A Conversation With Todd Haynes and Richard Linklater @ SXSW, 3/17/09

A Conversation With Todd Haynes & Richard Linklater
Tuesday, March 17 at 1:00pm
Austin Convention Center, Austin, TX

Linklater and Haynes took the stage with no moderator, sat down, and began a conversation like the old friends they are. Linklater was the first to speak, making some comments about a private screening of Superstar that took place the night before. Linklater commented on the fascination that many of the younger viewers experienced while they were viewing the film.

Haynes and Linklater first met in the late 1980s, at the IFP Market. Haynes had done Superstar, and Linklater was in between It's Impossible To Learn To Plow By Reading Books and his breakthrough feature, Slacker. Linklater wanted to bring Haynes to Austin on behalf of the Austin Film Society.

Parts of the discussion touched upon the changing state of Independent Film. They mentioned that it's becoming more difficult to finance movies, even with stars. Haynes recalled a recent conversation he had with a financier who told him that, paraphrasing, "We're going to have to start reading scripts again." Haynes thought that financiers might have to read scripts again could be a good thing.

Linklater said that he too had difficulty getting funding for his upcoming film, Me and Orson Welles, despite having Zac Efron in the cast. Many funders passed on Me and Orson Welles on the grounds that The High School Musical Crowd wouldn't find it appealing. Another obstacle was that the actor that Linklater cast as Orson Welles is a newcomer who had previously played Welles onstage.

Questions were asked throughout the course of the panel. A member of the audience asked Linklater about an ongoing project he is shooting, which follows a boy from the ages of 5 to 17. Normally, you would see different actors play the same character at different ages, having the same actors age normally. Linklater is shooting a little bit each year over the course of 12 years, and mentioned that he had just finished shooting year six.

Another question came from Jim Fouratt, a legendary gay rights activist and journalist, who asked Haynes what it was like to come of age just as AIDS was emerging into the public consciousness, and did that effect him in any way. Haynes said that it had a profound effect on him.  Haynes was a founding member of the activist collective Gran Fury.

Both recalled a story about Madonna attending a screening of Poison in LA. Madonna came into the theater, and the trailers began. The first one was for Slacker. The opening scene for that trailer had Teresa Taylor carrying around Madonna's Pap Smear. The whole audience--many gay men--turned around, looked at Madonna, and Madonna walked out.

Haynes shared with the audience that he was very reluctant to pursue his most recent movie, I'm Not There, about Bob Dylan, because of the previous troubles he had getting rights to songs. Superstar is not legally available, and David Bowie refused to let Velvet Goldmine use his songs. At the time he had moved to Portland and was working on Far From Heaven when he began listening to Dylan's songs.  Haynes knew Dylan's son Jesse, and after meeting Dylan's manager, sent a one page proposal.  Dylan liked the idea and gave it a go-ahead.

When an aspiring filmmaker asked both Haynes and Linklater what criteria he should consider when embarking on a project, both Linklater and Haynes agreed that you should find something you care about, then pursue it.

Zeitgeist 20th Anniversary Salute at MoMA Presents Two Films From Todd Haynes

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York began a celebration this week of the distributor Zeitgeist Films 20th anniversary with a retrospective of some of their best releases from over the years. Friday night, Todd Haynes presented two of his earlier films from the Zeitgeist collection, the short Dottie Gets Spanked and the controversial feature Poison , both shot by the great indie cinematographer Maryse Alberti, who most recently lensed Alex Gibney's documentary Taxi to the Darkside and whom I've had the personal privilege to work with on two short films in my own early days of independent film, a mere eight years ago compared to Zeitgeist's, Haynes' and Alberti's longevity. As an aside, Dottie Gets Spanked stars two former One Life to Live castmates, J. Evan Bonifant (ex-Al Holden) and Barbara Garrick (Alison Perkins). I state this because a few weeks ago, I posted notes from from the OLTL 40th anniversary panel discussion (speaking of anniversaries) at the Paley Center. Haynes also cast Garrick in his 2002 film Far From Heaven. She is a great character actress and I hope to see her in more of Haynes' films. Where is this aside going, you might ask? I suppose it just shows the point I addressed in my intro to the OLTL notes where I said "both genres (that being soaps and independent film) when done right, are often bold, risky, and deal with thought-provoking socially relevant issues." Nuff said. For more reading on Haynes, check out The Film Panel Notetaker's notes (here and here) from last year's New York Film Festival. And here are my notes from Friday night's discussion featuring highlights from the opening remarks and audience Q&A:

Zeitgeist: The Films of Our Time

Todd Haynes' Dottie Gets Spanked and Poison

MoMA

New York, NY

June 27, 2008

Haynes opened by thanking MoMA for bringing him to New York from Portland, Oregon. "This was a once in a lifetime opportunity to pay tribute to these two unbelievably talented, brilliant, smart and innovative distributors." Haynes is speaking of course of Zeitgeist co-founders Emily Russo and Nancy Gerstman, who were also present. "They are without a doubt the best distributors and best people I've ever worked with in distributing any of my films," Haynes said. On his films, Haynes said Poison was conceived, financed and approached at the time as an art project, outside the realm of traditional film financing and production. Russo and Gerstman were so committed to what Haynes was doing (along with Apparatus Productions partners Christine Vachon, producer of many of Haynes' films, and Barry Ellsworth, who shot the black and white scenes in Poison) that they wanted to distribute Poison even before it was completed."We had distribution of this art film at a time when that isn't something that filmmakers in their right mind should ever expect," he said. The film became the subject of great discourse and debate. It was one of the early films that sort of "branded with the new queer cinema mantle" that fell into a lot of controversy from the far right. On Dottie, which Haynes said was sort of the most autobiographical film he ever made, came three years after Poison and was made for ITVS , then was picked up for distribution by Zeitgeist. Haynes also dedicated the screening of Poison to Jim Lyons who both stars in and edited the film, and passed away last year.

Immediately following the screenings of Dottie and Poison, Haynes took some questions from the audience. Here are some of the highlights:

Q: Which of the Jean Genet stories (in Poison) were related to which of the stories you wrote?

Haynes: The clearest source for the film was Miracle of the Rose. It's sort of encapsulated in the prison story. I felt in a more general sense that I was interpreting aspects of Genet in all of the stories and I was very clearly interpreting the two more American genres...the horror film and the tabloid documentary story...into a vernacular that I felt I could speak in which is an American one. A lot of the same kinds of questions about transgression, about issues of the outsider, about issues of disease and the monster and so forth were things that I had encountered in Genet's writing. I felt this interest in bringing to a discussion that related to what was happening at the time, which is very much in the height of the AIDS scare. I was living in New York. It was sort of the center for a lot of political activity and activism and a lot of struggling that went on around those issues. I was also very much aware as we all were of how the media was beginning to depict AIDS and creating this sort of comfortable us versus them boundary. Those were the kinds of things I wanted to challenge, but I think even more than that, I felt that the gay community, which at that point was in a state of shock, where it wasn't being expressed through activism and through political activity. There was a retreat. There was an almost sense of culpability following the experimentation of the 70s and sexual experimentation that characterized that decade that people sort of felt that they had brought this on themselves. Genet had only recently died around that time and I felt like he was somebody that I could try in my own humble way to apply to some of these questions and embolden some of the issues that I felt might have been getting lost in the public assault around HIV.

Q: Genet did a film (Un Chant D'Amour) in the late 1940s or early 1950s which had a prison sequence in it. Was that an inspiration?

Haynes: I knew the film well when I made Poison and I love that film. Un Chant D'Amour is an exquisite work on film by this playwright and fiction writer and poet Jean Genet. I didn't want to literally re-produce those scenes. They're too specific to that film. There are some proverbially erotic scenes in that film that were shocking for it's time. Maybe the most provocative is the one you described where one inmate sticks a little piece of straw through a hole in the granite wall and smokes a cigarette and exhales the smoke into his neighboring inmates cell who inhales it and blows it back out. So simple and so minimalist...so powerful.


Q: What was it about the early 1990s that allowed you to push the envelope and make the kind of films you wanted to make? Why did you decide to make a feature after making so many shorts?

Haynes: I don't know if anyone would do that today. I bet it would have even been easier in the 60s and 70s to conceive of and get support for and get interest behind a film like this possibly. For me, and I think this is true for many ways Christine Vachon and Barry Ellsworth, were interested in aspects of experimental filmmaking...had all gone to Brown University where there was this very interesting theoretical program where any film classes were taughtwhich was called at the time semiotics. It has since expanded in a full-fledged department called Modern Culture & Media. We've seen these kind of departments of critical theory expand at universities throughout the country and the world. We were being exposed to critical theory, post-Freud and feminist, that looked at Hollywood classical cinema from the critical perspective. We were also witnesses the end of that purist era of American experimental film...the Stan Brakhage era, let's say, which was amazing work, but very anti-narrative. That period was beginning to be re-examined by some experimental filmmakers like Sally Potter whose film Thriller we had all seen in college. It was these filmmakers who were beginning to take genre and references to Hollywood film and references to narrative formulas and formats and applying them to experimental strategy. I think that excited all three of us in different ways. For me, in a weird way, my education was even more in Hollywood traditions and classic genre traditions than even experimental traditions. This melding of the two opened up our eyes. At the same time, Blue Velvet came out in theaters. You sort of saw in a sort commercial venue or parallel platform, something very similar where in a narrative film, experimental strategies...and playing around the idea of artifice and pushing the boundaries was being played out in commercial cinemas with great critical response and great potential for a lot of filmmakers. Probably gave birth to a whole generation of filmmakers. With all of that in mind, I think we sort of informed what Apparatus was about, a non-profit organization aimed at what we call the experimental narrative where narrative was being accepted from a critical perspective. It was something that was very much a part of that time and a real sense of necessity...some political response to the climate of HIV. And yet all of those films approached their narrative strategies with a sense of innovation and different from one to next.

NYFF- HBO Directors Dialogue: Todd Haynes - October 6, 2007

45th New York Film Festival
HBO Directors Dialogue: Todd Haynes
October 6, 2007

Todd Haynes in New York Film Fesival's Green Room for I'm Not There. Photo Credit: C.J.Contino

Saturday at the New York Film Festival, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman conducted an HBO Directors Dialogues with filmmaker Todd Haynes whose new film, I’m Not There, premiered at the festival a few days earlier. I was at the premiere and took notes at the Q&A, and thought it would be a good complement to take additional notes at the Directors Dialogue to get further insights from Haynes on his directing styles and choices for I’m Not There and his other bodies of work. What follows are highlights of the discussion and questions and answers from the audience.

Hoberman opened by saying “the greatest pleasure a film journalist can have is to come across a movie you never heard of from someone unknown and to have the privilege to write about it first 20 years ago.” The film refers to was Haynes’ 1987 super 8mm movie Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Hoberman called it a completely brilliant and original movie. He then went through the laundry list of Haynes’ other film including Poison (1991), Safe (1995), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Far From Heaven (2002), and finally I’m Not There (2007). Hoberman pointed out that most of these films have multiple stories and address certain pop culture text. In each case, there is a certainty of irony. He asks Haynes if these films were made with love, and what he’s a fan of.

Haynes responded that he’s an intense, wild fan of movies, music, and even of Hoberman’s work, referring back to Hoberman’s original review of Superstar, a film that would never have been shown commercially. This review launched Haynes’ career. Many theatrical venues wanted to show the film.

Hoberman moves the discussion over to Haynes interest in Bob Dylan.

Haynes recollected his high school days. He attended Oakwood, an artsy school in Los Angeles that had a radical, mythical history founded by progressive actors in the 1950s. It was in this environment, he first encountered Dylan’s music. After graduating in 1979, he moved to the East Coast for college at Brown University, where he studied semiotics, and became interested in glam and punk rock. It was not till the end of his 30s (he had begun his film career already) when he got back into Dylan. He finished making Velvet Goldmine and took a few years off. Most of his friends were starting their lives already, having families. He didn’t have any of those things in his life. Something was missing. He wanted to enrich himself. Since he was a creative person, he had the opportunity to externalize his troubles, and was very grateful for it. At the time, he was interested in 1950s melodramas (ala Douglas Sirk) and wanted to work again with Julianne Moore (who he worked previously with on Safe).

At the end of the 1990s, Haynes drove across country to Portland, Oregon, to live with his sister. He listened to tapes of Dylan in the car. Half way there, he bought some more folk music to listen to . When he got to Portland, he read a bunch of Dylan biographies. It became inevitable that his obsession would result in making something creative.

Hoberman mentions that Haynes started writing the screenplay for I’m Not There in 2000. During this time, Dylan published an anthology, ’s documentary, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan came out, and Twyla Tharp’s ballet based on Dylan’s songs, The Times They Are A-Changin’, played on Broadway. But Haynes focuses most of the film on Dylan’s life in the 1960s up until the 70s, the end of the Vietnam War.

Haynes said he couldn’t commit to Dylan’s entire life. He wanted to focus on the core elements and roots of his origins in the 60s era. That was enough. Dylan ultimately created his own escape at the end of the 60s until he had his motorcycle accident in 1966. Then he went to Woodstock and raised a family. In many ways, he never really came back. Dylan’s access and visibility have been under his own terms ever since. That’s what the whole last story with Richard Gere’s Dylan character, Billy, is all about. Billy is the most metaphorical character.

Given how protective Dylan is, Hoberman asked Haynes how he got permission to use Dylan’s music in the film and what Dylan thought of the film.

Haynes said he’s not sure Dylan has seen it yet. He sent the DVD to Dylan’s son Jesse, because he knew that Dylan didn’t want to come to any public screenings. Before even making the film, Haynes called up producer Christine Vachon. He was very bashful about it, because he knew it would be hard to get Dylan’s permission to use the songs. There was no way he could make the movie without the music. Prior to making the film, Haynes met with Jesse, who is also a filmmaker, in Los Angeles. It’s so hard to be the kid of a famous person. One thing Dylan has been able to do all along is keep his family protected.

At that point in the script (which was then titled I’m Not There: Suppositions On a Film Concerning Dylan), Haynes had seven Dylan characters, one of which eventually got absorbed into the Woody character, making the final amount six. Dylan had been opposed to every dramatic version of his life before, until that moment. If there was ever something Dylan wanted done about his life, it would have to be something this open and unconventional.

Audience Q&A

Q: Do you see parallels between I’m Not There and Velvet Goldmine? Did you get David Bowie’s blessing for Velvet Goldmine?

TH: Artists are always changing themselves. The first person you might think of is David Bowie. I wanted the rights to Bowie’s songs, but he wasn’t interested in having his story on film. Bowie’s version of self-transformation was about dressing up and applying make up. Androgyny. I’m Not There and Velvet Goldmine are very different films. Different music genres and traditions. Velvet Goldmine is a British story, whereas I’m Not There is American story.

Q: Why do you choose Cate Blanchett for the role of Jude in I’m Not There?

TH: I was obsessed about different actresses in their age range. I looked at pictures of actresses and put them in Dylan’s hair. Saw Cate on stage in Heda Gabler in Brooklyn. Saw her scale and proportions. She’s beautiful. On a physical level, I was stunned by her proportions.

Q: How do you work with such a large body of music?

TH: It was an embarrassment of riches. The selection of cinematic references started in the script stage. Music would be telling the story, built into the film’s concept. For example, the song “Ballad of a Thin Man” had such an important historical meaning. It expressed the inside/outside dichotomy. Another song, “Goin’ to Acapulco,” was a personal favorite. It’s absurdly melodramatic.

Q: You started the script in 2000 with seven Dylan characters. What are other changes were made?

TH: I did stop everything on the script when going into production on Far From Heaven in 2001, which occupied me completely till about 2003, but at that point, I had gotten the rights from Dylan to use the music. Then started researching and starting over from scratch. The process of being a pure fan was changed. The missing seventh character was called Charlie, a Chaplin-esque figure.

Q: Did you study of semiotics at Brown influence your filmmaking?

TH: It has. The semiotics courses are now part of the modern culture and media departments. Semiotics studies post-culturalism. It’s a post-humanist look at pop culture and media.

I Was There - Notes from Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" At 45th New York Film Festival

45th New York Film Festival
I’m Not There
October 4, 2007

Cate Blanchett as Jude in I'm Not There. Directed by Todd Haynes, US, 2007; 136m. Photo Credit: Jonathan Wenk/TWC 2007

I'm Not There opens in limited release at Film Forum in New York on Nov. 21.

Last night at the New York Film Festival, I saw Todd Haynes’ extraordinary narrative/mockumentary/experimental/biopic I’m Not There. The film beautifully and strangely yet effectively, weaves the tales of six different versions of legendary folk/rock singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, each played by different actors of varying ages (and gender ala Cate Blanchett’s terrific performance) at various stages or incarnations or dreamlike moments of Dylan’s life. I’m Not There was the most challenging, engaging and artistic film I have seen so far this year. There are definitely elements of Haynes’ earlier works here, which I’ve always been intrigued by, yet he presents us with fresh and new ideas, that to some may seem a bit jarring, but well worth the experience.

Richard Peña, Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, introduced the film along with its director Todd Haynes. Haynes told the audience that it meant a tremendous amount to him to have his film there. “This is a city Dylan so loved,” he said. He also mentioned how difficult it was to get the project financed and gave a big thanks to Harvey Weinstein (who was in attendance) for being someone who stepped in. “He is a courageous guy,” Haynes said.

Haynes then went on to introduce a lot of people from the film who all got up on stage. They included: Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Marcus Carl Franklin, Michelle Williams, co-screenwriter Oren Moverman, producers Christine Vachon (Killer Films), John Sloss and Jim Stern, executive producers John Wells and Wendy Japhet, music supervisors Randy Poster and Jim Dunbar, casting director Laura Rosenthal, production designer Judy Becker, titlist Marlene McCarty, assistant Tonya Smith, and last but not least, director of photography Ed Lachman. Also in the cast, but not present to my awareness was Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, and Ben Wishaw, all who round out the rest of the Dylan avatars in the film.

After the screening, Richard Pena (RP) moderated a Q&A with Haynes (TH), Blanchett (CB), Marcus Carl Franklin (MCF), and Michelle Williams (MW).

(RP) Can you tell us about the structure of the film?

(TH) The script tried to suggest the ways the stories would be intercut, told in a linear order. I created a dialogue with my subject’s lives. The only way the film could work was that the stories had to fill each other in. One fills in the past of the other. The characters were dreaming each other’s stories. The motifs and ideas came from Dylan’s songs.

(RP) How did you all prepare for your roles?

(CB) By talking to Todd. The script was like a logarithm or algebra. Todd put together a song for each character. I had also read Bob Dylan’s Playboy interview.

(MCF) I’m not as experienced as these actors are. I listened to Dylan’s music. Basically, I did my homework.

Audience Questions

Q: How did it feel interpreting Bob Dylan as a woman?

(CB) I didn’t really think about it too much. It was incredibly genius to cast a woman.

Q: Why did the six Bob Dylan characters in the film have different names other than Bob Dylan?

(TH) To really play out the idea of him occupying different psychic places in his life, it would have been too difficult to make him one character. Most biopics blend fact and fiction. Dylan gave himself different names over the years.

Q: How do you deal with the people who would rather see a more direct version of Dylan’s life?

(TH) People don’t have to like the film. Dylan was received by an incredibly popular audience in the 1960s. This was my subject. I didn’t want to dumb it down. I tried to be true to the story.

Q: Has Bob Dylan seen the film yet?

(TH) We don’t know yet. He hasn’t come to any public screenings. We gave his son Jesse the DVD. Heard that Dylan saw Martin Scorsese’s documentary, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, on TV when he was traveling in Spain.

Q: Were all the performances in the film song by Dylan? Did any of the actors do their own singing?

(CB) I had guitar lessons, but Todd wanted my character to have a male voice come out of my mouth during the singing scenes.

(TH) There was one actor who’s here today who did do his own singing. (Haynes is referring to young Marcus Carl Franklin. The audience applauds.)

Q: What was your relationship with the editor in terms of choices you made to tell the story?

(TH) This was my first time working with Jay Rabinowitz? We started out very closely following the script. It’s a long, big film. It was a challenge to make it work. For example, Richard Gere’s character comes last in the story, but we put little pieces of him earlier in the film.

Q: The film encompasses stages of Dylan’s life up until the late 1970s. Why doesn’t it go further into the present?

(TH) I was paralleling a lot of different events that took place in the film. For example, when Dylan had his motorcycle accident, he eventually goes to the Woodstock in 1969, but he was as far away from the psychedelics of that movement. He went into the past with his music. He never fully returned.

(RP) The turning point was the motorcycle accident. Could you talk more about that?

(TH) I didn’t want to make this film just for Dylan fanatics. Didn’t want to overplay the motorcycle accident, but wanted to make it clear enough. It kind of book ends the films.

Q: What inspired you to make this film?

(TH) I got into Dylan’s music in my late 30s and read a lot of his biographies. I was looking for excitement of change in my life. I associated Dylan with adolescence and the excitement of the future and the unknown. The idea of changing was something I was confronting. These are huge changes and they cause huge repercussions. I dramatized that.

Q: The core of Dylan is identity. Is there a huge question for you about human identity in your thinking?

(TH) The single thing I see in my films is about identity. Dylan found expectations of identity stifling. I found this to be a beautiful model.

Q: Did you have the actors in mind when writing the script?

(TH) I don’t usually think of actors in my mind. Only one actor came to mind, that being the wife character played in the film by Charlotte Gainsbourg. I was so indelibly blessed with these actors. They don’t have to risk everything for a movie like this.