“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.”

American film director, screenwriter, and producer

Todd Haynes is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Working across four decades, he is known for films that engage melodrama, historical pastiche, and queer cinema. His work often examines the emotional and psychological effects of social repression, especially around sexuality, identity, illness, and conformity. He is also associated with the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, and is noted for reworking classical Hollywood forms, including the woman’s picture and the biopic, to explore marginalized experience and unspoken desire.