The Press Box - The Big Picture — Todd Haynes on Growing Up and Going ‘Wonderstruck’ (Ep. 367)

Episode Date: October 20, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey sits down with filmmaker Todd Haynes to discuss his journey of making movies as a child to channeling youth and finding children to star in his latest film, ‘Wonderstruck.’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And all of a sudden, I was looking at stuff that was out in the world. I'm Sean Fennacy, editor-in-chief of the ringer, and this is the big picture. W.C. Fields once said, never work with children or animals. Well, Todd Haynes broke that rule.

There are no animals in Haynes' new movie Wonderstruck, but it stars are children. Two, in fact, in two different timelines. One, a deaf girl who has run away from her home in New Jersey in the 1920s in search of her mother, and the other, a deaf boy from Minnesota on a quest to find his father in the 1970s. Both come to New York City in search of those lost parents. What they find and how their stories come together is something only Haynes could pull off. His other movies, including safe, far from heaven, my personal favorite, the Bob Dylan portrait, I'm Not There,

and 2015's Carol, are period pieces that capture a time in history, but also make us see the past in a new way. their lush, grand emotional stories. Wonderstruck is no different. Todd came by the ringer offices to talk about his new film, digging into the past to see the future, and the growing cult of Carol. Here's Todd Haynes. Boy, I'm really lucky to be joined by Todd Haynes today.

Todd, thank you for coming in. Thank you, Sean. So Todd, Wonderstruck is your new film. It's a beautiful film. I couldn't help but notice that it is a double period piece. You love a period piece. I love me a period piece. You do.

And I want to ask you about going back and what going back does for you and why you keep seeking out these stories that take us 10, 20, 50, 70 years in the past? You know, I wish I had an answer that would address it as a sort of overall compulsion. I think it's sort of case by case in my films. But there's no doubt that every time I go back into a different time period, I learn so much. I feel like I get to time travel and to another time and place. I'm called upon to study the music and the culture and the habits and the history and the events of that.

time. And period films that are kind of conscious about what they're doing make you kind of think about where we are today in relationship to those times. It's not, it's not for no reason that we're looking back and putting a frame around it at the time that we are. So that's always been an interest in the films I've made. So the movie is based on Brian Selznick's book. Yeah. And it takes place in the 20s and the 70s. Exactly. Had the book come to you? Why did you decide to make this a film? What came to me first was his adaptation from his book, this being the first one that he himself wrote based on one of his young adult novels.

The invention of Hugo Cabre is probably the first best known thing he did, which was adapted for the Scorsese film. But this time, I think the story goes that Sandy Powell, my costume designer, the great Sandy Powell, yeah. The great Sandy Powell. read the book to Wonderstruck and said, I think this could be something Todd. Haynes could do or something.

And at first Brian was like, what, Todd for a kid's movie? It wasn't the obvious person that he thought of, but he knew my work. And I think that started to sink in as he started to do the adaptation. So when he finished, he offered it to me. And so I read this really beautiful, really thoughtful treatment of his novel. So people know your films as social dramas at the forefront of queer cinema, a lot of historical work. I think it's reasonable that Brian would be surprised that a kid's movie would appeal to you.

So why did you lock into this? And what did you think about making a movie primarily with kids in the lead? I mean, I think in terms of his interest in history and his interest in film history in particular, and that part of it, probably he could see a crossover to my work. but I never have made a film that's really exclusively about kids I made a short film called Dottie Ked Spankton 1993 in between my first two feature films

but it is from a kid's point of view but it's not really a film It's like a teenager, right? No, he's like a seven-year-old kid. He's a little guy but it's not really meant for kids that age to watch it. And this film was,

although being extremely strange and unique in its concept and artful and all of those things that were great incentives creatively for me. I just thought, I thought kids could really follow it. I thought kids could follow it because it's structured like a mystery story. And it's all about little pieces of information and clues and bits of evidence that they keep following in their journeys sort of self-discovery. And I also just remember seeing movies. as a kid myself and seeing movies that were, you know, maybe just a little beyond my reach when I saw them.

What's an example of that? Probably the first movie that really that I was a little young for was I was seven when Romeo and Juliet came out, the Franco Zeparelli film. But it's a gorgeous film. It's an eternal story. It's the tragic narrative and the love story was really. just, you know, made a huge impression. It's erotic.

It also felt, and I was very aware of this, that it really connected to youth culture of the time. So it felt very modern while being set in the past. Did it feel forbidden somehow, or you just couldn't quite access every theme that it was going for? Well, yeah, it was Shakespeare. And so the language was so rich and mysterious to me. the story was something I could follow, and that's the great thing about Shakespeare,

is you really can follow the stories, you know, despite or because of the language. But the language becomes sort of poetic guide that takes you through the narratives. But the narratives are extremely visceral and enduring. But, yeah, it was certainly a little beyond. It's not necessarily what you think of taking a seven-year-old kid to, But a lot of my friends were making this funny write of passage from starting the year seeing Oliver. Everyone's birthday party was going to see Oliver. And then some kids sort of split off and started to get exposed to Romeo and Julie,

which was also a phenomenon of that time. That was very popular among teenagers at the time too, right? Very much among teenagers who were probably more what you thought of as the younger end of that audience. But it obsessed me. like other films I'd seen when I was a kid, and I went on a sort of Shakespeare, you know, phase or something. At seven years old. Well, at seven, it continued for a few years later.

My first film was my version of Romeo and Juliet, where I sort of played all the parts. Were you talking about Superstar? No, no, this was when I was nine. It was Romeo and Juliet. Your first film? My first little Super 8 home movie, where I, you know, dressed up in all the characters and even tried double exposure as a test one day and dressed up as Juliet.

Alongside Romeo didn't really work. But I got a friend to play Juliet. But I played, you know, I would be sword fighting dressed as Tibold on one side of the frame. And then you'd cut to the other side of the frame. I'd be dressed as Mercutio playing the other side. I thought a lot about the tricks of cinema while I was doing that. But no, it got into my bloodstream. And then, you know, when I was 12, which is the age of the kids in Wonderstruck, I saw the miracle worker, which is about the life of Helen, the early life of Helen Keller.

And that made a, that was another film I got really, really into. And I think kids are interested in Helen Keller. I think kids are interested in the question of losing and not having your sight, not having your hearing or one of your central senses and how you would fare. what you would do. You know, kids are curious about situations that put them in a challenging places and situations. It's visceral in the way that we don't often use that word, right? But you can feel, in your movie as well, the loss of hearing is profound. It really touches the character and it touches you while you're watching.

Exactly. And kids understand limited freedom and limited mobility and limited access to things. And I think also all great kids, stories, and fairy tales are unafraid of dealing with dark themes. Both of these kids deal with loss, particularly a little boy who's just lost his mom, and the little girl for whom no one really knows how to deal with her as a deaf kid, what to do with her. They kind of stash her away, lock her up, which was not uncommon in the 1920s when your kid was deaf.

So these kids are loners, and they have to kind of leave their, homes and venture somewhere to kind of figure some things out. When you were making it, were you hoping that this be a movie that kids would watch? Yes, absolutely. How do you make that happen now? Meaning... How do you get a movie like this in front of children? Well, that's a good question.

I mean, that's part of the marketing challenge of this film. But it's always been my conviction. I mean, I really state to claim saying, come on, you guys, this is true. This has basically been true for all my films. that they're not, they don't have an automatic audience. You have to kind of contextualize them for different audiences. And in the older days in film, in the indie film, people would read critics and get a perspective and a framing of what the film was and it would give them a way in and set them up for an experience. It may not be typical of other films.

Now they listen to podcasts. Now they listen to podcasts. So it's, Sean, this is in your hands, man. Okay, I'm doing my best. So I'm handing it off to you. But no, but I do think, you know, I do think in today's day and age, we miss the curator. We miss the person who does, we find other ways of finding that person, the tastemaker, you know, the YouTube star, the person who kind of says what's cool or their favorite top 10 things of the week or whatever it is. And because we're so overwhelmed by media and content in every corner that you kind of need a navigation through it.

So, yeah, I hope that is a way. I mean, I think word of mouth is one thing that might help any movie, but this one as well. I went to like the Women's March the day after Trump was elected and I went around and like, well, all these families are together and the kids are making signs and they're feeling like we have to like get out of our house together and figure out what we're going to do next. And I'm like, okay, this is this is not, this is a good example. of an audience for Wonderstruck. It's parents who want to nourish their kids, show them cool things, and maybe teach them a little about history.

I can't guarantee you that I have a strong seven-year-old listenership on this show, but we'll do a rest of spread the word. Yeah, we're working on it. We're trying to touch all audiences. But does working with Amazon on this film help that in any way is the fact that this movie eventually

will be streaming in a significant way, help get it in front of more people? Because obviously you're sort of a bastion of independent film in the minds of a lot of people in the industry. So has this been different and will that be helpful for you? Well, I think today all films will be streamed. All films will be on cable. That's been true for some time now. It's always been the sort of ancillary life of independent filmmaking. It's often how you complete your financing packaging and is relying on that final audience

and venue. So it's not really that different today. The one thing that Amazon is trying to make, you know, really state as a mandate to distinguish themselves possibly from other streaming companies is that they really are committed to the theatrical portion of their releases and really committed to making things that will be seen on the big screen. Of course, that's the way I want that matters to people to see Wonderstruck. It's got this beautiful widescreen aspect ratio, the two-four aspect ratio. The sound design, because it's so much about this sound of The music and the sound design tells the story as much of or as more than any other single component because it's not driven by dialogue.

Both kids are deaf. And so you really hear that and feel that dynamic sound design in the theater. But I know it'll end up on cable. That's fine. That's another way people can see in their home theaters. I think any way people find the things that mean something to them is okay. you know, and there's maybe no perfect way. Tell me about the sound of the movie.

You know, you're well known for choosing songs. You've also got Carter Burwell's score in the film. Yeah. Plus, you're also trying to manage making it clear that these deaf characters, what they can hear and what they can't. Right. There's some trickiness with the dialogue. How do you do that?

How does that go into a script? How do you know ahead of time how to manage something like that for the big screen? Well, it was just something I wanted to pay acute attention to, from the beginning, well before we were shooting the film, begin conversation, so that we really just were like conscious of sound, even at the stages in shooting the film, when most likely we wouldn't be using recorded dialogue in any of the silent portion, the black and white 1920s portions of the film, which we did not end up using. But we wanted to have it anyway, just in case, who knows, you know, we could do, we could distort it. We could turn it into

weird sound abstract soundscapes it could be material to use later so i just wanted to be mindful of sound in every conceivable way so yeah that's pretty much what how we proceeded in in tackling it and but it was really unique this i've never experienced before with my editor of fanzo gonsalves and and ultimately wonderstruck is a film about editing it's it's how the two stories interact the rhythms of the two stories that the whole film rests on. Were you filming those two parts in tandem? Or did one happen and the other happened?

No. They were so in tandem because we're shooting with kids. So kids expire by union rules after about eight or nine hours on set a day. And the whole movie features kids. There's very few scenes where the kids do not, are not pictured, which meant we not only were shooting them in tandem. We literally had to shoot 1920s and 1970s every day of the shoot.

Wow. So the film was already a puzzle piece that compounded things, as you can imagine, in just the sheer practicality of how to pull a production off with still limited means and limited time. Yeah, location, set design, all that stuff. Yeah. All that stuff. Is what they say about working with kids true? That they tell you everything you should be doing and teach you how to. Don't do it. Don't do it. No, it was great. It was amazing.

I mean, it's, I think what the, the adage that it's all about casting is more true, is, is even more true with kids. How'd you find the two leads? There are very different stories. There's Ben, who's a professional actor, who had starred in Pete's Dragon. And then there was the role of Rose in the silent film. And Rose is born deaf. She's deaf from the beginning of the film. Ben becomes deaf during the course of the film.

So for Ben, we had to cast a hearing kid who could speak and still play that transition. With Rose, my goal was to try to find a deaf actor to play Rose. And that pretty much meant going into the world of non-professional actors, obviously, because there aren't a lot of deaf kid actors with regular employment. And that meant looking through the country and seeing where deaf communities live and reside. And it's not necessarily where there are deaf schools. Millie was in an integrated hearing school outside Salt Lake City. We sent out notices.

We asked kids to send in homemade tapes on their phones. And we got many, many, like 200 submissions from deaf kids all over the country. And then we and one of them was Millicent Simmons. And she just kind of floored me in my casting director, Laura Rosenthal, from the beginning and a sense of self-possession was immediately evident in her, just her signing and talking about who she is. But you still don't know whether a kid can act and can carry a movie like this. And that was really the remarkable thing is how innately she sort of understood this medium film. She has silent film movie star charisma, you know? It does. It's pretty

amazing. And that's not no easy task. What about filling out the rest of the cast? You're back with Julianne Moore. Yeah. Michelle Williams is there. Your great Tom Noonan is there. Yeah. Yeah. How did you end up pulling everybody else in? Well, we made the East Coast

the first sort of prerequisite, of course, and we didn't find who we needed. We would branch out to the West Coast, but we were there in New York City. We just made a whirl of sense, and there's fantastic actors in the East Coast, of course. And for Julie, to work with Julie again, is always an amazing privilege

and at this stage it's sort of like, you know, family and... Can you just make the call and doing something? Would you like to be part of that? I can definitely do that. It's always a matter of her schedule, my schedule. And what I always like to be able

to do with Julianne is offer her something different, something she hasn't done before, which gets harder where she's played so many roles and done so many kinds of films. Well, this was definitely that. So this movie came pretty quick after Carol. I'm used to waiting a few years. For me, yeah, for my career. How did that happen? I usually, there's a three or four year gap sometimes. Well, it was, you know, pretty much due to the fact that these are both films I didn't write myself.

Oh, interesting. They existed. They were out there and that sort of new for my career. Was that a choice that you made after? Was it Mildred Pierce? You have a screenwriting? I wrote, we adapted the novel, you know, and I'd read, my friend John Raymond, who's a writer, a friend of mine in Portland, I kept saying, you got to read the James M. Kameh original novel of Mildred Pierce one of these days. It's really great. And it was right around the recession, recession year 2008, where I finally had this little moment. I read it. And I was like, wow, this is something else. And it's so different from the Michael Curtis film version. Yes. With Joan Crawford. And it spans the entire era of the Depression, like a nine-year span of time, and told a bigger story about this middle-class family and the mother-daughter conflict. So it just felt relevant in so many ways. So, yeah, we adapted that novel and played very close attention to the novel and all of a sudden were able to do so by doing it in episodic, dramatic television as a miniseries. But did that, after that experience, did you make a decision to not necessarily?

write things because of how long it had been taking you or anything like that? Not for that reason, but I think it was like maybe it helped open up that, crack open that door to looking at stuff that was out there, which my agent and lawyer had always been like, and producer, Christy Vashon, we're like, no, no, no, he's a single-minded one at a time, does his own thing, director, don't even send us the script. And all of a sudden, I was looking at stuff that was out in the world. It's funny, though, I think of even the films I've written, I think of them as not necessarily things I invented, but things that I interpreted from existing stuff in the world, you know, whether it's literally adapting or interpreting the life of Bob Dylan

in the way I did and I'm not there, or looking at the 50s melodrama. with a different take, as I did in Far From Heaven, these are all coming from really specific sources, movies, history, culture, other writers, in the case of Jean-A, who I looked at on my first feature film Poison. So I always feel like I'm kind of already reinventing or recombining things rather than... Curatorial redefinition.

Yeah, exactly. Curating is definitely a theme in this new film. Talk to me about Carol a little bit. There's a cult of Carol now. I know. There's a real cult of Carol. It's a, I'm not sure I saw it coming, but there's both like an online, a fervent fan base, and obviously it recognized as a great film when it came out. How do you look back on that?

It's only a couple of years ago now, but it does feel like it has taken place as like one of the most important parts of your career. Yeah. It's, well, it's so gratifying to see people kind of wanting to kind of, you know, I can relate to movies. as I was just alluding to earlier about my child, of certain films that would just take over in my mind. And I would need to kind of repeat something about the emotional experience that I had watching them. And the best thing is when one kind of creative experience, one art form or whatever you want to call movies,

an art, popular culture, form of popular culture, induces a creative reaction in you. And I think fandom is creative. It's like you want to make something in kind to kind of replicate it, get back to a feeling, but also sort of show the thing that you love how you feel. But you make it, you know. So it triggers creativity on the part of people. And that was absolutely true for me as a fan of movies I would get into.

It was true for me as a fan of music. It was the theme of, you know, Velvet Gold Monument. my film about the glam rock era. It's really a tribute to the imagination, the dreaming of the fan, because I think that chapter of music invited it in the fan base. So to see any of my films,

you know, kind of gravitate into an intense kind of fan culture means that they touched a chord that people kind of want to keep replaying in their lives. And that's about all any director could hope to do. A chord that people want to keep replaying is a good theme for all your work.

A couple more to wrap up. One, what are you going to do next and how do you make that decision? I'm beginning research on a big, on a longer project, episodic, dramatic project. It's too early to talk about it, but I'm very excited about it. But in addition to this new thing, I also just was offered from the Universal Music Group, the opportunity to do a documentary on the Velvet Island. It's a band that has such profound influence on music, on culture, on summit, on me. But it'll be a challenge because there's so little traditional kinds of footage of the Velvet Underground doing what most bands do, promoting themselves.

And they came out of this weird hybrid avant-garde moment in music and film and art culture in the 60s. So there will have to be different recourses to tell that story. That sounds like a fascinating challenge. Super fun, really exciting. I look forward to that. What's the last great thing you've seen? Well, I've been watching a lot of Hitchcock's. It's hard to not just say.

For what reason? For this project, I'm interested. I'm watching them all again. And there's nothing more profound. It's like it's akin to, you know, oh, yeah, So you looked at silent cinema for your movie. You know, it's like, yeah, that little thing called silent cinema that actually encompasses such an unbelievable breath of work and artistry and sophistication and beauty and invention. What is your number one for him?

I mean, I think it still is vertigo, but it's hard. There's so many great ones. And it's when you go back and look at a lot of them, you discover stuff you forgot about what makes things like sabotage is just crazy awesome. movie. Dialan for Murder, which I sort of had, you know, thought was not a major film. It's so interesting. My wife's favorite film of all time. That one. Really? That's so cool. That's not typical. That's not typical. She's got a grace thing. Well, that's understandable, of course, but it's, it's fantastic. It's so smart. Todd, this is great. Thank you so much for joining me. I enjoyed it. Take care, man. Thanks again for listening to the big picture. Please join me next week,

and I'll be talking to the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Oslo, who's got a great new film coming out called The Square. See you next week.