This article was originally published September 27, 2023. On January 23, 2024, May December was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Be sure to also read our review.
Todd Haynes knows how to build a trap. The filmmaker, who is hyperarticulate and prolific, has spent much of his career making work about people who struggle to express even the most basic emotional needs. (Like Safe’s shrinking protagonist, Carol White, when asked to give a speech: “I’m trying to see myself, hopefully, more as I am, more, um, more positive, like seeing the pluses?”) Sometimes the web they’re stuck in is one they have spun themselves, a filigree of delusion and self-protective lies. Other times, they fear society’s judgment. In his best films — the thwarted lust and romance of Poison, Far From Heaven, and Carol; the suburban rot of Safe — it’s both.
At the opposite end are his rock-star movies, which use the self-creation of performers as an aspirational motif. What if freedom weren’t about knowing who you really are, but about knowing you could change at any time? What if you cast six different actors as Bob Dylan, including a young Black boy and a 30-something Australian woman? (It would still feel less radical than Haynes’s casting of Superstar, a film about the life and tragic death of Karen Carpenter that’s “acted” entirely by Barbies.)
Haynes, 62, grew up in the L.A. suburbs, a multitalented kid who was fascinated by hippie girls, tight with his sister and his female friends, and super into drawing and painting and trying to remake the movies he saw in the theaters using his Super 8. He studied film and semiotics at Brown, then spent about a decade and a half in New York before finally shipping out to Portland, Oregon, in 2000, where he’s stayed ever since, in part because it means he can hang out with friends like fellow filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. He remembers his early urge to recreate movies like Mary Poppins as one that sizzled through his hands and through his body. Even now, his films are full of visual and narrative references to the classics he can’t stop thinking about — including May December, his latest, which opens the New York Film Festival on September 29.
May December follows a famous actress named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) who travels to Tybee Island, Georgia, to meet the notorious woman she’s about to play in a biopic: Gracie (Julianne Moore), who filled the tabloids more than two decades ago after she seduced, and got pregnant by, a middle-school boy named Joe. Now that boy is a man (Charles Melton), and he and Gracie are still together and raising their own nearly grown children. The film, inspired by the real-life coupling of teacher Mary Kay Letourneau and her student Vili Fualaau, refuses to make a ruling on Gracie’s choices. Instead, we watch while she and Elizabeth circle each other, facing off Persona style. It soon becomes clear that the intrusion of this glamorous outsider could change Joe’s life even more than his wife’s, forcing him to question what he had learned to accept — but in classic Haynes style, that’s no guarantee he’ll break free.
I noticed something rewatching your films: You’ve shot a lot of scenes of disapproving townspeople gawking at the protagonist for doing something transgressive. You’ve also got a lot of scenes where people are gawking at someone because they’re famous. May December has both.
I know exactly what you’re talking about — that tableau, it’s in Velvet Goldmine, it’s in Poison, it’s in Far From Heaven. Those are almost invariably nods to similar shots in Fassbinder melodramas where he separates protagonists who are put into a fraught situation with the mores of the culture. In May December, looks in general are a motif throughout, along with which characters have access to seeing things. Natalie Portman’s character, Elizabeth, is an actor, somebody whom people look at and project onto. At first, we presume she’s going to be our view into this story, but she’s hardly the anonymous, objective reporter in the dark.
Is this the first movie you’ve ever made about filmmaking?
It’s been tipped upon, but it’s never been a big theme. When Elizabeth talks about the craft of acting and filmmaking, she talks about getting to the truth, and everybody sort of nods along, as if it were an agreed-upon consensus what truth is and how available it is to everybody. This outsider is coming in to revisit the history of this relationship and to put a frame around it. That’s what enables Gracie and Joe, and particularly Joe, to look at themselves in ways they have been disinclined to do all these years. It uproots and destabilizes their life.
Joe is a fascinating character.
I’m so grateful Charles Melton came into our consciousness. I didn’t know him from Riverdale. His looks were almost a deterrent.
What do you mean?
I felt that Joe would be a good-looking man, but Charles has that sort of hunkiness and pinup quality that wasn’t necessarily how I pictured him. He gained 35, 40 pounds for the role to change his chiseled self into something more familiar: a suburban man in this place. There’s such remarkable physicality in the choices he made as an actor. A friend of mine saw a cut of it, and he said, “Charles moves like a child and an old man, a combination of the two” — which makes so much sense given his predicament.
You’ve done a lot of work where people are judged because of their sexual proclivities, and usually we’re made to understand that the judgers are bigots. But in May December, we’re in a more complicated position.
It put me in a state of self-questioning. Part of what makes that so interesting is how it’s set 23 years after this relationship first occurred. You’re excavating it. There’s no question that the fact that it’s about women in positions of sexual agency contributes to one’s own sense of not knowing how to feel. You kind of want to be on the side of women driven by desire and wanting to bring fresh relationships into their lives, and you’re also aware of how differently a man would be treated after deviating from his marriage and pursuing his sexual desires — even with somebody underage, how much more we expect that, societally. On the other hand, it’s like, No, she completely abused her power over this boy. But how appalled society was by it all — it’s hard to not attribute that, to some degree, to the fact that it was a woman who was doing it.
All of your films have been set in the past, even if it’s the recent past. May December is set in 2015; Safe, which you made in the ’90s, is set in the ’80s; Far From Heaven is set in the late ’50s. Is there something you can do in a film set in the past that you’re unable to do in a story set now?
Yeah, there’s a kind of freedom in it. When you set it back from the very moment we’re in, it forces a reframing. It asks you to make the connections between then and now, between subject and self, yourself. Especially, maybe, when it’s a very small push back into the past. It almost begs you to make the connection to the present in ways that, when it’s just the present, you don’t have to do anything about. The original script for May December was set in the present, and I simply wanted to remove it from the Trump years and put it in the less intensely divisive years of the end of the Obama era. It’s set in Georgia — there would be some questions about political allegiance and the relationship of the cultural moment that would impede on the already crowded subject matter.
Your movies do feel like they’re responding to the present anyway‚ especially the early ones. When you came out with your first feature, Poison, it was the era of AIDS and HIV, and a new type of cinema was coming up to respond to it — what the critic B. Ruby Rich coined New Queer Cinema, meaning films by people like you, Gregg Araki, Jennie Livingston, Cheryl Dunye, Gus Van Sant.
We were all making films that were responding to a besieged underground culture that needed to be represented. It’s hard to fully express the terror that we felt coming of age, trying to begin our independent lives right at that moment when the government was so persistently in denial and refusing to even mention the word AIDS. A certain urgency to respond creatively to that crisis was driving people our age and our peers who were older and even more stricken by the illness. New Queer Cinema was also a way of describing a market that had emerged or had been more clearly designated as a gay filmgoing audience — which had maybe previously just been part of an arthouse audience. It was both addressing the work and the receptiveness to the work that became very politically ignited.
On the one hand, Poison was critically praised. It was getting attention. On the other, you were being attacked by conservatives like Donald Wildmon, who were trying to whip up Congress about the fact that you got an NEA grant to finish a film with gay content. You had to spend so much of your time doing a diplomacy tour. What were you feeling?
That the themes the film was targeting — that nest of bigotry and panic — were being seen in real time. And that the film was doing its job. Because it was a film and not an artist’s exhibition or a performance, the possibility of it getting circulated widely heightened the intensity around it. It was on the evening news. It was bizarre. I found myself being asked to stand up and defend the freedom of artistic expression against some of the pillars of the far right, like Dick Armey and Ralph Reed, on Larry King Live and Today and so forth. All the people on the right would say, “Oh, I didn’t even see your film. We just don’t think taxpayer dollars should go toward financing art that’s controversial.” Without the benefit of lawmakers or anybody on the left standing up, it was just me, the artist, standing there saying, “I’m just the recipient of a grant and I believe in public funding for the arts and expression.” It was a detour for what they were really talking about — which was the content.
Poison is clearly a statement about homophobia and AIDS panic — especially in its B-movie segment where you really heightened it. But it’s not exactly agitprop. The gay characters aren’t innocent. There’s a rape scene. I know the people on the right didn’t like it — but did you ever get any complaints from people on the left?
Not really. There was a range of work coming out at the time, whether that was direct documentary work, or the film And the Band Played On, from the book by Randy Shilts documenting the history of AIDS. There was The Normal Heart. There was Longtime Companion. There were films many of us found too conventional for our taste, but they were out there, all of which were trying to protect and defend and make visible the costs of HIV on real people. What was so interesting about the films joined under the banner of New Queer Cinema was they shared a more provocative, experimental language about how to depict deviancy, homosexuality. We wanted to protect transgression and not water it down. To not try to make pacified, domesticated examples of gay subjects. And doing so with stylistic diversity and experimentation as well; not just telling the boy-meets-girl story as the boy-meets-boy story, but really trying to change the mode of the formal and stylistic languages in which we tell stories. It was a revolution in form and in content.
Now we’ve got gay Christmas movies on Netflix. There are rom-coms like Bros or Fire Island or Red, White & Royal Blue. What does queer cinema mean to you today?
I’m not interested in seeing any movie that might have gay content because it has gay content. That in and of itself isn’t enough for me, and there’s so much being made all the time that I always feel like I am oceans behind what’s new. Natasha Lyonne said to me recently, “I don’t like watching new movies because it feels like work. I’m doing my work. I watch old movies for inspiration.” I’m like, “Oh my God, girlfriend, that is so much how I feel.” I admire people who are seeing everything new and there’s great stuff all the time, especially coming out of European cinema or Asian cinema or Latin cinema. But I live in the world of Turner Classic Movies. There’ll be movies every month that have never even been broadcast before. I’m just like, Holy shit. It’s the most remarkable resource.
One of the first films you ever made as a kid was a recreation of something that would be considered a classic now — Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. What was the itch you were trying to scratch by making your own Super 8 version?
It was this desire to re-conjure something that happened in the theater through my own hands. It was the same with Mary Poppins, the first film I saw at age 3. That movie conjured so many elements of spectral excitement. I wanted to reenact Mary Poppins constantly, mostly in drawing pictures from it, but also by putting on little shows and dressing up my mom as Mary Poppins.
Romeo and Juliet touched a moment in the counterculture in the ‘60s I was very much aware of. I grew up in Los Angeles and I was patently a suburban kid, but I would see the hippie girls walking barefoot down the street with their black feet. Me and my sister had a babysitter we adored who kept a horse in a stable in Encino, and we’d ride the horse down Ventura Boulevard. I remember going to Romeo and Juliet with my parents when I was 7, and two hippie girls were in front of us or behind us — I can’t remember, you have inverted memories that way, behind, in front, all those little Freudian pivots. They had their black feet on the back of the chair with their long, dark hair parted in the middle. They sobbed convulsively when Romeo killed himself. I felt like it was touching something very vital in society that had to do with youth and love and romance. And of course, it was very arousing, with that little bit of nudity in the sex scene before Romeo is banished to Mantua. It penetrated my entire romantic being.
So I had to remake it a couple years later. I painted a little mural of the Capulet ball and tried to use double exposure: I dressed as Romeo, then we rewound the camera, and I popped back into the frame as Juliet. Luckily in the finished version, we got a friend to play Juliet at the last minute. By the way, for years, I thought it was, “Where far out thou?” because I was blending hippie idioms with Shakespearean language. Where far out thou, Romeo?
That’s so cute. As I’m sure you’ve heard, the actors who played Romeo and Juliet, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, have now said Zeffirelli exploited them. Does that change your memory of watching it?
No. I mean, it’s sad. I know how much that film defined their careers and how much they stood by it — specifically the nudity. It was discussed quite a lot at the time and years after as they would continue to come to anniversary screenings of the film or festival events. So it felt like a maybe unfortunate desire to turn the tables way after the fact. Who knows if it’ll really produce anything, but … yeah, when you have such a defining event in your young life, it’s very hard to match years later when you want to have an ongoing life as an actor.
The earliest film you’re known for professionally is Superstar, which notoriously chronicles the life and death of Karen Carpenter using Barbie dolls. What gave you the idea to make it that way?
I came out of a critical-theory curriculum at Brown where I studied film and film theory. Feminism and feminist film theory made a real impact on me — it connected to things I felt and things I intuited as a young, coming-of-age gay guy, for whom women and female friends had always been so seminal in my life. I was more interested in the political consciousness around feminist thinking in my high-school years than the gay culture that was also thriving in the ‘70s in cities.
When my very dear friend Cynthia Schneider — who’s a lawyer, not a filmmaker — and I had graduated from college and moved to New York, we were like, “Oh, maybe we can do a film project together. Let’s do something kind of weird.” She wanted to do a movie with pets, and I wanted to do a movie with dolls. In both cases, it came out of narrative theory. My thinking was that if I followed a genre that was well-known, and I did it with dolls, very ornately and with a great deal of attention to detail, it could stir up the same emotions we feel when we’re watching an actor.
Why Karen Carpenter?
We didn’t know what it would be about. Then one day I was sitting in some coffee shop in New York and a Carpenters song came on the radio. I hadn’t heard a Karen Carpenter song in so long, since she had passed away of anorexia. The way I experienced that song all those years later was so layered and embedded with that knowledge and a new appreciation of the remarkable suffering she was going through. All of a sudden, it just felt so rich and complicated. I called up Cynthia, like, “We got to do the Karen Carpenter story.” She was like, “Okay, we’re using dolls,” and that was it. I went to the Bard MFA program and spent the entire summer making the miniature world of Karen Carpenter’s life — all the props, the sets, collecting the costumes. A lot of the women in the program had saved their Barbie clothes. I was working as a preparator in galleries in New York City, so I could put out press releases. We made an event, and to my shock, some very serious critics were curious about the film and wrote about it and gave it a much higher profile than I would’ve ever imagined. It’s hard to imagine that happening in other eras of our industry of filmmaking than that moment when the Village Voice and its opinion could really make a difference for such an obscure and unwieldy 47-minute-long film.
Superstar feels like it foreshadows two of the themes you keep going back to over the course of your career: people, often women, stuck in conformist social situations — and rock stars. This is where I come clean that Velvet Goldmine was one of my favorite movies when I was a teenager. I totally received it as a movie about how these glam-rock stars were cool — but rewatching it, I can see how much it’s about disillusionment too.
That sense of disillusionment is really important — built into the glam-rock ethos was a sense of it already writing its own obituary. After Poison and Safe, which hover under the catastrophe of the body and illness, this was my first affirmative example of a movie that offered a glimmer of a positive application of unstable identity through art, through music, through this cultural moment. Velvet Goldmine was asking questions about your own fluidity as a teenager and not knowing exactly who you are — and how brilliant that was. To feel like you can make a different version of yourself every day. I was so ready to enter into this sumptuous, sexual, erotic world it opened up. Of course, even before glam rock, there was the sheer erotic shock and attraction of androgyny — which the Beatles embodied, and Little Richard, of course, embodied, and Elvis Presley embodied, and Frank Sinatra and Mick Jagger and Josephine Baker embodied. There was androgyny present in all these things, but you were thrust on to the sidelines as a spectator. With glam rock, you were asked to dress up. To put on the glitter. When you think about The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is a product of this time, the film demanded the audience take part, literally, in a ritual of going to the theater and dressing up as characters.
Did you ever go to Rocky Horror?
Absolutely. I didn’t dress up, but I’d revel in the spectacle of it. Didn’t you?
Of course, but I dressed up.
Did you?
Yes! Why no costume, Todd?
Oh my God. I don’t know. I felt older, even though it only could have been … But I was dressing up in Bowie clothes while researching and writing Velvet Goldmine, even while promoting Safe before it. I wanted to live what it felt like to float around on platform shoes and feel the breeze go up your midriff and your little Lurex glitter tops. It was the most Method I’ve ever been as a writer in my life.
I know some critics found Velvet Goldmine confusing, especially the twist at the end, or complained that it was trying to do too much. Did those kinds of critiques bother you?
No, they didn’t. I made precisely the movie I wanted to. It was an incredibly hard movie to make. But one thing Christine Vachon and I did do was provide a dreamscape for everybody making the movie to live within. There was a party, if not every night, every weekend, often at Sandy Powell’s house. I remember Christian Bale by the end of the movie saying something to Christine like, “I know this was a really hard film for you guys to make, but thank you for never letting me know that.”
When it was done and for the first time I got invited into competition at Cannes, I decided, Todd, you gotta have a good time now, you’ve earned it. And I did, man. We had one of the most historic, euphoric, crazy, legendary parties at Cannes that Wendy Palmer, our world sales agent, created. It took place in a château with a rolling field lit with purple and pink lights. There were swirly colored cookies shone onto the clouds, and much smoking of cigarettes and hashish. Along with Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Toni Collette, and Christian, there was Eddie Izzard, Jim Lyons, Michael Stipe, Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno … It went into dawn the next day. That continued in premieres in London and Edinburgh and New York. I would travel with the actors, and we were all wearing our glitter makeup and still had our ‘70s-style shag haircuts and platform shoes. The film gave me so much pleasure in ways that I can’t say I felt watching Safe or Poison.
Safe is uncanny to watch now: It follows Julianne Moore as Carol White, an ‘80s housewife who develops a mysterious illness that she decides is a sensitivity to chemicals. In the movie it feels like a fringe belief, but now, a lot more people identify as mysteriously chronically ill, whether with long COVID or Lyme disease. They’re into avoiding chemicals and living a “clean” lifestyle. Has that led you to think about the themes of Safe in any different way?
In general, Safe is an exercise in interpretation, and maybe you could say this about all my movies. The premise of environmental illness — is it real? Is it in her head? The film is suggesting it’s both, and that things that are real, that we’re exposed to from without, enter our minds and our psyches and the way that we manage ourselves and get played out internally. Carol White makes life look incredibly unnatural, because it is. As for what to do about these things — they’re not easily solvable. The world remains poisonous. We can try to isolate ourselves. The film comes out, ultimately, with a lot of serious questions about whether that is the only recourse. It also begs questions about how isolated Carol was at the beginning of the film, living in the lap of luxury, in an isolated, wealthy community. Illness is the thing that alerts her to aspects of what is unnatural, and what is poisonous, and what is foreign and alien.
Safe was the first film you worked with Julianne Moore on and her first lead role. Of course, you’ve worked with her many more times since then — on Far From Heaven, I’m Not There, Wonderstruck, and now May December. Has her process changed?
It was so completely intact from the beginning. It was so evident, her conviction and trust in the scale of the performance and an understanding of what the camera sees. Astonishing how much she knew what she was doing and could make a decision about who a character was — I mean, especially that character, who almost doesn’t exist on the page. The lines describing who Carol White is, they seem to disappear as you finish reading them. It needed an actor to meet that challenge on the other end with a deft touch.
What is it about her that makes her so good at embodying that housewife archetype?
She’s unafraid of it. She understands that within that kind of a person, there are all kinds of complicated reasons for acquiescing to social order and constraints, for yielding to others around her and subjugating oneself. I know Julianne has, as I do, her critique of those forces that make players within society have to succumb to these prewritten roles. But I also think there’s a very present, elemental compassion for these people. She knows there’s a problem she is depicting, but it’s up to the viewer to figure out what that problem is and what to do about it. The characters are not going to have the answers, and they’re not going to come to a place of learning how to change their conditions. She and I both share a preference for films that don’t demonstrate massive overcoming of conflicts. I’m drawn to storytelling that doesn’t necessarily depict heroic solutions.
Did you have women in your life whom those characters remind you of?
I did. My mother had a lot more willfulness, and more of a connection to her own desires, than some of these characters have had. But she struggled with aspects of femininity and relationships with her mother and daughter. The contradictory roles women are offered in society — clearly, we have not fixed it. If we’re not seeing those issues played out to a degree today that continues to shock all of us who think we’ve moved forward, we’re not looking around enough.
I’m also thinking of Carol Aird in Carol, played by Cate Blanchett, who is such a powerful character, who can be so seductive, who knows what she wants. But then there are the scenes where she’s at home and it feels like you’re watching a caged tiger.
I hadn’t seen Carol in so many years. I just saw it again in May at the Pompidou, where I had my retrospective, and I was surprised by how constrained Carol is, even around Therese, played by Rooney Mara. The film is riddled with constraints. Some of them create a romantic friction that’s stimulating, and it’s full of wishfulness that overflows past the limits of what they can do. They finally have sex and get to act on some of their desires, but I had forgotten — and I really appreciated — how they’re so locked in, too. It’s what gives it a sense of reality. And why the romantic yearning in that movie is strong.
They can never quite say, “I want you.”
It’s too dangerous. But we know it, we see it.
Have you ever worried about whether your films would make money? Was that a concern for you?
Not inordinately, no. We were always lucky. The first time I’ve ever gone to a film festival without an American distributor for a film I made was just now, with May December. Every single feature film I’ve ever made, we had a distributor in advance of the film’s premiere, even on Poison. As long as the film was going to get to the theaters and be released, the amount of money it would make didn’t matter, because I knew my films weren’t going to be measured that way. With Christine leading the charge — this fearless, indomitable partner who was going to slay every dragon to get the next one made — I knew I was okay.
And then, of course, after Velvet Goldmine, you made Far From Heaven — where Moore plays a ‘50s housewife named Cathy Whitaker who discovers her husband (Dennis Quaid) is gay — and it did end up being a big Oscar contender for the first time: nominated for Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Actress, Best Score.
That was thrilling. The critical reaction for Far From Heaven — I remember going, like, Wait a minute, this is weird. The genre of melodrama that I was trying so hard to respect and embrace, antithetically to everything I would’ve expected, actually worked.
What kind of reaction were you expecting?
Critics have had my back from the beginning of my filmmaking, from Superstar onward and particularly in how Safe was reevaluated and reconsidered. So I thought, Oh, yeah, critics are going to dig this. I wrote Far From Heaven in two weeks when I landed in Portland in 2000.
That’s wild. It came out of you.
It did. I mean, I struggled longer with the basic concept. I needed a diagrammatic plotline. In the best kinds of melodramas, there isn’t just a bad person who, if you removed them, everybody would be happy. Society is that person, and so everybody is captive to the conditions under which they live. Once I found that, I knew I was drawing from a thrillingly specific series of source material. It was Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. It was Max Ophüls’s gorgeous film The Reckless Moment. And that was it, pretty much.
I wanted to get away from New York at the time. It wasn’t what some people have written — that I was depressed due to negative reactions to Velvet Goldmine. Velvet Goldmine was the pure happy point of my life. It was my personal life that was more the problem, due to the ending of some romantic relationships. I landed in Portland and I met all these amazing people and I fell in love with this climate, this beautiful city. I felt productive by day and social by night. Then, I lost my apartment in Williamsburg and, all of a sudden, I was like, Holy shit. Do I want to go back to New York and pound the pavement in the summer and look for a new apartment? My sister found a house that was for sale in Portland for $240,000. It was an amazing 1909 Arts and Crafts bungalow with gardens and fruit trees. I was like, Oh my God, I never imagined having a house. I thought I’d live in New York the rest of my life. And then I was like, I’m not leaving Portland. I’m going to stay here. And I did.
Sometimes, when you need to come out of a rut, there’s a tremendous amount of psychic and creative energy that is circulated, and that’s exactly what happened. I drew a sketch of Cathy Whitaker in markers and stuck it up on the wall.
You actually drew a picture of her?
Yeah, I drew a picture of how I pictured her in the backyard, in color in the fall, and I gave her red hair in the picture because I knew it was for Julianne Moore. That was the first and last time I’d ever written a script for an actor — until the script I’m writing right now with Joaquin Phoenix.
When that film got the Oscar nominations, that wider validation — did it make it easier for you to get films made?
No, not really. It was hard for I’m Not There, which I made next. That script was almost indecipherable. It was a piece of abstract text because I put everything on the page: the music, the lyrics, the descriptions, the images, the quotes, the separation of the segments of the different stories interweaving. I knew that would probably adjust in the editing of the film, but I wanted people reading the script to have a sense of how all the stories would interact with each other. It seemed like we were on our way initially when a certain collection of actors signed on, starting with Richard Gere. He put the sword down first. And then some of those actors dropped out. I don’t know why. They would end up being replaced by the most stellar actors: Heath Ledger replaced Colin Farrell for the role of Robbie. What was so touching to me about the actors who signed onto it is they were like, “I don’t really understand this script, but I am down with Todd. I’m going to go for it.” I rewatched I’m Not There at Pompidou sitting next to Cate Blanchett. I hadn’t seen it since it came out. I think it might be my favorite of my films.
Before the pandemic, you were working on a series about Freud — is that still happening?
No. No. That’s … that’s the project I have to do before I die. The most important thing for me. I shouldn’t even say that out loud, because it sets myself up to not do it or fail or whatever. It was a 12-part, 12-hour-long story about Freud’s life and work that I started to develop before COVID. And then COVID hit. We had a deal for developing the script with Amazon with a whole team of people in the dramatic film division. And then they all went away and that deal wasn’t renewed with the new roster of people. So that went onto the back burner. It needs a lot more work.
Can you tell me what you picture for it?
It’s still in a tender stage. But I want to dramatize his life and theories and the ways the theories interact with the development of his life. Freud started to describe the notion of dreams and the interpretation of dreams at the beginning of the 20th century. To me, his ideas really parallel the birth of cinema. Filmmakers like Hitchcock, even when they aren’t setting out to do things inspired by psychoanalysis and Freudian theory, somehow find the language of the unconscious and dreams and desire. Nothing about cinema — or almost any psychic product of the 20th century — can be disentangled from Freud. To me, he’s the most radical and fundamental thinker of our time.
Are you in analysis — or have you been?
No, I’ve never been in analysis. Really, I am the product of a critical-theory education where Freudian theories and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories have been applied to cultural studies, semiotics, and structuralism and poststructuralism. That framed the way I studied film in college. It was thoroughly inspiring, creatively. It was not just an academic or intellectual endeavor — it was visceral. “A Child Is Being Beaten,” one of Freud’s most remarkable articles, plays a literal role in Dottie Gets Spanked, my short film, and in Superstar. All the spanking references you see in my early films owe a lot to him. Basically, Freud is a companion for me in the way I look at the world.
I’m dying to know what he would say about Joe and Gracie.
Oh my God, seriously. I’ll say!
When you were younger, you called yourself an experimental filmmaker. Does that label still make sense to you now?
It does. I can’t help but think of The Velvet Underground, my first documentary. It was such an embrace of pure avant-garde experimental cinema — I could use that amazing art and other filmmakers’ visions to illustrate what was happening in New York City. It had this inherent queerness to it and the sense of an underground culture that questioned the communal ‘60s idolatry and optimism in this gritty, underground way. What I’m doing with this movie with Joaquin is returning to very challenging and — in my mind — moving, transgressive ideas about queer desire and how these two unlikely men find each other in this interracial relationship. With May December, I was drawing from European art-cinema tropes, coupling them with the invitation to wrestle with your own predetermined moral ideas. That was an experiment.
The response to May December, so far, has made me feel like people want to be — are there to be — confused and disturbed and uncertain about what they think about movies again. And I love that, because that’s always what movies should do to you. They should put you in a place you’ve never been before. You’re scratching your head and you want to talk about it afterwards and you want to revisit it and you want to laugh, but then you’re also really moved by the event. There are all these conflicting feelings going on. That’s what cinema is to me.
May December opens the New York Film Festival on September 29.
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