Todd Haynes Quotes

#1. I think when you're trying to get a film together that's had a long gustation process before I came on board and was trying to get financed in various stages, sometimes you're trying to make it more friendly to the financial interests or the commercial interests of various parties.

Todd Haynes

#2. Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative.

Todd Haynes

#3. There are always things I have to remove. I might look at a shot for five months, when somebody new to the screening room will say, 'hey, there's a modern air conditioner in that window.' It's a process.

Todd Haynes

#4. I sort of have a dog-minded single strategy but I am a little more open to stuff that's out there, now and looking at scripts in the world and seeing if something that already exists can spark my interest and my curiosity.

Todd Haynes

#5. I always bring it up to my lawyer every now and then. And another reason we have to revisit it is because there is a restoration going on right now for the film through UCLA and Sundance.

Todd Haynes

#6. In male-driven [films], the protagonist is not the person who's necessarily in harms way. There's a sense that they're going to figure out how to persevere and take on the obstacles and foes and you don't necessarily know if that's going to happen with the subjects of love stories.

Todd Haynes

#7. In a way, I think Roxy Music is high camp, in a brilliant way.

Todd Haynes

#8. Doing a love story as a genre, and looking at love stories in movies, and feeling like I learned stuff about that, and that it broadened my view and my idea of what I can do, and how I can work with the people around me, that was such a great, really satisfying experience.

Todd Haynes

#9. I really want the audience to place close attention to the movement, possibilities of movement, possibilities of trespassing boundaries and observe what's possible in different social settings, and different settings of class designation as well.

Todd Haynes

#10. I think when I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist.

Todd Haynes

#11. You always feel like rock critics are frustrated musicians. I envy musicians their ability to live their art and share it with an audience, in the moment.

Todd Haynes

#12. When Cate Blanchett starts directing, it's over for all of us.

Todd Haynes

#13. I think all my films can be enjoyed. In fact, they've often surprised me with how they're received.

Todd Haynes

#14. Making a film is so scary, and there's such a kind of void that you're working from initially. I mean, you can have all the ideas and be as prepared as possible, but you're also still bringing people together and saying, 'Trust me,' even when you don't necessarily trust every element.

Todd Haynes

#15. It's only when you look back sometimes and you look at some people in your life and you're like, Oh my god, there was something so pure about that. The thing that kind of bugged me, maybe, is the thing that's so unique.

Todd Haynes

#16. Nostalgia could be considered a disease because you're living now.

Todd Haynes

#17. The Johnny Depp generation has this kind of brooding, weighty, introspective quality, very James Deanish. Which is nice, great for a lot of characters.

Todd Haynes

#18. In my research, all roads led back to Oscar. It's definitely in a way trying to understand the truly English element to glam-rock. It really does not come from American culture.

Todd Haynes

#19. You want everything for your kids that you didn't have, but that that very desire can pollute and corrupt the good, basic American pluckiness, resourcefulness and down-to-earthness that we like to pride ourselves with, and result in aspirations of wealth and high culture.

Todd Haynes

#20. I have always had an interest in performers who play against the most obvious of expectations and are able to find something secret, something withheld, and some level of restraint.

Todd Haynes

#21. I love how 'melodrama' is a denigrated term - a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that's what life is, man.

Todd Haynes

#22. I was 3 years old and Mary Poppins [1964] made an impression on me that was seismic, apparently. I fell into some kind of total creative, imaginative rapture over that movie that propelled this industry of Mary Poppins drawings, plays, performances - just an obsessive, creative reaction to it.

Todd Haynes

#23. I figured I would be teaching my whole life and making experimental films on the side.

Todd Haynes

#24. A refusal of nature as a model is a tradition that goes right back to Oscar Wilde.

Todd Haynes

#25. I think that's what I love about glam-rock. It invited you to participate. It asked you to change yourself in all these different ways, or offered up all these options.

Todd Haynes

#26. It's absurd: half the movie audience are women, but Hollywood bosses are still aiming for men who are 20.

Todd Haynes

#27. I'm drawn to female characters; not all of them are strong characters.

Todd Haynes

#28. I always loved theater and acting in plays and directing, writing little plays and directing friends in plays.

Todd Haynes

#29. As an independent filmmaker, to develop the money and the financing and the structure and the whole process, and then promoting them and traveling with them, which is a part of the process that I've always enjoyed and I've learned a great deal from.

Todd Haynes

#30. You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

Todd Haynes

#31. I think by around the time I was about 8 or 9, the idea of filmmaking probably took hold. I made little Super 8 extravaganzas when I was a kid, the first being my own version of 'Romeo and Juliet,' and where I played all the parts except for Juliet.

Todd Haynes

#32. I liked to act in plays when I was a kid, and then in college. But that's the last time I really acted. I always loved it. But my interests were more in looking at the whole, rather than getting completely swallowed up in a single part of the whole.

Todd Haynes

#33. Pop music can get inside us and enter our memory bubbles. It provides those true Proustian moments, unlocking sensations, unlocking our imaginations. Music inspired me as a filmmaker.

Todd Haynes

#34. When I write my scripts, there's a point at which if I'm not starting to see them visually, I feel like I'm kind of cheating. So my scripts are laden with a lot of visual description, which makes them not so much fun to read - I kind of weigh them down.

Todd Haynes

#35. In the end, whether I write the script or, in this case, somebody else did, there's a point where you let it go when you're making a movie. You just have to. The thing that you shoot is not what you imagined in your head - it never is exactly that. And it shouldn't be.

Todd Haynes

#36. What was so interesting about the glam era was that it was about bisexuality and breaking down the boundaries between gays and straights, breaking down the boundaries between masculinity and femininity with this androgyny thing.

Todd Haynes

#37. I'm a great admirer, fan and consumer of television. I love serial drama. I have been a major fan of HBO's series for many years.

Todd Haynes

#38. I was about 6 or 7, I would have said I wanted to be an actor and an artist. And that just kind of kept honing itself around film and getting closer to film.

Todd Haynes

#39. It's very funny because every time I make a movie, and I've heard this re-echoed by other filmmakers and actors I have worked with, you kind of feel like you're naked again. You have to figure it all out from scratch, as if you had never done it before.

Todd Haynes

#40. Like the music and the period, I wanted 'I'm Not There' to be fun and full of emotions, desires and experiments that were thrilling and dangerous.

Todd Haynes