Todd Haynes

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

When most people think of queer film, they have a tendency to pigeonhole the label as being only for and revolving around the gay world. However, Todd Haynes has made it his mission throughout his career as a filmmaker to break wide open such short-sighted and stereotypical conventions and labels.

He made an incredibly unusual debut into the world of film in 1987 with the short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which rather cleverly told the life story of the performer using Barbie dolls. Haynes has since made an array of distinctive films that tend to tackle on gay issues in various degrees, including Poison, Safe, and the 1950's-inspired-and-set Far From Heaven.

Many of his films also involve his love for rock n' roll music, including 1998's glam rock-insipred Velvet Goldmine. Todd returns to this territory, taking his highly unconventional, yet intriguing style into his latest film, the Bob Dylan-inspired I'm Not There.

I'm Not There unusually tells the life story of the rock legend through no less than six different actors to tell seven of his seemingly many different phases, including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, and even Cate Blanchett. When Haynes discussed the movie with us, the first thing we asked was whether or not non-fans of Bob Dylan would appreciate the film as much as a fan might.

'I don't know if you need to know a great deal about Bob Dylan to enjoy the film and to enter into the invitation in,' Todd believes, 'It sort of takes you on a journey on this very specific time in the 1960's and this very central artist of that time. And I hope the film helps young people feel like Bob Dylan, who they may have already allotted to their parents' record collection, and it kind of reinfuses him with the kind of sense of excitement and risk and irreverence that I think really defines who he was.'

We asked the 46 year-old director what inspired him to do a film about Bob Dylan.

'Basically, it all started in the flood of fresh obsession around Dylan that I found myself in at the end of my thirties, at the end of my life in New York, in fact,' Todd recounts, 'And so, it started in this unplanned, unfocused spirit of love and obsession, which Dylan can provide those who are in one of that.'

'Out of that,' he continues, 'I started getting to biographies and discovering a lot of the music I had not known about and heard when I was a high school Dylan fan and I kept confronting this. It was so apparent and so consistent, this idea of somebody who changes and who enters these creative phases and psychic phases thoroughly and then exhausts them and moves on and then almost has to reject it to clear the air and start fresh.'

Haynes also explained to us the methodology behind the seven different phases concept that tells Bob Dylan's story in I'm Not There.

'The seven psyches that emerged all kind of split him up into these components that I felt needed to be distinct from each other,' he notes, 'And yet, they needed to have a link to each other where you saw that as one character explores his world and then, reaches certain impasses or certain barriers, that it forces the next character to reach a solution to those conflicts.'

We were curious to know how the director managed to draw up all these distinct, different personalities, in which he was more than happy to oblige.

'Some of the characters were drawing more directly from the biographical life of Bob Dylan, some were more composites of various sensibilities, like the final story, the Richard Gere story, kind of takes a lot of Dylan's interests in the past and in roots music and traditional music and puts it all together in one story,' he explains, 'The Woody story is really just about the early years of Dylan when he first came to New York and he was in the thrall of Woody Guthrie and his music, attitude, and style and look and all those things.'

'And it's really about how the creative process can begin through impersonation, how you want to be almost anything other than who you are,' he adds, 'And in this case, it's almost a joke on passing. You know, Dylan was passing. He was pretending he wasn't a middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota and he wanted to just be connected to this grassroots history of Americana. The amazing thing is how everybody went along with it and it was the sheer exuberance of that performance that he lived that made everybody kind of nod.'

Also asked was how Bob Dylan reacted to I'm Not There's strange concept and how involved he was with the film.

'Only in the beginning, just to get the music rights, which we got in the beginning of that,' Haynes replied, 'Basically, he completely stayed outside of it and did his own thing. Jeff Rosen, his manager, was basically the person we dealt with.'

We wondered also from Haynes what makes him so constantly drawn to the subject of rock music in many of his films.

'Music is a core of something that I think we all can't help but respond to,' he answers, 'And that's such a general statement in and of itself because we all respond to different kinds of music. I think in Velvet Goldmine and in this film, and in one of my earlier films Superstar about Karen Carpenter, and they are all very different movies with different motivations, but there's something amazing about pop culture and popular music because it can exist on the airwaves and seem to have passed through the market system and still emerge almost as this accident or this rupture or something that turns the rules upside down for a moment.'

'And in both cases,' Todd adds, 'Both in Velvet Goldmine in particular and in this film, I felt like I was dealing with those examples of that that are incredibly powerful and unique, just what Dylan was able to do to the popular song and how he can explode it into something that could encompass politics and philosophy and subjectivity and really art, doing high art on the jukeboxes as the Ginsburg character says at one point in the film. That's really what he did and the yet the most astounding thing is how popular he remained while doing that and that was always a goal for me, a level to achieve to try to aspire to as a filmmaker.'

One of the more unusual aspects of I'm Not There is how one of Bob Dylan's personalities, known as Jude, is played by a woman, namely Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett. We asked the filmmaker what inspired him to make one of Dylan's personas a woman.

'I think the idea of an actress playing a character that was Jude from the very beginning of the conceptual framework of how different these stories would be and how would they be approached,' Haynes explains, 'And it was a fairly superficial instinct on my part. The fact that an artist like Cate, an actress like Cate was the one who did it meant that she took that so much further and went further beyond the superficial, went beyond the physical transformation, which you get the instant she walks out onto the screen for the first time.'

'And she really gets inside this character and that, in and of itself, is no simple task, because that was Dylan at one of his most mercurial, most complex, at times spiteful and vindictive, just incredibly witty and the mind was working overtime, the peaks of his creativity,' he continues, 'So she makes it three-dimensional and she, of course, saw all those same clips and used all those same clips. But again, she was working from the inside out.'

We also asked Haynes whether he was worried if any Bob Dylan fans may be at best put off by even a persona of his being female.

'It wasn't as if I was saying Dylan had a feminine side or he has a particular soft side at this particular time of his career,' Todd replies, 'In fact, this is the time when he had one of the sharpest sides. What you see with the dueling between Mr. Jones and Jude in the film, what I wanted to show and one of the more interesting aspects that Dylan had in this period of his creative life is that Dylan had this art that was coming out of this vengeful sense of spite and you see it on stage.'

Todd shared with us what the process was like filming such an ambitiously conceived independent film like this one.

'Once we were going, it was really like a train,' he recalls, 'And it was like the train had left the station and every compartment was going to be the next story and that it was coming fast and furious. I usually like to have a little time with my actors, even just to hang out and like sort of have a beer or have dinner or whatever, before we are shooting, and even that was impossible.

'So it was as always, even with low-budget films, particularly one as ambitious and complex as this film, it's all about the planning and the preparation to really try to cover your tracks and know exactly what you need,' Haynes continues, 'We didn't have a second to do anything extra. So it was really following the plans as closely as possible and really trying to get all the pieces shot.'

The filmmaker also explained how he managed to get so many fantastic talents fully on board such an incredibly ambitious and unusual telling of Bob Dylan's story.

'What was so crazy to me is that this was such an ambitious premise and the script was virtually impenetrable for people to read,' he believes, 'And yet, all of these actors wanted to take part and wanted to take this enormous risk with me. It really was. These actors and these guys in the creative department, they really got, and at a very personal level, got me through this film because they all put themselves on the line, on the precipice, dancing on the ledge with me.'

'And it's amazing because people forget, movie stars, these movie stars, these actors are artists,' Todd adds, 'They want to put themselves in unknown territory and feel scared and feel uncertain. No one can do that every single time. You die. That's why I take six years between all my movies. But the other thing in this film is with all these lead Dylans that are so strong and so compelling in and of themselves, there's also room for all these other actors who make their mark on the film. So this was so fortunate.'

An actor who we particularly asked Haynes about in regards to whether or not he was up to the challenge was Heath Ledger.

'Heath had a unique challenge because he had to play the Christian Bale character in a movie within a movie,' he claims.

'I don't know if he's seen it. I believe Dylan has a DVD with him in his suitcase and that's the last we heard and it was about two weeks before the release, we heard that. I hope so, my God, we got to hear something, but he works at his own time and his own pace and I'm not going to pressure him (laughing).'

Being one of the few openly gay filmmakers out there, we took the opportunity to ask the director how it feels to be labeled as being part of the queer cinema movement.

'I do,' Todd says, 'I like a broader definition of queer. I think for me, always, it's about the form and not the content. That's how we change things. That's how things really get artistic. Forms grow and expand and that's why one of the reasons the new per cinema label was applied to a series of films that came out in the early 1990's. I was always proud and happy to be categorized that way.'

'If queer can be ways of rethinking conventions and reexamining conventions,' he adds, 'And to be really more specific, in re-conceiving ideas of stable identity, which is what interested me in the glam era, which in that it really wasn't about gay people or straight people, as it is about this embrace of the bisexual, which makes gay people and straight people uncomfortable, because it's that slip, it makes it hybrid, that in-between, where categorizations are unreliable. That affects us all. The question makes us question our own categories of ourselves.'

Finally, we asked Haynes what Bob Dylan thought of the end result of his celluloid tribute to the rock legend.

'I don't know if he's seen it,' Todd replies, 'I believe Dylan has a DVD with him in his suitcase and that's the last we heard and it was about two weeks before the release, we heard that. I hope so, my God, we got to hear something, but he works at his own time and his own pace and I'm not going to pressure him.'