Todd Haynes on “May December,” His Fascination With Julianne Moore and What It Means To Be a Queer Filmmaker Today

Variety

“May December,” Todd Haynes’s tenth feature, stars Natalie Portman as an A-list actress preparing to play Julianne Moore's Letourneau-like pariah.

Transcript

00:00 This term that came out of some of the reviews after Cannes, or at Cannes, of the film being

00:07 camp or quoting tabloid television movies or soap operas and so forth.

00:14 No, it was not anything that I was trying to do at all.

00:18 And when you watch the film, there's a very austere, restrained camera through almost

00:24 so much of the film, so many scenes and single shots that don't cut.

00:29 I was looking at Bergman and Godard, and I was looking at European art cinema, I mean,

00:35 partly because I thought a persona right away with this film.

00:41 And it all sort of fell into place because of how many scenes there are in mirrors, how

00:47 much it's about these two women and their sort of triangulation between their gazes

00:51 and their reflections and their looks to each other.

00:54 And there's sort of, it's almost a five-point pentagon where they're looking at each other

01:00 and they're looking at themselves and they're looking at each other's reflections in those

01:05 scenes.

01:06 I thought, you know, people would, I hoped, they would just be like, "Wow, Todd, I love

01:11 how you held those shots so long."

01:14 And I felt removed, but I was thinking about Bergman.

01:20 And what's so remarkable is people don't seem to even know this.

01:33 How do you choose your roles?

01:35 I want to find a character that's difficult to, on the surface, understand.

01:42 I love the film.

01:43 It's so much fun, but so much to think about as well.

01:46 It's really provocative and sexy and weird and difficult.

01:51 And of course, it's your fifth collaboration now with Julianne Moore.

01:54 Did you read the script and instantly think of her?

01:57 No, I didn't instantly think of her.

01:59 Natalie Portman sent me the script.

02:00 The script came to her and her producing team.

02:03 And it was a script that was already getting sort of earmarked as something special.

02:09 This was at the height of COVID.

02:10 Everything was shut down in the United States.

02:11 So there was a lot of speculation and stuff swapping around.

02:15 Natalie and I had discussed, you know, there was another project she sent me years ago.

02:20 So her interest in wanting to work with me had been this opening that meant a lot to

02:25 me and I looked forward to an opportunity to do so.

02:29 Read the script and it sort of cut through the noise of a lot of stuff I was looking

02:33 at.

02:34 I had other projects that I was developing at the time, but this one I knew meant something

02:40 special to me.

02:42 And so I started to talk to Natalie about it.

02:44 And the very things that were exciting to me about it were exciting to her.

02:49 She was also really interested in delightedly playing with people's projections.

02:56 She plays an actress in the film that people would think, "Is this really the way Natalie

03:00 Portman is?"

03:01 And the way she talked about it and the way she talked about the moral gray areas that

03:05 we both were intrigued by reminded me of somebody I know very well.

03:12 And here was this second lead role of a woman hovering around 60 years old.

03:18 It didn't take long for me to go to Julianne.

03:22 So I sort of slipped it to her first so she could get a sense, feel her out first.

03:27 It's such a pleasure to meet you.

03:29 You are so sweet.

03:30 We're so happy to have you.

03:32 Thank you for doing this.

03:33 It's so generous.

03:34 Well, I want you to tell the story right, don't I?

03:37 Apart from the fact that she's just a great actress, what do you find so compelling about

03:41 Julianne?

03:42 What keeps you coming back to her?

03:43 She's drawn to these kinds of characters that unnerve us, that perplex us, that are hard

03:50 to reach, to fully assess.

03:53 And as she and I have explored in films of mine, characters who are not in positions

03:57 of power in their lives or in their domestic stories or statuses as women, whether it's

04:06 contemporary or not.

04:08 She is an actor for the medium of film, how she understands the lens.

04:12 There's things that happen that I can't even see in the room when we're shooting them with

04:18 her that I only see later on film or when I watch the dailies or when I watch what we've

04:25 done.

04:26 And so there's this sense of understanding, a restraint and an understatement that again

04:32 was so fully formed when I first met her that was pretty remarkable.

04:37 And that's just continued to branch out in so many different ways over the years and

04:41 so many different great performances.

04:44 What would make a 36-year-old woman have an affair with a seventh grader?

04:50 You've made films before about people who are kind of socially persecuted for their

04:54 relationships, you know, interracial love in Far From Heaven and lesbianism in Carol.

05:00 And this is about that, but with a very different kind of moral stakes and a much more thorny

05:05 way of navigating that story.

05:07 Where did your sympathies kind of lie in the film and did they kind of shift as you thought

05:11 about it?

05:12 To be honest, it didn't change greatly from how I felt when I read it.

05:20 It's very ingeniously built where we think that we're going to trust Elizabeth.

05:26 She's going to be our proxy.

05:27 She'll be our reliable narrator.

05:28 She's coming into this crazy fortress that's been built around this family from that tabloid

05:34 event.

05:35 And of course, as her interview process and her sort of investigation into the story starts

05:42 to reveal more about her or as much about her as it does about Gracie, we start to question

05:51 our faith in that character.

05:53 And in some ways that draws unexpected sympathies for Gracie.

05:58 It talks about her being so deluded in love with this boy and weeping.

06:04 You're like, this woman just has completely abused her power and her authority and her

06:11 age with this young boy.

06:13 But you also find yourself strangely and surprisingly sympathetic.

06:17 Your name is always kind of identified with the new queer cinema movement of the 90s in

06:22 America and obviously a lot has changed since then.

06:26 What does being a queer filmmaker mean to you today?

06:30 Today, all of a sudden, everything we thought we had accomplished is suddenly fair game

06:37 in a newly rabid far right conservative party that can take full aim at the themes of the

06:44 issues, the political and cultural issues and cultural politics around trans and gay

06:51 and LGBTQ experience and tolerance or whatever.

06:56 It's just absurd where we are.

06:58 What's so difficult at times in our political climate, and you see this echoed of course

07:05 or matched in Western Europe and Eastern Europe of course, it's so dire.

07:11 It's such an end of interesting discussion.

07:14 We're back to the frontline fights over the most basic rights and tolerance around people.

07:20 I thought we'd gained headway and that we could get into continuing to explore gay and

07:27 lesbian lives on film.

07:28 And if anything, it's just like back to the conservative voice that I confronted with

07:33 Poison, my first feature film.

07:35 I know you're working next on a gay love story with Joaquin Phoenix.

07:40 What can you tell us about that?

07:42 Not a whole lot more except that it's set in LA in 1937, '38.

07:51 It's an interracial relationship that very unexpected, these two people who don't really

08:01 have experiences or identities that would prepare them for what they encounter with

08:08 each other coming out of a sort of corrupt Los Angeles.

08:13 Joaquin's character is a cop in a very, and this is all true about LA at this particular

08:18 moment, where the DA and the police department and the mayor were incredibly corrupt sort

08:25 of triad of power.

08:28 And the mayor was ultimately recalled in '38.

08:31 But Joaquin came to me with these ideas and these sort of instincts and we started to

08:36 talk and I did research for the background story.

08:39 I brought in my friend John Raymond who had adopted Mildred Pierce with me, who's a dear

08:43 friend.

08:44 I go, "Wow, how fun.

08:45 We can do a detective story.

08:46 We've never done that before."

08:48 It was initially a kind of meditation on Chinatown with these changes around this queer element

08:54 to it.

08:55 And we all three were just swapping ideas and it kept getting more about the sexual

09:01 and romantic relationship between these men.

09:04 And so it almost became more meditation on Last Tango than on Chinatown in the end.

09:10 I'm really excited about it because it all emerged so organically and it came from his

09:16 urgings and he really was pushing me into these darker places that I haven't really

09:22 explored between a gay male love story in so long.

09:26 I can't wait to get back to work after this experience I just had on May/December that

09:30 was such a positive one creatively for me and the relationships and collaborations I

09:34 had on it were so revitalizing for me.

09:39 And I would love to bring that energy right back into this next one.

09:42 [music]

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