Top 156 Quotes & Sayings by Todd Haynes

They always find new ways of talking about my movies.

I worked with Jim James on my film 'I'm Not There' - he sang 'Goin' to Acapulco' with Calexico backing him up. We just hit it off, and it's such a beautiful moment in that film.

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.

I live in Portland. I'm a man of the world, and I live in Portland.

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

I don't want to make people feel better.

I don't think there's any more synesthetic medium than film.

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

I think it remains a film-by-film process, and since I am relatively selective and slow, it can take a while.

When you premiere somewhere like Cannes, it's huge. It's nerve-wracking.

I've been really lucky with critical reaction, overall, even if my films don't often resemble each other.

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.

The bond company comes in if you exceed your costs; they're the insurers of the film. In the worst-case scenario, they take over the production.

I remember going to see '2001' with my dad.

Melodrama is sometimes broadly applied and sometimes derogatorily applied.

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.

Looking at photographs of New York in 1952, you find a powerfully pre-Eisenhower era - sagging, tired, distressed - and the palette is slightly dissonant.

I saw experimental film-makers teaching in college. They did what they wanted and didn't worry about the market, but the circumstances ended up offering me other possibilities.

Aspects of guilt or handwringing that one might expect in a film set in the '50s about women who discover their love for other women - a lot of these things are not in 'Carol.'

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.

I'm pretty single-minded, unlike a lot of directors who miraculously seem to be holding six projects in their hand at a given time and juggling them accordingly.

'Carol' is so distorted by point-of-view.

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

In high school - that's when I first fell in love with his music and his voice. 'Blonde on Blonde' above everything. I vaguely remember 'Desire' coming out. I definitely remember 'Street Legal' and 'Slow Train Coming.' The first time I saw Dylan was on that tour: '79 in L.A.

'Carol' takes place in the really early '50s, before Eisenhower has taken office. It's based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, her second and most autobiographical book and the only one outside of the crime milieu.

It took an entire generation of critical thinking for Douglas Sirk's films to be really appreciated.

I always learn a lot when I do so. You know, when you step out of your comfort zone and even your cynical zone, and open yourself up to what other people might experience and why they do so.

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

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.

Sirkian films really aren't - at least the way I see them, they're not about identification. They don't have voiceover. A lot of the love stories that are rooted, classic love stories rooted in point of view, use voiceover as a mechanism for locating you there.

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.

The way I sort of approach my work is that the historical and socioeconomic and cultural worlds that the music is exploring dictate the visual experience and the way that we approach it specifically on film.

The best love stories on film are rooted in the point of view of the more woundable, vulnerable party, the more amorous party.

You'll see in 'Carol' a lot of shots shot through windows, glass and awnings, with interruptions between where we are and where our object is. To me, I hope that that conjures the whole act of looking as a predicament, as something that is never easy and never completely attainable.

'Evil Urges' has some stuff in it that's unbelievable.

Serious films for grown-ups - 'Michael Clayton,' 'In the Valley of Elah,' 'A Mighty Heart' - these are big Hollywood films, but they have substance and craft and really beautiful performances.

When 'Safe' came out, it was treated respectfully but kind of forgotten. Then, by the end of the '90s, it somehow made it onto all these best-of-the-decade lists.

I'm always interested in what classic crime writers got into when they stepped away from the genre stuff they were known for. That's why 'Mildred Pierce' is like noir without any real crime.

I had really loving parents and a happy childhood.

All actors are protecting something, in their own way, that happens in front of a camera.

At the time I made 'Safe,' I was really intrigued by the whole culture around AIDS, which was turning to people like Louise Hay and these other West Coast New Age thinkers.

When you think of the later '50s and 'Far From Heaven' and Eisenhower and Sirk, you think of that Hollywood panache and gloss to American middle-class life.

Each production is its own experience.

The film division at Amazon is made up of true cineastes who love movies and really want to try and provide opportunity for independent film visions to find their footing in a vastly shifting market. They love cinema.

There's this homogenization, this big sucking motion in dominant society, to absorb all the disparate elements that define the margin or define the culture or define those who are thrust outside the status quo.

'Carol' takes place at a time the country was crawling out of the shadows of the war years, feeling the new vulnerabilities of the Cold War and conflicts within the union.

We yearn for the desire to triumph, and it almost never does in the greatest love stories because we're left yearning for it more in the end, and we wish the world were different as a result. I do love that.

I don't know if I ever entertained an academic career, nor did I ever think I'd become a feature film-maker in the market.

My parents are very supportive and proud.

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.

Films like 'The Godfather,' 'The Exorcist,' 'Klute,' 'Chinatown,' 'Network,' and 'The Parallax View': They were drawn from the genre tradition, but they dressed down the stylistic telling of those traditions and genres.

Every actor prepares differently and to different degrees of privacy. Some want to talk everything out. Others really don't want to talk anything out - or rehearse much.

'Mildred' was the first film I shot on Super 16 with Ed Lachman, and we decided to continue doing so for 'Carol.'

When you're shooting concert scenes in films, we try to bring in, where appropriate, as much of a sense of live performance as possible.

Love stories require an obstacle between the lovers, something that keeps them from one another. You have to yearn for the love that can't be fulfilled. And it gets harder to conceive of viable cultural or racial or sexual obstacles between people as we move forward progressively.

The term 'new queer cinema' and the films of mine that were associated with that term are from a very, very different time, one almost entirely defined by the AIDS era. It was a very different social and cultural regard for the lives, the experiences, the worth of gay people.

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

I felt 'Brokeback Mountain' re-imbued the love story with an authentic and unquestionable series of obstacles that these men faced. I think that's certainly true for 'Carol' as well.

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

I have a hard time making movies that affirm life and say life is a good and happy place. That's not true about the world.