Most of the time with film we're manipulated by music in a very insidious way; it cues emotion and tells us how to feel. But here you're not trying to conceal the role music can play, the way it prompts or reflects emotion in this grand, almost operatic way.

The Latin root of melodrama is "melos," which is music plus drama. The very construction of the term implies this intense marriage between what drama and music do to us, whether that's music literally interacting with drama or drama that provokes intense emotional feelings that aren't always articulated or verbalizable.

Music in a lot of contemporary movies is irritating to us because it's reiterating what's been told in so many ways in the narrative. It's just doubling it and it starts to feel overdetermined and you feel locked into a reaction you have no choice over. The music in Sirk's films is almost a central character or chorus that fills in for the things characters can't really express for themselves. These kinds of movies are almost pre-psychological. Characters are moved around by forces of society; there isn't that privileged moment of knowledge at the end. So there's a space for music in these films in a way there generally isn't in movies today.

In "Far From Heaven," the music goes from something so overt -- like in the beginning, where most of the people watching are going to say "Oh my God, they really went for it, they didn't hold back, we're going to have a whole period postcard here." By the end of the film the same music and the same intensity has accumulated a lot of our trust and involvement. You can't imagine getting emotionally involved in the film at the beginning but by the end you really are and that dance from one to the other is also a model for how I hoped the overall film would work.

You've said that the film "deviates from the thematic possibilities afforded films in the 1950s in its depiction of homosexuality." And in fact the film reflects a deeper ambivalence regarding the possibility of an interracial relationship in this era than a homosexual one.

It has a lot to do with what can be covered up and what can't, which is what Sirk's "Imitation of Life" deals with. Homosexuality has always been something that could be concealed and the movie is very much about surfaces. These two dueling themes on either side of Cathy's story are mirrors of each other in a weird way. One -- Frank's homosexuality -- is concealed by this carefully tended domestic life, and Cathy participates in that concealment. The other, race, is un-concealable, is in fact so hyper-visible that it takes on a charged meaning that doesn't really reflect the facts of Cathy and Raymond's relationship; it assumes an intense volatility in this particular time and this particular climate.

When you were filming "Safe" you added a shot, very late in the process, of the retreat leader's mansion at Wrenwood, all in an attempt to make the audience more aware of the nature of your critique. Were there any points during the filming of "Far From Heaven" where you felt similarly concerned that the audience wouldn't grasp your intentions?

No. The difference is that in this film the style puts everything on the surface. There's something so naked it almost makes you squirm, how it's all stated at a direct level. The content is made so painfully clear that there was never a point where I thought people weren't going to get it.

If anything, I wanted to make sure that we didn't hold back. I didn't want to look back at Sirk's films and say they were bolder than we were. His films were so bold in their exposure of what they were about, they were sort of screaming their themes. So in "Far From Heaven" you get these shots of spectators staring at Cathy and Raymond in these almost cartoonish depictions of prejudice, and that's almost more interesting, where you see how all the pieces of the story are bald but somehow you're not pulled out of the narrative and the hand that's putting it all together disappears.

The line "She's as devoted to family as she is kind to Negroes" is referred to repeatedly -- sometimes ironically -- throughout the film. And yet even as Cathy's experiencing this awakening racial sensitivity, she remains a product of her class and circumstances, and so you have the scene where she basically ignores the NAACP volunteers who come to her house to solicit her signature on a petition.

We used the NAACP theme and Cathy's ostensible "kindness to Negroes," her tendency toward compassion, as a kind of instigator or marker of tiny little steps that she might be taking towards some kind of liberation from her own constraints. People who saw the film or were involved in financing said they thought the NAACP scene was stilted; or some said, "Oh, I think it makes Cathy look a bit disingenuous." And I was like, no kidding.

But it was very important to depict Cathy as a character who has these sympathies but is incapable of taking any real action on her own. It's necessary for the NAACP to come to her doorstep and hand her a brochure, for the brochure to already be in her possession, where after a series of events escalate and disturb her, that she might consider doing something about it in some small way. I was very careful to chart that, that she's very passive, that she's not proactive, because it's going to take some radical changes for her to really realize the limits of her choices.

I wanted to show how Cathy's role within the family binds her, how the ultimate burden a woman had in this time period was to her family and to the maintenance of that domestic tradition, the raising of kids and the making of home. To a large degree, that hasn't changed.

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