Quotes from Todd Haynes

I saw experimental film-makers teaching in college. They did what they wanted and didn't worry about the market, but the circumstances ended up offering me other possibilities.

The bond company comes in if you exceed your costs; they're the insurers of the film. In the worst-case scenario, they take over the production.

At the time I made 'Safe,' I was really intrigued by the whole culture around AIDS, which was turning to people like Louise Hay and these other West Coast New Age thinkers.

I noticed that there were all these kinds of practices in a working set that had to be un-practiced on 'Far from Heaven,' which was so interesting.

When you premiere somewhere like Cannes, it's huge. It's nerve-wracking.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

I didn't quite realise until we started to put together our first cut of 'Wonderstruck' how much time is spent with no words spoken whatsoever.

It's funny: I don't feel like I have any particular privileged feeling for the Fifties.

'Carol' is so distorted by point-of-view.

I felt I would have the most creative freedom making experimental films and teaching, as I had many good examples of people around me who did just that.

I'm a lover of cinema, and I don't want that to completely expire.

I was lucky enough to be exposed to film, art, literature, culture, and then told, 'Yes, you can do that, too.' It's not something that everybody's circumstances allow for.

There's no better place to do a longform project than HBO. I loved the creative teams I got a chance to work with.

All actors are protecting something, in their own way, that happens in front of a camera.

I don't know if I ever entertained an academic career, nor did I ever think I'd become a feature film-maker in the market.

Cannes is a lot of work, since it's a market festival and a serious festival, and they really work you, understandably.

I came out of a sort of experimental background, and I didn't ever really expect - or even desire - a career as a feature filmmaker.

The highest-caliber dramatic work produced for TV - not just in cable but something like 'The Good Wife' at network - is consistently great.

I love how 'melodrama' is a denigrated term - a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that's what life is, man.

At HBO, you've just basically got a studio full of artistically driven smart guys and women who really care about the quality first and foremost.

You'll see in 'Carol' a lot of shots shot through windows, glass and awnings, with interruptions between where we are and where our object is. To me, I hope that that conjures the whole act of looking as a predicament, as something that is never easy and never completely attainable.

By the time I finished 'Poison,' the New Queer Cinema was branded, and I was associated with this. In many ways, it formed me as a filmmaker, like as a feature filmmaker I never set out to be.

My problem on 'Safe' was that when I liked something, I would giggle.

What was so interesting about the glam era was that it was about bisexuality and breaking down the boundaries between gays and straights, breaking down the boundaries between masculinity and femininity with this androgyny thing.