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LIFE AFFIRMED: An interview with Far From Heaven director Todd Haynes
by Ryan Kugler
November 4, 2002
www.cinemaspeak.com

Writer/director Todd Haynes burst onto the independent scene with 1991's Poison, a festival favorite that interwove three different stories. He followed that up with the highly acclaimed Safe, which starred Julianne Moore as a paranoid housewife allergic to everything and afraid of the world in which she lives. Next came Velvet Goldmine, a strange and original trip back to the days of Glam. Unlike his first two features, Velvet Goldmine didn't really catch on with critics or with audiences, and it disappeared from theaters fairly quickly.

Haynes is now back in a major way with a project that's as different from his last as he could get. Far From Heaven is modeled on the Douglas Sirk melodramas from the 50s, and it examines the relationships between a housewife (Julianne Moore, in the best female performance of the year so far) and both her husband (Dennis Quaid, playing against type) and gardener (24's Dennis Haysbert). Sounds simple enough, right? Keep in mind that the story takes place in the 50s (and Haynes reproduces the era better than any modern filmmaker that I can think of) and that her husband is gay and her gardener is black. It's true that Haynes is working with some heavy subject matter, but this isn't just an "issue" film that's good for you. This is an amazingly detailed and entertaining look at a strong woman and a time in our nation's history when things were different.

Far From Heaven is one of the very best films of this year, and I expect that we'll see a lot more brave and important work from Haynes in the future.

CinemaSpeak had the opportunity to sit down with Haynes at Far From Heaven's Los Angeles press day. Focus Features will release the film on November 8.

(Note: This interview was conducted as part of a press roundtable, therefore not all of the questions were asked by CinemaSpeak.)

CS: Are you a big fan of 50's films?

TH: I definitely had an interest in Douglas Sirk's films. I'm not like a 50's fetishist. I'm not one of those guys with a lot of 50's model cars on his shelf or anything like that, but I've been a real and serious admirer and puzzler over those films ever since I first saw them in college. I think I've thought a lot about, not only his films, but also just women's films.

CS: How has your relationship with Julianne grown since you worked on Safe together?

TH: There are a lot of similarities between our relationship on Safe and this one. She's really the same person and I think I am pretty much as well. She has so much integrity as a performer and she comes extremely well prepared to the set. We're similar in that we both do a lot of our preparation beforehand. And then, she's very easy to work with as a result -- very kind and very joking with the crew and relaxed. So, the experience of actually working with her on a set is great. These are two films that are unusual for her, and for most actors, in that she's in every scene (in both Safe and Far From Heaven). The film is exclusively about the woman, which is something that you just don't see much. It's also a workout for her and it's a different kind of commitment than most actresses are faced with.

CS: Wasn't Julianne pregnant when you cast her? Did it cause any problems?

TH: It was hard. It was one of the many logistical challenges that we were faced with when making this film for a very little amount of money on a very tight schedule. We knew we had to shoot it in the actual fall to do the exterior stuff that we needed. I think she shaved a couple weeks off when she told me how far along she was, but she did really want to do it and she didn't want to upset me. I wasn't upset. I felt like the costumes would conceal it well. I hope the press -- you guys, don't write about it endlessly because then everybody looks for it and if you look for it, you'll see it, but it's just not important. It gave her great 50's breasts. That was good.

CS: Where did this idea originate? I'm mean, obviously you have the Douglas Sirk movies as a starting point, but where did the idea come to skewer it?

TH: Yeah, it definitely started somewhere in there, but I had a lot of high fallutin' ideas about melodrama to sort of keep on top of it. It comes from personal experience, but it also comes from a real commitment and interest in resurrecting this style of filmmaking.

CS: Were you obsessive on set in terms of like, this hair's out of place, the skirt's not straight, fix the gloves, do her hair again? Was it you or was it your team that was more involved?

TH: It was all of us, but I think what most people who worked on the film will say is that I'm very involved with all of that stuff. It's not necessarily about fixing it or making it. I mean, it's all about that, but it's also at the conceptual level and it's getting as close to those people and really respecting every aspect of what a design team was engaged in. Everyone had a specific role and in a film like this, that role changes. In this movie, all of the sudden everything had to be spotless and the leaves had to be on the grass in exactly the right way, so it was cool to watch everybody have to rethink what they normally do and have a whole different set of rules to deal with.

CS: How was it trying to find a balance between the theme of racism and homophobia --trying to find a balance between those two story lines?

TH: It was tough because both of them, which are hugely explosive and fascinating themes in and of themselves, were ultimately not the focus of the story. It was really about her and how she was forced to kind of navigate between these two themes. One is defined by its privacy and the other is defined by its hyper visibility. I ultimately wanted to show the hierarchy of these various issues and themes -- the role of the women is sort of at the bottom rung and she's the one who has to give up everything. Raymond (Dennis Haysbert's character) kind of comes in second and Quaid, based on his secrecy and his ability to be covert and his ability to enlist his wife in that process to a great degree, in a way, he gets closer to his needs. Of course, he loses everything that has defined him as a man in this world, but it's a duality of contending issues and, ultimately, the woman's role is the one we were trying to focus on.

CS: But the women were also the enforcers of it.

TH: Yeah, absolutely. You see that she's at the bottom rung, because she has the burden of maintaining the family in ways that the man doesn't. You know, it's really on her shoulders to keep it going and to maintain decorum and a sort of tradition that she's supposed to straddle.

CS: What type of effect do you think or do you hope this will have on modern women watching this film?

TH: To get back into the 50's mode and to get back into the house! Enough of this career thing, there are some things we can learn about the 50's. No, I think it is there to provoke questions about how far we've actually come. I mean, we have a sense of superiority that we bring to 50's themed-films or books or television shows where we're so much more of a progressive society today than we were in the 50s. The 50s were so conservative and you know, McCarthy, racism and everything. It's like, look around; it's a really scary time right now.

CS: Forgive me for not seeing enough Douglas Sirk films to know, but your black character --he's almost too perfect. He has to be. He quotes poetry, he does art, he has his own business, you know what I mean? I know that he's an invention, but is he supposed to be like the dreamboat guy getting away?

TH: There's that and there's definitely a nod to the tradition of that sort of over-qualified perfection of the Sidney Poitier kind of character from the 60s. All of the characters are typified by conventions of that time. There was a liberal attempt to show black America in its best possible manifestation, which had all this great liberal attention behind it, but at the same time is masking over what was actually going on on the streets in America. But I also see Raymond's flaw as a really important one, and that is his incredible hope and feeling that there can be a mixing, and that he can maneuver himself in the white world in ways that will ultimately benefit his daughter and provide her more options and more freedom than he had. That backfires on him and he's punished for having those kinds of ambitions.

CS: What was it like casting Dennis Quaid? Was he you first choice?

TH: Fred McMurray was too old and Robert Stack is too old. No, I didn't have anybody in mind while writing the film except Julianne, but I knew I wanted an actor who came with a kind of masculinity and an unquestioned association -- where you wouldn't see this coming. He had a sort of fortification against these kinds of feelings built into him, and what's amazing about Dennis is that from the minute he's on screen, there's something broken about him and it never really resumes itself. So I was thinking about Quaid and I was thinking about other people, but there was definitely pressure to cast a bigger name star. I've always really liked Quaid actually and there were films I've seen that I was like, "Wow, that guy is so good." He's sort of underrated. People don't realize what a fine job he's doing all the time because he's so handsome and so likable. I watched a lot of films, but it was seeing Everybody's All-American. It's so great and he's so amazing and he ages. You see him as this football hero in the 50s and then you see him totally like age 30 or 40 years. It's a beautifully modulated performance and it was really helpful to see him do a different period as well.

CS: His character is broken, certainly, but I thought he was alive when his head falls on that guy's chest in that one scene. I thought, this is clearly who he really is.

TH: That's cool. It's true; I think he's a very amazing guy because he's not what you think. He said that he saw Velvet Goldmine twice in the theaters when I met him. He's interested in films that you don't normally associate him with. He has a pretty wide range of interests.

CS: But he accepted the man?

TH: The very first thing he said when he read the script was, "You know what's so interesting about this, is that it's the presentational aspect of it -- that emotion. Not even the style is the big hurdle, I have to get over to get to the emotion." Actually, the emotion could only happen in this way and I thought that was so beautiful and so sharp and he really understood what I was trying to do in ways I probably couldn't have stated.

CS: So why did you have to make this movie? When you sit down to create something and you have nothing and then it becomes this, why that? Why are you so passionate about these particular themes?

TH: I definitely felt compelled to make a film about a woman character again -- someone in a social setting that was restricted, that would have to encounter a discrepancy with her own feelings and needs, but that ultimately, there would be no real escape for her there. She would just have to learn about those contradictions. I wanted to make something really sad and yet something that was of a language that has been discarded -- the melodrama. To re-endow it with something that feels authentic in your own experience I think is a really interesting process to go through, and that seems to be working for certain people. It's very exciting.

CS: What do you think Sirk would think of this film?

TH: Oh, I don't know. Somebody said such a nice thing in a review. They were like, somewhere up in heaven, Sirk and Fassbinder are dancing a jig right now, very happy -- or something like that. That was a sweet sentiment. Sirk does mention in his Sirk on Sirk book that there was a film that had a gay theme that he wanted to do. Maybe it was a story or maybe a book, but homosexuality was the theme, but of course it was not possible to do at the time. He stated in these interviews, which I think came out in the late 60s or early 70s, that it was something he would have loved to do.

CS: So what happened?

TH: I don't think he was going to go there. It was a theme that he couldn't touch at the time and it interested him.

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