absolutely it informs me and inspires me as an artist, in particular when it’s part of the subject matter of the film, as it was in Velvet Goldmine and in I’m Not There. The specifics of the music sort of become the template or direct what the story is going to be — at least thematically. They kind of create their own rule book of what is relevant and what isn’t relevant in the storytelling and the style of the filmmaking. Then, it’s a process of sort of picking which is the best example of this artist or that artist’s songs, if that’s what the story is focusing on, to illustrate what I feel this chapter or this point of the story is trying to express. Then, the music becomes the most complete and generous way of yielding so much emotional content without words, without having to describe anything, because it’s all in the music. That’s something that you ultimately get to share with your actors and with your crew, and it puts you all back in the same place emotionally and stylistically in ways that it’s very hard to find any equivalent to.
VMS: It’s like an aural mood board that helps drive the story in that way. Which scene in May December was the most challenging to direct, and why?
TH: We had specific challenges on the day of the graduation scene because of technical issues. It was our biggest extras day. We had just had to move that day from the actual Veterans Day holiday we were going to shoot it on initially because of a hurricane that was coming in to Savannah. The Veterans Day parade, which we were going to shoot for the Memorial Day parade, moved two days, and we thought we were going to lose all of our extras because everybody had planned to be away from work and school. That was tough. But it was just one of those days where there were so many moving parts. We lost a lot of hours getting stuck in one thing or as opposed to another. My amazing AD Tim Bird had more on his hands that day than any day, I would say, in the movie because of the numbers of [people in the] background. He also had, like, 104° fever flu that he had been carrying around. It was just like one thing after the next, compounding and bringing challenges to that day. But sometimes, it’s under those demanding circumstances that you feel like you grab something out of necessity, out of the burning moment that’s in front of you that’s about to die. In this case, it was the sun going down, or the limited amount of time we ultimately had to shoot the final scene with Natalie and Julianne on the field. It produced something extraordinary, as did the shot, the shot of Charles watching the graduation from the rafters.
VMS: His performance was amazing! You must have a shorthand with Julianne at this point because you’ve worked together on five films now.
TH: I do have a shorthand with Julianne, but it’s not to suggest that shorthand and understanding of each other in this innate way wasn’t there from the very first time we worked together on Safe. It was not like, “Oh, I had to work so hard with her,” and since then it’s just become an easier, more intuitive experience. She’s just so brilliant, and in that particular film, she had an idea of who that character was that was so intact and was so completely realized in ways that exceeded my own best imaginings of it. I just found in her this immediate counterpart creatively, and it sort of felt so lucky to be able to revisit that experience in various ways with various projects and characters and roles ever since.
Charles Melton, Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and Director Todd Haynes attend Netflix’s May December photo call at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on November 17, 2023.
Eric Charbonneau//Getty Images
VMS: You explore themes of pleasure, sexuality, and desire in your work, and how we struggle as humans with boundaries and the binary. What inspires you to take on a project? What do you look for?
TH: The question suggests a kind of passiveness where I’m waiting for things to just come to me, and I think sometimes they do. This one did. It came to me and was intact, but I would say it’s sort of the exception to the rule, where usually I have an idea or I’m writing a specific script, doing research and development of a project, and developing it over time. Carol, which did also come to me, was a script that had been in circulation based on Patricia Highsmith’s Price of Salt for many, many years. It was almost a fluke that the producer who was attached to [it] at that time, Elizabeth Karlsen, who happened to be a very, very dear friend, said, “Do you think Todd would even consider doing this?” That’s the kind of thing you want to be ready for in your creative life because things get crowded with your own agenda, your own timetable, and your own process. You want to be able to have things come to you, and usually, a lot is going on at the same time. With May December, I really wanted to do it but didn’t know when. I had something else I was developing; Julianne and Natalie were booked solid for a while. So, you get it, you decide this touches so many interesting things, and it’s so challenging and exciting, but then you’re still in a position of having to be dexterous and flexible and aggressive when you finally have the moment emerge where everyone’s available, and other things have gone away, to pounce and to make it happen.
VMS: You’ve got to strike while the iron and the timing are hot, I would assume. What was the first film you saw that drove you to the desire to make your own films?
TH: I think at some primal level, it was the first film I ever saw, which was Mary Poppins, when I was 3. I had such an almost delirious obsession with that movie. It was about something happening in the theater that was so overwhelming and so total for me that it made me want to make drawings, paintings, sketches, and sculptures in reply. I became this little creative machine, trying to reproduce something that I felt. When I watched that movie, it was a creative obsession. I knew that meant something about the medium of cinema. Of course, that movie had a maternal central character — I’m sure that was no small part of this. It had music; it had animation and live action. It was sort of the ultimate synesthetic experience for a child or anybody. It was a lucky place to start, but it definitely started something very deep that would continue where I latch onto other films later, and almost in this residual way of just getting very hooked and obsessed on one film and then the next.
VMS: It sparked you in a creative way that you didn’t even know, to start drawing in response to it or start trying to replicate the magic of it in some way and do it in your own little way as a child.
TH: I’m still doing the same thing in a way!
VMS: Basically, it follows the trajectory of your life, for sure! Culture is such an innate part of your storytelling. What phenomenon are you currently obsessed with? What are you inspired by?
TH: Oh, I don’t know if that’s a short question! To be honest, I’m in product-promotion mode on May December, and I’ve been doing this since May, when we premiered the movie at Cannes. So, I can’t really focus on anything. I have a script I’m developing that I want to do next, that we hope to be shooting in September. I barely had time to get through one reading of the script over the last two months to focus on it and make notes on it. And I’m catching up on all the movies from this year, so I’m just behind! I haven’t been able to escape back into the creative process quite yet, but it’s for all the best reasons because we’re so happy with how May December is playing out.