You've now made several films -- "Superstar," "Safe," "Far From Heaven" -- that explore the lives of women who are to some extent outsiders. What has drawn you to these kinds of stories?

Despite a lot of obvious advancements made since the 1950s in terms of roles and options and choices, women are still generally the ones who have to run the household and raise the children. The story of women's struggle with marginality comes into this film in a very interesting way because both men on either side of Cathy can be called marginal in the sense that one is dealing with a homosexual life and the other with race and prejudice. Yet you have this social hierarchy that still puts Cathy on the bottom.

Getting this film made for what by Hollywood standards was not a huge amount of money -- this is a $14 million film -- was perceived as this enormous financial risk just because it's a story about a woman who was not going to be portrayed by Julia Roberts. Hollywood is still a male-dominated industry aimed at a male market. It's insane to me but that's the reality.

Could you talk about Douglas Sirk's influence on this film?

We all looked at three of the best ones: "Imitation of Life," "Written on the Wind" and "All That Heaven Allows." I'd be fibbing if I didn't say that my film draws most from "All That Heaven Allows" in terms of both content and visual style. The other films have a palette that's more primary and stoplight-bright, even garish at times, while "All That Heaven Allows," which has less explosive material, is much more muted and complex in its color strategy.

When you watch it on DVD and freeze the frames, you realize how expressionistic each shot is in terms of color, shadow and intensity. But when you actually watch the movie the visuals don't clobber you over the head; they serve the narrative needs of the story in a way that was our goal with this film.

Suburbia is generally presented as a site of repression in your work. Yet in "Far From Heaven" it's also depicted as this physically beautiful place.

I'm taking up the incredibly excruciating attention to visual detail in the films of Douglas Sirk. They're immaculately, painfully beautiful, almost oppressive in their beauty and their meticulousness, where every object, every dress and every hair has to be in place. It becomes an awful burden to maintain, and contributes to the pressure you feel Cathy having to negotiate as the floor is dropping out from under her. You see what's at stake in this beauty, in what this idealized life is supposed to look like. It's a friction that plays out at every level in Sirk, who created these fashion-plate movies with actresses who are lit beautifully, who wear perfect clothes and have perfect hair and makeup, but whose actions reveal they're actually very ordinary people who fail in their desires and buckle under cultural pressures.

Why did you choose Hartford, Connecticut?

I was using this gut sensory instinct that took me to New England. Somehow Massachusetts seemed a little too progressive and New Haven seemed too defined by Yale. Hartford felt like this lost city. In the 1950s it was this prosperous, very important city with a healthy economy and its own brand of sophistication but it was still very provincial, subject -- or so I imagined -- to social pressures to be a certain way. I cultivated this whole movie fantasy of Hartford in the 1950s. I saw it as this place governed by a sense of decorum that people would embrace but would also find very stifling at times.

On one level your film confirms the view of the 1950s as a culturally repressive era, but there's also something more complicated going on here.

We wanted to suggest that the 1950s bear a far more disturbing resemblance to today's society than we generally want to admit or cop to. There's this idea that history is innately progressive and that as we move forward we become a more open and sophisticated society. Sorry, guys! It's just not true.

The '50s were an intense recuperation of traditional values after a war era that put women in the work field and completely changed everyone's role from what their parents did. That was a radical, amazing period with Eleanor Roosevelt traipsing up and down the country, lesbians living in the White House, and then this victory over Hitler and Japan. They needed to do a lot to reinstate a sense of old-fashioned order to secure male ego and give it prominence. They had to really let women know what their place was.

At the same time, the civil rights changes that had begun during the war were starting to bristle under the surface. The '50s are interesting because there's so much going on under the surface that was about to explode; the decade was just this very quick patch job from what had just preceded it.

"Poison" was an exploration of a theme through multiple genres, and "Far From Heaven" is a 1950s melodrama filtered through a contemporary sensibility. How does rooting a film in a specific and recognizable genre open up possibilities for you?

Genre is definitely something I've always been interested in, because genres bring a series of historical references along with them and, as a result, create expectations in viewers that I like to tap into and slightly derange.

"Poison" was almost a textbook example of the ways in which different genres connoted different attitudes about the material at hand, the material being these stories about outsiders being shut out of or threatening their societies. For me, using genre in this way ultimately has a freeing effect.

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