Once you are shooting a movie, even if it's your own script, you have to let it go at a certain point. That's true for every film. It breaks up into phases where the thing that you have in front of you is the thing you have to address, and you can't worry about what you imagined a scene was going to like and that it came out differently, because that's what you have to make work.

I always bring it up to my lawyer every now and then. And another reason we have to revisit it is because there is a restoration going on right now for the film through UCLA and Sundance.

Nostalgia could be considered a disease because you're living now.

I was 3 years old and Mary Poppins [1964] made an impression on me that was seismic, apparently. I fell into some kind of total creative, imaginative rapture over that movie that propelled this industry of Mary Poppins drawings, plays, performances - just an obsessive, creative reaction to it.

I came to this project and 'Far from Heaven' from completely different vantage points. 'Heaven' was of course about the Douglas Sirk films of that period, with the very specific cinematic language and style of melodrama. With 'Carol,' it was presented to me already packaged, with Cate Blanchett attached and Phyllis Nagy's script complete - when it came to me it had a long history and pre-history.

It's like our go-to notion of innocent and secure mythology of American life. I was always amazed when people would come up to me and say that 'Far from Heaven' was exactly what it was like back then. [laughs] I was so disinterested in what it was 'really like' in the 1950s when I was putting the film together, I was only interested in what it was like in movies.

Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative.