A biography for Todd Hayneshasn’t been written yet.
“My films have often looked at the whole dilemma of identity as a straitjacket for people, for societies, for cultures, for historical moments.”
“I'm drawn to female characters; not all of them are strong characters.”
“I'm used to always having struggles getting finances together and keeping precarious budgets alive in the independent film world.”
“I always learn a lot when I do so. You know, when you step out of your comfort zone and even your cynical zone, and open yourself up to what other people might experience and why they do so.”
“When you premiere somewhere like Cannes, it's huge. It's nerve-wracking.”
“They always find new ways of talking about my movies.”
“In a way, I think Roxy Music is high camp, in a brilliant way.”
“A key part of the process for me is having screenings: not official test screenings, just gatherings of people, some I know and some I don't. We ask what is working and what isn't. So it's not as if I'm shutting out input.”
“I love visual mediums, and I've always painted and drawn.”
“With 'Poison,' I'm sure some people just hated the movie, but it also got caught up into a debate about arts funding because it was a film that received a National Endowment for the Arts Public Grant, and it won the prize at the Sundance Film Festival.”
“Films like 'The Godfather,' 'Chinatown' and 'The Exorcist' brought a realism and currency and understatement to their genres that we wanted for 'Mildred Pierce.'”
“We yearn for the desire to triumph, and it almost never does in the greatest love stories because we're left yearning for it more in the end, and we wish the world were different as a result. I do love that.”
“I liked to act in plays when I was a kid, and then in college. But that's the last time I really acted. I always loved it. But my interests were more in looking at the whole, rather than getting completely swallowed up in a single part of the whole.”
“Aspects of guilt or handwringing that one might expect in a film set in the '50s about women who discover their love for other women - a lot of these things are not in 'Carol.'”
“When you're shooting concert scenes in films, we try to bring in, where appropriate, as much of a sense of live performance as possible.”
“When you think of the later '50s and 'Far From Heaven' and Eisenhower and Sirk, you think of that Hollywood panache and gloss to American middle-class life.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I think by around the time I was about 8 or 9, the idea of filmmaking probably took hold. I made little Super 8 extravaganzas when I was a kid, the first being my own version of 'Romeo and Juliet,' and where I played all the parts except for Juliet.”
“Every actor comes with their own experience, method, methodology.”