Todd Haynes
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Trailer Watch: Todd Haynes’s May December
Here’s the first full trailer for Todd Haynes’s May December, which Netflix acquired at Cannes this year for a reported $11 million. At that time, contributor Blake Williams wrote that the “campy, provocative and sexy May December was the most fun I’ve had at this year’s festival, and stands as the filmmaker’s strongest work since Far from Heaven (2002), if not Safe (1995).” The film will show this Friday as the opening night selection for this year’s NYFF. May December will receive a limited release on November 17 prior to joining the streaming platform on December 1.
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 26, 2023 -
Inhabiting the Role: Todd Haynes on May/December
Todd Haynes’s May December, which premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival and was snatched up by Netflix almost immediately, marks a return to the kind of expressive women’s drama for which the director is arguably most beloved. Think Far from Heaven (2002) or Carol (2015), two films about forbidden romance whose lush, stylized aesthetics both encourage nostalgia and destabilize easy emotional identification. As the title suggests, May December, too, concerns a taboo love affair—one whose throwback elements are anchored to the tabloid frenzies and true-crime obsessions of the 1990s. Written by Samy Burch, a casting director making her […]
by Beatrice Loayza on Sep 20, 2023 -
Todd Haynes’s May December Will Open the 61st New York Film Festival
Film at Lincoln Center has announced that the North American premiere of Todd Haynes’s May December will open the 61st edition of the New York Film Festival, to take place from September 29 through October 13. The rest of the 2023 lineup will be announced at a later date. “We are all so proud and moved to have been invited to open the New York Film Festival with the North American premiere of May December,” said Haynes in a press release. “It is a festival that plays a role in my work and life like no other in the world, since […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 11, 2023 -
Cannes 2023: The Zone of Interest, Killers of the Flower Moon, May December
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, instantly hailed as a masterpiece upon the conclusion of its first screenings in Cannes last Friday, finds the British filmmaker once again engineering a vehicle with which to burrow beneath viewers’ skin. After opening his previous film, an adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 sci-fi novel Under the Skin, with an on-screen reminder of cinema’s intrinsic visuality—darkness, then pulsating orbs and, finally/explicitly, a dilating pupil—here Glazer turns to the aural. Another literary adaptation (this time of a work by Martin Amis, who died of oesophageal cancer the same day Glazer walked the red carpet), The […]
by Blake Williams on May 22, 2023 -
Transformations in Non-fiction Filmmaking: The SCAD Savannah Film Festival presents the 8th Annual Docs to Watch Roundtable
This year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival – the “largest university-run film festival in the world,” which ran from October 23-30 – was a conveniently hybrid event that also marked my own return to the in-person festival circuit. Admittedly, as someone residing in a blue state with a strict mask mandate in place, traveling to the Deep South was a somewhat disorienting experience. And a stark reminder that the U.S.’s politicization of a global pandemic really is a war within – and specifically within the states themselves. On the one hand, Georgia’s Republican Governor Kemp issued an executive order back in […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 4, 2021 -
NYFF Critic’s Notebook: The Velvet Underground and The Girl and the Spider
Peter Buck, the guitarist for R.E.M., is often quoted as saying, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought one formed a band.” Now it seems, all those bands are the subjects of documentaries. Finally, even the Velvet Underground. The eponymous film is one that Todd Haynes appeared destined to make. Popular music, rock’n’roll mythology and the vagaries of self-invented personas are a core of the director’s filmography, going back to the Super-8 transgression of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a melodramatic biopic of the ‘70s pop singer cast with Barbie dolls. Velvet Goldmine (1998) […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 14, 2021 -
Reflect What You Are: Jim O’Rourke Interviews Todd Haynes about The Velvet Underground
It’s 1963: High-minded Welsh musician John Cale participates in a concert of Erik Satie’s Vexations—per the composer’s intent, 840 piano performances of the same piece, totaling 18 hours—alongside experimental luminaries like John Cage, La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. Later that year, Cale appears on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret, where guests are grilled by a panel that tries to determine what their particular secret might be. Cale’s performance of the Satie piece is eventually established as his in front of a slightly disbelieving host and audience. The not-so-politely implicit question: Why would anyone do something so […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz on The Velvet Underground
Editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz first worked together on Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch’s very funny and infectiously playful 2016 documentary on The Stooges. The Velvet Underground is a different band, whose story places different demands on the filmmakers and audience, but Gonçalves and Kurnitz once again found the proper cinematic corollary for their subject with Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground. Gonçalves is a Haynes regular, having edited narrative features Carol and Dark Waters for the director, along with the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. Kurnitz is a first-time Haynes collaborator (but, as he notes below, longtime Haynes enthusiast) best known […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 11, 2021 -
“It’s a Pretty Unambiguous Condemnation of a New Age Answer to Life’s Problems”: Writer/Director Todd Haynes on Safe
With Todd Haynes’s classic Safe now streaming on Criterion Channel (and seeming utterly prescient in its concerns), we’re reposting our Summer, 1995 cover story: Larry Gross’s interview with Haynes. — Editor Todd Haynes, director of Sundance Grand Prize Winner Poison and the underground classic Superstar, was inspired to make his latest feature, Safe, by his visceral response to New Age recovery therapists who tell the physically ill that they have made themselves sick, that they are responsible for their own suffering. Carol White, played superbly by Julianne Moore, is an archetypally banal homemaker in the San Fernando Valley who one […]
by Larry Gross on Apr 2, 2020 -
“This Is the First Film Todd and I Filmed Digitally”: DP Ed Lachman on Dark Waters
Starting with 2002’s Far from Heaven, cinematographer Ed Lachman worked with director Todd Haynes on four features before this year’s Dark Waters. Based on a true story, the movie follows corporate attorney Rob Bilott (played by Mark Ruffalo) as he investigates industrial pollution on a farm in Appalachia. The case widened to include the entire town of Parkersburg, West Virginia, and led to a years-long lawsuit against DuPont. Lachman spoke with Filmmaker at Camerimage, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography, held this year in Toruń, Poland. Filmmaker: How did you and Todd approach this story? Lachman: In his storytelling Todd has always dealt with how our culture treats the outsider and insider. The difference is […]
by Daniel Eagan on Dec 3, 2019
