Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Writer-director Todd Haynes talks about "Far From Heaven," his exploration of race, sexuality and the glorious '50s visions of Hollywood legend Douglas Sirk.
Nov 11, 2002 | Chisel-jawed lotharios, pointy-breasted housewives, violins played at fever pitch: Such is the stuff Douglas Sirk's films are made of.
Born in Hamburg in 1900 (as Detlef Sierck), the legendary director hobnobbed with the likes of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in 1920s Germany, then fled the Nazi regime at the beginning of World War II. In Hollywood, he rechristened himself and made his name off a series of bold Technicolor weepies -- "Magnificent Obsession," "Imitation of Life," "Written on the Wind" -- shot for Universal Pictures in the 1950s. Sirk's films wed a moralizing instinct to a genre, the domestic melodrama, known for its overheated emotions and torrid plot turns.
Sirk's vibrantly hued and socially engaged movies served as the inspiration for director Todd Haynes' newest film, "Far From Heaven." Set in Hartford, Conn., in 1957, "Far From Heaven" centers on the seemingly picture-perfect Whitaker family. Early on in the film, well-heeled housewife Cathy (Julianne Moore) finds her hunky husband (Dennis Quaid) in a compromising position that throws their marriage into doubt. As Cathy's home life starts to unravel, she strikes up a friendship with her African-American gardener, played by Dennis Haysbert. Using the conventions of '50s melodrama -- the swelling music, the stagy dialogue, even the ornately curlicued script in the credits -- Haynes explores the impact of Cathy's culturally taboo relationship.
"Far From Heaven" cements Haynes' reputation as one of the most daring filmmakers of his generation. From the get-go Haynes has revealed an interest in the world's misfits and outcasts. His 43-minute directorial debut, "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," uses Barbie dolls to relate the tale of the AM pop princess's demise from anorexia (the film was yanked from distribution after Haynes made unauthorized use of the Carpenters' music, prompting A&M Records to file a cease-and-desist order).
Haynes' first full-length feature, 1991's "Poison," generated even more controversy. Partly funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the film was slammed as pornographic by opponents of the NEA. Inspired by the work of French novelist, poet and playwright Jean Genet, "Poison" features three intersecting story lines that explore sexual transgression, making use of familiar genres -- the documentary, the love story, B-movie science fiction -- to communicate its themes.
Haynes achieved greater prominence with his next two films, "Safe" and "Velvet Goldmine." "Safe," perhaps the director's most horrifying work, centers on a California housewife (Julianne Moore) who develops an environmental illness and ends up shuttered away from society, quarantined in a metal igloo at a spiritual retreat. And in the eye candy-rich "Velvet Goldmine," a David Bowie doppelgänger drops from view at the height of his fame, prompting a reporter to investigate the disappearance 10 years later.
"Far From Heaven" is not as explicitly disturbing as its predecessors. In fact, in many ways it stands as Haynes' most sentimental and visually seductive work. But the story it has to tell -- about a culture that denies homosexuality, condemns interracial romances and refuses women the opportunity for true change -- is decidedly dark nonetheless.
I spoke with Haynes by telephone a month before his film was set to open.
You have said that you used very few close-ups of Julianne Moore in "Safe" because you wanted to distance the viewer from the Carol White character. Is Cathy Whitaker a character you wanted viewers to have a stronger emotional identification with?
Ultimately I wanted this film, despite its very reverent use of outmoded styles, to draw you in emotionally. But I also didn't want it to deviate from the language of films from the 1950s. When you look at these films and start to understand their terminology, you see that they operate at a certain distance; they're very presentational. So we don't go in as close as you do in most movies today. Almost all of Cathy's shots where she's talking to another character are filmed over her shoulder so you're very much aware of the character in her social dilemma at any given point. But what's so amazing to me is how it seems to have worked, how people get past these old codes and find those emotional connections.
Why did you cast Julianne Moore in this role?
Because she's the best! I'm amazed at how she starts from scratch with each role and rebuilds it, almost on a molecular level. I knew the kind of acting involved in "Far From Heaven" would pose a technical challenge for the actors, to overcome its staid quality and not have it sound like the movie dialogue it really is. It's a subtle process because I also didn't want actors who would be nodding to a contemporary audience and doing things that would betray the vernacular of this particular period of acting. I knew Julianne would be up for the task as few others could be.
You've got actors trained in a naturalistic tradition delivering lines that have a deliberate staginess or dated feel to them -- lines like "Aw, shucks." What impact were you trying to create with the acting style?
We hoped to re-ignite what is innately powerful about cinematic experience. Movies are basically nothing until we bring an emotional life to them; they're just shadows on a wall until they affect the viewer sitting in the dark. That's why I've never been drawn to a more realist model, à la John Cassavetes or people like that, with the goal being to create reality on screen completely intact. Because it's all artificial, it's all a code, a trick, and it takes the viewer's real-life experience and identification to make it something else.
What I love is using this completely dismissed, rejected, degraded form of narrative -- the melodrama -- and watching it play out really earnestly, without big quotation marks around it. We were trying to give it the respect it was due; none of us were treating this material as a parody.
The hope was that ultimately you wouldn't be watching the form anymore, but would find yourself entering it and engaging it and bringing it to life with your own memories of movies like it, your connection to the content of the film -- that combination of things we all bring to movie experience. We hoped that the form wouldn't stay materially present in your mind's eye but that it would come and it would go.
